October 2, 2024 • 42 mins
Robert sits down with Margaret Killjoy for a dispatch from Asheville in the wake of a disaster, and then talks to James Stout about disaster survival lessons we need to learn before the next one.
Sources:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/hurricane-helene-death-toll-missing-people-b2622259.html
https://www.broadcastify.com/webPlayer/43107
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1625951558?ref=cm_sw_r_apan_dp_JGGGWKAWJN5Z9A3RKRRB&ref_=cm_sw_r_apan_dp_JGGGWKAWJN5Z9A3RKRRB&social_share=cm_sw_r_apan_dp_JGGGWKAWJN5Z9A3RKRRB&starsLeft=1&skipTwisterOG=1
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
A zone Media. Hey, this is it could happen here.
I am Robert Evans. This is a podcast about things
falling apart. Most of this episode is going to be
me and James Stout discussing the disaster in North Carolina
and elsewhere as a result of Hurricane Helene. But before
we get into that, and we'll be talking largely about
(00:24):
what this means for your own preparations for future disasters,
what we can kind of learn initially from everything that's
been happening. I wanted to start with a few minutes
of us talking to Margaret Kiljoy, who was on the
ground in the Asheville area doing disaster relief work right now.
And obviously the audio here is not up to our
(00:44):
usual quality, but it's only about five minutes, and then
you will get James and I talking crystal clear into
your ears. So here is Margaret.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Hi. Everyone, I just got on the ground about two
hours ago and immediately have been basically running or with
my van delivering food to different places just because van
did van thing. And it's I mean, it's intense. Everyone
is having an intense time. But also at the same time,
there's like, you know, more people are out walking around
(01:16):
and riding bikes, and you know, there's hundreds of people
gathering at every place that's passing out food and water,
and there's a very kind of community spirit happening right now.
I'm actually recording this from up in Marshall, which is
a small town immediately north of Asheville that also has
a mutual Aid distribution hub. We just came up here
to drop stuff off, and even in the twenty minutes
(01:37):
that I've been here, other people have come with pickup
trucks full of harm reduction supplies and diapers.
Speaker 3 (01:42):
And just all the things that people need.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
And everyone is trapped on basically little islands. Right There's
a very different style of flood than when you have
like a coastal flood. And what's happened is that the
houses that are near the river have been destroyed and
the roads a lot of them have been destroyed, and
a lot of them went under for a long time.
It's all the infrastructure is down, but many of the houses,
at least as I record this, seem to be intact
(02:06):
and then doing well. And what it is that everyone
is just trapped and isolated. Most people don't have food, water, sewage,
or even cell signal, although cell signal is kind of
the first thing to come back and power is starting
to filter back in, and we're hoping that some places
are maybe getting water. But one of the things that's
kind of come up is that, again, because it's in
(02:28):
the mountains, it's a very different setup, it's a very
different culture and community. And one of the things that's
happened is that, I mean a lot of people have wells,
and so immediately the problem has been more about distribution
of water and also getting generators to people who have
well so that they can pump. You know, a friend
of mine got a generator pretty quickly and you know,
pulled a thousand gallons out of their well right away
(02:50):
to get and distribute around. And there's a you know,
just while I was waiting outside my friend's house, someone
drove by and asked us if we needed water, and
then asked us if we knew about each of the
neighbors and who did and it didn't have water.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
Yeah, And I mean, one of the things that makes
me think of is like having the generator, having the well,
that's great, the kind of thing that maybe people wouldn't
think about as much as having the ability to put
a thousand gallons of.
Speaker 3 (03:18):
Water in something.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
Yes, totally. It seems like it was also crucial and
is probably would have been lowered down the list for
a lot of people. But there's really no replacing it
when you need it, totally.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
And but one of the things that again I mean,
I'm not suying to say that everything's fine here, it's
very much fine. For example, the only federal response that
anyone is talking about is that ice is already in
the area, So before anyone had been given food by
the federal government, they have sent ice to detain people
and question people.
Speaker 3 (03:46):
At least that.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
Is the word on the ground. Obviously, you know, details
and truths come later when you're in a crisis situation,
but we do know that ice is on the ground,
and no one I've talked to is so much in
the way a federal response besides law enforcement. But one
of the things that's happened here is that a lot
of people have pickup trucks in Appalachia, and so a
lot of people have you know, you call them water buffalos,
(04:08):
the big water tanks that you can put in a
pickup truck or a trailer. I definitely left this feeling,
you know, my first you know, I drove with my
van full of stuff and on the highway and being
passed by pickup trucks pulling flatbeds full of palettes of water.
Speaker 3 (04:23):
And things like that.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
But then even yeah, in the city, people are driving
around in trucks and filling them up with water and
delivering them. But don't get me wrong, Yeah, if you're preparing,
think about how to deliver water. Even some of the
things for me, for example, the city government has been
doing some things, and there are places where people can
go and fill up water containers, but they don't have
the water containers.
Speaker 3 (04:43):
So the people who.
Speaker 2 (04:44):
Were prepared by having a couple of five gallon toats
in their basement are in a much better position. And
that's like some of the things that I brought for
some of my friends. It's litergally just a couple of
five gallon water containers so that people.
Speaker 3 (04:55):
Can go get them filled up.
Speaker 4 (04:57):
Man.
Speaker 1 (04:57):
Obviously, you're talking about when we're thinking about the places
that people are able to drive around where the places
that you've been reaching are hit pretty hard. But we
also then have these more isolated mountain communities that both
seem to have suffered a lot more physical damage, although
that's not entirely clear at this moment, but are certainly
not accessible in the same way. And I think that's
(05:18):
one of those things we're still going to be waiting
to hear, like how extreme it is. But like we
talk a little bit on the episode before this about
people using burrows to deliver food and water in places
where vehicles can't even reach. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
And one of the things also, you know, one of
the things that went out on the mutual Aid list
that I'm on is people are saying, hey, if you
have your ATV, bring down your ATV, you know, and
that makes complete sense if you the listener are listening
to this, don't just drive down with supplies and if
you are plugged into a mutual ad to.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
Just roll to Ashville in your polaris.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
Yeah yeah, but but yeah, no, one of the hardest
things has been getting the supplies, you know. I mean,
disaster relief is just it's just logistics. And the same
way war is just logistics. You know, It's like how
do you get things from one place to another? And
what people have set up is all of these you know,
you centralize the acquisation of supplies and then you decentralize
(06:16):
getting them out. But yeah, people have been working. I'm
going to know more about what people have been doing
to get things out, but I've already talked with people
or heard from people who you know, we're getting rescued
by people a handsaws, right, and then one of the
main things that people are doing is that there's chainsaw crews,
mutual aid chainsaw crews going around.
Speaker 3 (06:34):
One of the big asks.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
That I came with a lot of was a bar
and chain oil, you know. And it's a little bit
hard because gas is also until just recently, gas is
starting to come back online now, but getting gas for
a chainsaw or an ATV or your vehicle has been tricky.
But people have been working on that too.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
Yeah. Well, Margaret, I'm going to take up more of
your time while you try to help in the wake
of a disaster. But thank you for being on the ground.
Good luck to you and everyone else who's out there.
We will be hearing more from you and more about
the specifics of what's happened in North Carolina and elsewhere
in the wake of the hurricane next week. So thank
(07:16):
you and thank everybody there. Good luck.
Speaker 3 (07:18):
Yeah, thank you.
Speaker 1 (07:20):
That is done. I am now going to move on
with our previously recorded episode. Here is James and Me. Oh,
welcome back to it could happen here a podcast where
it's happened for some chunk of our listeners who are
probably not listening right now, because as we record this
(07:41):
on Monday, the first technically a Tuesday, we're just now
getting word that internet has come back on, like mobile
internet has come back on to parts of Ashville and
North Carolina that we're in communicado for several days after
Hurricane Eleen tore through. So you've heard something about this.
(08:02):
I'm hoping. I'm different things from friends about how much
news attention there seems to be on this. I'm seeing
it a lot, but I'm seeing it largely through social
But the gist of it is, I mean, there's a
photo I came across right before getting on here, where
there was a memorial marker for the nineteen sixteen flood
in Ashville that was knocked out by what used to
(08:24):
be a road and was now nothing but rushing water
and mud.
Speaker 3 (08:28):
Beautiful.
Speaker 1 (08:29):
Three out of four highways into Ashville are down. I
heard yesterday from people who were coming in and doing
an aid drop that what had been previously a thirty
minute drive took twelve and a half hours. From the
state of the roads, and the number of checkpoints and stuff.
All of this is pretty common stuff for a natural disaster,
(08:51):
obviously amped up in severity because this disaster was correspondingly
worse than even most natural disasters tend to be known
in this country.
Speaker 3 (09:02):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
I was just looking through, just doing a little bit
of googling before we got on, and I found a
Reddit post from the Asheville subreddit from two years ago
saying Ashville is apparently the number one city in the
United States to be a climate haven, according to the CNBC,
although that article it just made the list of best
climate cities, but the original post has been deleted. I
(09:24):
don't know if that was earlier or as a result
of this, but that is one of the side stories here,
is that Ashville is not We're not talking about one
of these coastal cities in Florida that everyone is known
as doomed for forever, right. We're not talking about New Orleans,
which lovely city, great history, doomed as fuck and everyone
has known it for quite a while. We're talking about
(09:45):
places that are many miles inland, and that something like
two thousand feet elevation.
Speaker 3 (09:51):
Yeah, it's certainly not below sea level or even at
sea level.
Speaker 1 (09:55):
Yeah, it's an inland, mountainous community. It's just not the
kind of threat that people are used to having here.
And the devastation has been pretty total, like whole communities
wiped out. I think the death toll from the county
Asheville is in. Let me let me pull this up
to make sure I'm not getting it wrong. I've just
(10:15):
now pulled up a story from thirty minutes ago on
the Independent that says, yeah, at least one hundred and
forty three people have been killed. Yeah, that's a total
death toll from Helene forty people in Buncombe County, where
Asheville is six hundred people unaccounted for. Governor Roy Cooper
has told CNN that there are communities that were wiped
(10:36):
off the map. Kind of the first thing that I noticed,
you know, outside of the footage coming in was friends
of mine. Because I've spent a decent amount of time
in Asheville. I have friends on the East Coast, including
our own Margaret Kiljoy, who has a lot more friends
in Asheville, and I was in a couple of different
signal loops where people were trying to contact their people,
(10:58):
and there was a line from one of the folks
I was chatting with, who had reached out to multiple
people in the area, and said, I have not heard
anything from anyone in Nashville in hours. Nothing is getting
in and nothing is getting out, And that seems to
be consistent with everyone's experience. Starlink was largely not functional.
(11:18):
Starlink doesn't work very well when the weather's really bad.
Sat phones seem to have had some efficacy. I know
some people were getting messages in and out, but they
weren't super reliable because sat phones also are reliant upon
climactic conditions. Right, It's certainly better than just trusting your
normal cell phone, but it's not going to do great
when you've got a fucking hurricane dumping half an ocean
(11:43):
on your head. So that was the first thing I
was thinking about, because we talk a lot about disaster preparedness,
and we talk a lot about having stuff that would
have been useful in this, and that people who were
prepared and had water set aside and food set aside
were certainly in a better situation, because those both very
quickly became problems. I mean, I heard a devastating story
(12:03):
of an old folks home that was completely cut off
from the outside and didn't have enough water or food.
Hoping that story ends as well as possible, but there's
a lot of stories like that. But even outside of that,
there were people who were prepared, who had food and water,
but who wound up stuck on the roofs of their
(12:23):
house because the water just came in so quickly there
was no chance to really get much other than maybe
a bag. And when you're stuck up on there, like
what are you going to do if your SAT phone
or you don't have a SAT phone and that doesn't
work and there's no internet and there's no cell service.
Well that's why we're going to start today talking about
(12:44):
Ham radios, because those motherfuckers there's actually a I'll see
if I can pull it up through this like that
has been the most reliable way for people in the
area to communicate with the outside world, because if it
is possible to communicate using technology, you can do it
with ham. Yeah, right, Like that's just that's just how
Ham radios be.
Speaker 3 (13:06):
Yeah, they don't need to see the sky like, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
They don't give a fuck it. If there is any
way to communicate via technology with people in a disaster,
you will be able to do it with a Ham radio. Ye, sots,
let's chat about that, James. You have more experience with
this than I do. This is something I have been
working on getting into, but I certainly am not very
knowledgeable on the matter. So we'll start like, what what
do people need to think about when it comes to
(13:31):
like actually getting set up to communicate with a Ham radio,
Because there's definitely you could just go buy a Boofang
or something like that, Like you can get ahead. They're
not expensive. This is actually a very affordable thing to
have right now. Kind of the most recommended model is
the UV nine R Pro, which is eight watt instead
of five and waterproof.
Speaker 3 (13:52):
Yep, that's what I was going to say. And you
can charge it off USBC, which is really nice.
Speaker 1 (13:56):
Yeah, they're what like thirty something bucks.
Speaker 3 (13:59):
Yeah, you can get them cheaper in bulk. I think
you steel to get them cheaper on Alley Express, but
seems like they're kind of hanging them up in charging customs,
so you end up not getting them cheaper. Yeah, so yeah,
for real basic stuff. I think you do need to
be licensed to operate these radios on certain bands, right, yes,
And that's something that you you can, I believe in
(14:21):
a case of emergency you can. You can operate on
any band.
Speaker 1 (14:24):
No one's going to arrest you for a legal youth
unlicensed used to a ham radio if you're trying to
get people rescued from a flood, right, Like that said,
you should not be learning how to use a ham
radio when you're hiding on your roof.
Speaker 3 (14:38):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Like this is like you know the
people who buy guns and put them under their bed
and never shoot them and expect to be right because
the fucking marksman in a crisis or by medical gear
and never train with it again. Right, These things that
you want to practice before. So we use these a
lot of the boarder. We use radios to communicate. When
they were higher numbers in Cucumber, my friends and I
(14:59):
put a map sive antenna on the roof of the
youth center where we were. You know a lot of
listeners have been out there and they've probably seen antenna
that we put up. And then I was using a
radio on my truck and then we also all had
personal radios, right because cell phone signal is crap out there,
and it was the only way for us to communicate
and it worked really well. So the things that you
need if you want to get started in this are,
first of all, some kind of education or a license.
(15:22):
There are tons of local groups. Hand people fucking love
to be ham radio people. They love to talk about
hand radio. They love to teach you to do ham
radio so like, and it's not like a hobby, you know,
firearms people love to talk about firearms, but lots of
them are really toxic people. I haven't found that ham
radio is premised on talking to people all over the place,
and often very.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
Few people killed with ham radio.
Speaker 3 (15:43):
Yeah, I'm sure it's possible. But if you can find
a local club, but that's a great way to start.
They can clean you in on stuff. But I think
to begin with you also need someone to talk to, right, Like,
if you want to practice with your hand radio, you
need to be talking to other people on it. So
you can just go on to different bands, different repeaters
and do that, or you can get your friends and
(16:03):
study together. Yeah, get your license together.
Speaker 1 (16:06):
I too, bow things, you know, Yeah, give one to
somebody who you live close to but not right next to,
and work on it with them.
Speaker 3 (16:14):
Yeah, work on like, oh how far this work? You know?
Like I am one of the former guests for the
podcast James Corderra from Border Kindness. He and I were
doing that not so long go talk to each other
from our houses. But yeah, you can. You can certainly
get into this pretty cheap. I have a business license,
which is another option for people. I would suggest first
(16:35):
getting your ham operator's lescense and then going from there.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
Yeah, that's it's called a radio technicians license, right, Like
that's the most basic because there's three levels.
Speaker 3 (16:42):
If I'm not mistaken, Yeah, I believe. So it's been
a while since I did that.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
Yeah, I think it's Radio Technicians General and then amateur
extra if the note yeah are accurate.
Speaker 3 (16:53):
Still, and then in terms of cost, like the size
of your antenna is what's going to determine, you know,
how far you can transmit and how you can receive
along with like line of.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
Sight, right, it's about side.
Speaker 3 (17:04):
Ye, it's the biggest one possible. So you want to
be a size queen, like you can get yourself a
really big antenna. I would say if you're using those
handheld radios. So the company called Nagoya that make pretty
decent radios antennas that work with that UV nine R
that I use. I have like a telescoping one and
we've had pretty good luck with that, and then I
(17:25):
also use one in my VI So I've hard mounted
a radio inside my truck and I have an antenna
that uses the frame of the truck as part of
the antenna, and I can get really good signal with that.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
Yeah, that makes sense if.
Speaker 3 (17:36):
You're just doing it at home. Yeah, put something on
your roof, Like you can get a pretty good antenna
on your roof, you know, and it's not that hard
and you can get signal.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (17:43):
Much further.
Speaker 1 (17:44):
I've been recommended a little book that you can get
for twenty bucks in kindle form or it's like thirty
bucks for the spiral bound, which looks pretty durable. I
haven't received mine yet. Yeah, the ar rl HAM Radio
License Manual, which is kind of what I was advice
to buy and read through and the advice that I
got and you can correct me here. But this seemed
(18:06):
pretty hard to argue with. Is that, like the primary
benefit to doing the training and getting the license formally
rather than just buying it is it also teaches you
how to fix problems if you're trying to like get
this thing to work in a stressful, dangerous situation.
Speaker 3 (18:21):
Yeah, you want to be familiar with it if you're
going to rely on it, right, just like anything else
this ham study dot org as well, which helps you.
You can also do something called a software defined radio SDR.
I've used those before as well.
Speaker 1 (18:33):
I'm sure we'll Yeah, we'll do a more dedicated episode
to this kind of thing once. I feel a degree
of competence too. But I think what's really important with
this is because I can tell you right now, as
much time as I spend, like thinking about water and
having a bunch of different water treatment options and spare
water stored, and I have like I literally have at
this point years of dried food on the property. I
(18:54):
can food all the time. I have animals, obviously, I
have guns, you know, I do stuff like know, go
foraging in the woods and shit. I had completely because
it's a pain in the air. It seemed like a
pain in the ass. There's a lot of numbers. I
hate fucking numbers, and I am choosing to use this
and we're we're starting out with this as coverage of
(19:15):
Halle not because like this is the end of it.
We're not. We are going to look at what's actually
been happening in the community. We have people Margaret Killjoys
down there right now, we have some other like friends
of the pod who are in the area doing relief work.
Now it's just too early for those stories, and we
don't want to like really bug people who are doing
useful work down there. Yeah, but this is the first
(19:36):
thing that terrified me was being like, well, fuck, I
have been negligent in my preparations because I don't have
comms locked down.
Speaker 3 (19:45):
Yeah, definitely, like people underestimated because it's not cool and fun,
right like guns and fun.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
I have a sat phone, So I was like, that's
probably fine, right, Like, well, it wouldn't have been wouldn't
have been in Ashville.
Speaker 2 (19:54):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (19:55):
Oh, people think that they can have stylink now, and
I think, yeah, you know, people, it's a lot of
emphasis on that, but I think, yep, going back to basics.
We were talking about this in our group chat. But
for things that you need, having a primary, secondary, and
emergency way of doing that makes sense. So yes, your phone,
your SAT phone. You know, I think Robert and I
(20:15):
both He's gum and in reaches like a sack communicator.
Speaker 1 (20:17):
I have an in reach and I also have a
Motorola smartphone that is a SAT phone through God, I'm
forgetting the name of the service, but a separate service,
like I have two different SAT phone services.
Speaker 3 (20:28):
And then you got your ham radio as your backup.
Well after that you got smoke signals and pigeons right.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
Well, that gets us to a general idea of preparation
which I was kind of when I started. When I
got advice from a colleague about war reporting, like the best.
It's still to this day some of the best advice
I've ever got is two is one and one is none.
Speaker 2 (20:50):
Right.
Speaker 1 (20:50):
If you have one way of doing something and a disaster,
you are very close to having no way of doing
it right, which brings me to transit because one of
the the thing that is probably going to wind up
being the defining characteristic of this disaster in memory is
the degree to which the ability to reach people in
(21:10):
an area that is we're not talking, you know. There
definitely are a lot of rural communities impacted by this,
but like Ashville is a significant place. We're not talking
the middle of nowhere. We are not talking about people
living on the edge of the world, right, Yeah, we
are talking about like one of the what was what
was up to this point, one of like the hippest
and more popular parts of the northeast.
Speaker 2 (21:30):
Right.
Speaker 1 (21:31):
The immediacy with which the ability to reach people on
the ground was wiped out, and obviously while the storm
was going on, there was no way to reach them
from air. Like you know, a helicopter can get places now,
but during the worst of the flooding, you're not reliably
getting a fucking chopper into a lot of these places.
So people were stranded very quickly, much faster than they
(21:54):
had been prepared for. You should be thinking about like,
oh shit, I could get flooded, because you probably could.
Most of the people listening to this. There's not a
zero percent chance a freak storm floods your community, right,
even if it never has before. It's not exactly a
common problem in Asheville, right, the last massive flood thing
(22:14):
was like nineteen sixteen, So we're not talking about a
place that's used to flooding all the time. But likewise,
like it's not just flooding that fire could do this, right,
I am thinking the last kind of near disaster we
had where I was was in twenty twenty. You know
where I live right now. I am in the city
of Portland, and we were like three or four blocks
(22:35):
away from where the evacuation orders had spread during the
fires in twenty twenty. It was not a foregone conclusion
that they would stop before reaching the city. You know.
This is also I think people in southern California. Yeah, definitely,
there's a shocking number of communities, communities with money that
are really built up that if a fire hit at
the wrong time of year, there's no stopping it. And like,
(22:58):
you need to be thinking about how am I preparing
to be informed during the seasons where this is like
of of highest likelihood, because the only real safety there
is paying attention to what's happening and building an understanding
of how quickly things can go badly so that you
(23:19):
get out ahead of time, because if the disaster just hits,
you're not going to get on the highway and drive
through a fire or through a flood. I don't care
if you have a fucking Safari snorkel. I'm looking at
those waters. You are not getting the most kitted out
land rover on God's Green Earth was not getting through
some of those waters.
Speaker 3 (23:38):
I'm sorry, Yeah, you need a submarine fish. Like I
remember my house flooded when I was probably seventeen eighteen,
and I remember that. A couple of the things I remember,
first of all, was like, most of your shit is
not that important to you. I remember being seventeen and
being like, oh man, we got this back then. Having
a widescreen TV was a big deal for us, and
just yeah, then thinking like, oh, my name is an
(23:59):
eighty some like I fuck the TV. I need to
check of those people, okay. And then people completely overestimating
the capability of their vehicles in floodwater, yeah, which.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
Which they always will do. It will always be the
people with the biggest trucks that cause the most problems
for everyone else to overestimate where their vehicles can get them.
Speaker 3 (24:16):
Yes, and like you can die in your vehicle crossing
relatively shallow floodwater. This isn't yeah, you know, it's a
serious business.
Speaker 1 (24:23):
Or get burned to death, which happens all the time,
has happened very recently in communities in like California. You know,
people just get fucking incinerated. So don't be that person.
Pay attention. Like one of the things to pay attention
to is like when the warning started to come in.
There will be good breakdowns fairly soon in places like
(24:43):
the New York Times on when warnings came in and
how much time people actually had. Ye But don't gamble
with stuff like this. Fucking drive to high ground or
you know, drive to whatever seems like the safest place
and fucking in your car if you have to. And
this is why again, when it does come to survival stuff,
(25:05):
I'm a big fan. If you have the money, spend
two hundred bucks on one of those buckets of dried food.
Because you can keep a bucket of dried food and
five gallons of water by the door. You can throw
that son of a bitch in your car, and carrying
the waters might be a pain in the ass, but
if you have to get out and run, those buckets
of dried food with a week or so of food
in them are not that hard to carry. You hold
(25:28):
it under your arm, you keep a backpack on your back,
and you run like a son of a bitch to
whatever evacuation exists, and you'll have some food with you. Yeah,
you know, like this is one of the ways I
think about stuff like this. You know, it's obviously preferable
if you can just hunker down in your fucking house
full of gear and equipment. But I'm sure there were
I'm sure there were people who had to evac or
(25:49):
who got flooded out in Ashville and their house that
got flooded out was full of survival gear. I know
for a fact that that happened to people. Yeah, and
it happens everywhere to people, right happening. But what should
be happening right now is an advertising break? Oh shit,
should have happened ten fucking minutes ago, James. Yeah, but here,
but here we are. We're back.
Speaker 3 (26:19):
You know.
Speaker 1 (26:19):
When it comes to talking about like the degree to
which people's high tech and expensive equipment, including vehicles, has
run out very quickly, one of the stories that has
been most interesting to me is of like, one of
the first groups of people to be able to get
supplies and significant quantities to some of these isolated mountain
(26:42):
regions was a guy with a shitload of donkeys. Oh yeah,
the mule team. The mule team guy. He was one second,
let me pull this up I've got this bookmarked. Yeah,
Mountain mule Packer Ranch, which I'm guessing is just some
sort of like a you know, you go there to
vacation and do like mule trips, mule hights and stuff.
Speaker 3 (27:01):
It's kind of people who want to backpack or take
like a really luxury as camping set up.
Speaker 1 (27:05):
Yeah. Yeah, they've been doing mule trains into a town
call into a Weaverville. It looks like and yeah, like
a mule can carry. It's something at least based on
this people article I'm looking at, they're saying about two
hundred pounds of supplies per animal, which you know is
actually very significant. That's not a whole lot more than
you're going to be fitting in like a compact car
(27:27):
at least obviously a truck's carrying more. But you're not
getting a truck into a lot of these areas. And
it just kind of goes to I'm not saying like
everyone go buy a mule. That's not really practical for
most people, although if you've got some land, maybe consider
getting the mule. They're real handy. They do come in
very useful in situations like this.
Speaker 3 (27:47):
Yeah, thinking companion animals as well. I think people haven't
felt like, if you have a hole or whatever, I'll
pack us too. But they can't carry so much, but
I'll pack. A packing is a thing, and in like Montana,
in places like that.
Speaker 1 (27:58):
Yeah, they're great. You know, if you've got to fight
in the mountains of Afghanistan a mule, you know you can.
You can do a lot there, So very useful in
a wide variety of situations. I know a lot of
our listeners are actively fighting in Afghanistan right now, so
that that could be very handy for you.
Speaker 3 (28:14):
Yeah, proud of you guys.
Speaker 1 (28:16):
Yeah. Yeah. America said we're done there, but you said
not me.
Speaker 3 (28:20):
It can happen here. You can't stop me going back
with my mule. That's why this is the official pocast
of the Islamic State Corusson Province.
Speaker 1 (28:31):
That is that's that's uh, oh, James, we shouldn't be
saying stuff. We can hopefully hopefully the government's busy.
Speaker 3 (28:39):
Well apparently because they ain't doing ship in a Nashville.
Speaker 1 (28:42):
Yeah, so, you know, I saw a lot of One
of the more heartbreaking posts that I saw was this
this lady posting a picture of her parents and her
daughter who was six on the roof with them, and
she was like a few minutes later, the roofs and
they were dead. Like she apparently managed to just kind
(29:04):
of barely survive and get out of there. But there's
there's like I'm I think a lot of people whose
last act was trying to get a good photo or
video of their location, you know, to post on social media.
I don't want there to be a lot of people
who made the decision to stay longer than they should
have because they wanted to get a good shot for
(29:25):
social media. But I'm sure that number wasn't zero. I'm
not saying that's what happened to that lady. There's also
a matter of like, well, if you are stuck up there,
what else are you going to fucking do but document it? Yeah,
I have some sympathy for that. Yeah, I'm not trying
to shit on these people, but it is one of
these there's that post that goes around every time there's
a disaster like this, where you know, climate collapse is
(29:47):
watching a series of horrifying videos on cell phones until
one day it's you holding the phone. Yeah, And I
think that that not that we shouldn't think about, Like
what's happened, you know, to North Carolina, to Tennessee, to
these affected communities. There's places in Georgia that got hard hit.
Obviously that's a focus. But from a practical standpoint, the
(30:08):
only good that you can make of a disaster like
this is to try and pay attention to what happened,
to what went wrong for other people, and make yourself
less vulnerable, because the less vulnerable you are one of
the things that we see every time there's something like
this hits, you know, and this is I would call
this a hand of God event. Right, You had a
bunch of communities that were a part of the developed,
(30:30):
you know whatever term first world one day, and we're
completely cut off from everyone else on the planet the next.
And all you can really do in the immediate aftermath
of something like that is try to figure out what
can I do to make it less likely that I'm
a strain on resources during an event like this, And
(30:52):
obviously the best way is to not be there, because
then you're not a strain on resources. But the next
best thing is to have to pay attention to what
went wrong for other people and try to make yourself
less vulnerable to that, because not only does that protect you,
but you protect other people by not needing the resources
that rescuers can bring to bear, which will be terribly
(31:12):
limited in the immediate wake of the disaster.
Speaker 3 (31:15):
Yeah, I think like in terms of resources, I'll see
Margaret does an excellent podcast quuredly if the world is dying,
we can hear more about that stuff. I think the
thing that you can buy, I guess right now, if
you have like thirty to fifty bucks and you want
to be a little bit more repared, because I understand
that for some people this will be an oh shit
moment right where this is something that it ought to be. Yeah, no,
(31:36):
it really should be. Like you know, you've seen a
city that thought it was completely invulnerable be very vulnerable.
You can buy a Sooyer squeeze for like thirty bucks
right now. You can set them up in a off
a five gullon bucket yep, or you can use the
bag that it comes with. You can buy a back
from a company called Cannock CNOC, which is a much
(31:56):
better bag. I would recommend that. But like you can
spend thirty bucks. The like we said before, you should
have backup and other water filtering options. But yeah, there
are whole countries that use Soyer squeezes, right, the Marshall Islands.
I made a thing about Liberia uses in too, And
you can filter rain water with that, and you could
pretty much have a supply of water for as long
(32:16):
as you need it if you backflush it.
Speaker 1 (32:17):
Right, You've got like a family of four and a house.
You have one or two five gallon buckets full at
any time, and you have a Soyer squeeze, and you
can you know, in this kind of situation, you could
keep filling it up with you know, disaster water for
lack of a better word. And in that sort of
situation too, you can double up and triple up, which
I always recommend in an emergency. I've nearly diet of dysentery,
(32:41):
so I don't fuck around with this. Yea, get a
filtration option that's not the only one. Filter your water
and add iodine tablets too, right, like you know, filter
your water and use something like a UV light, Yeah,
a stiry pan, stirry pan. You know, don't just rely
on one method. Double up, there's no You're not going
(33:01):
to have a lot to do other than make sure
your water doesn't kill you. And that's a real good
thing to focus on.
Speaker 3 (33:07):
Yeah, you could even use bleachhouse help bleach. Just make
sure you're leach sucking around, it's not scented, et cetera.
Speaker 1 (33:12):
But yeah, you want to look up that ratio just
or not fucking up the ratio with them. But like, yeah,
that's a great you know, I keep a I usually
keep one or two, just big fifty gallon barrels of water.
There's like stabilization tablets or in liquid that you can
drop in there because water doesn't store indefinitely. But you
can use bleach too. People do I keep at all times.
(33:33):
I just have this as part of my outdoor kit,
but it's a good thing to have for a disaster.
You can have a camelback with one company that makes
them as called Catadin Kata d Ynn Catadyne. Yeah, Catadyne. Sorry,
but there's a couple of different water filters that you
can screw directly onto your camelback. So you pour water
in the camel back and by the time you get
the water in your mouth, it has gone through a
(33:54):
very serious filter arrangement. And that again, that can be
part of your I pick this up and I take
this with me, and no matter where I go, I
couldn't pour water into the camel back and me and
my family can drink off of it, or we have
two camelbacks or whatever. You know, I have four lids
on you. This is not free, but it's not prohibitively expensive.
It's certainly not like buying nice firearms, right, and it
(34:14):
is considerably likelier to save your life than an AAR fifty.
Speaker 3 (34:18):
Yeah, yeah, there are magazines of ammunition that will cost
you more than this would. And like yeah, yeah, with
all of these things, once it's dirty, it's not clean, right,
So like your camelback bladder is now dirty water bladder
and stuff, especially in a disaster situation, don't be mixing
a match. Just get a sharpie and run and it. Likewise,
I have a Jerry can. I just wrote the bleach
(34:40):
amounts on it with a paint pen and it's there now,
And now I know, like none of this stuff is
hugely complicated, and like everything else, right, like the more
familiar you are with it, that if you go camping
a lot. Yeah, like Robert was saying, you already have
a system in place, so you're already ready for that.
Speaker 1 (34:55):
Yeah. I keep something called a grail on me, which
is just like a cup that has a filter. Like
it's a two part like almost kind of a thermos
type deal, and you fill the bottom part with water
and you press the top part in and it fills
an internal reservoir with filtered water. And then I'll drop
a tablet in there or something and you know, or
I'll pour that into a larger thing and put the
(35:17):
tablet in there. But you can always have multiple options
for water. And it's the kind of thing where like
there's no reason not to a camelback and a filter
plus a bunch of pills, plus some sort of like
canned pump rig you're maybe out one hundred and fifty bucks.
You have three different methods of keeping your water clean.
Speaker 3 (35:36):
Yeah, I think they're surtplusing out a lot of the
MSR Guardians the US military used to buy. You can
get those pretty tech. Those are great, like I have.
I was just in the dairying gap. I used one
of those and then chemical treatment and like yeah, I'm okay.
And you can also bulk process with the gravity Guardian.
You could do ten liters at a time.
Speaker 1 (35:57):
You know, we're in this kind of conversation. We are
tree by what we think is the most important stuff
which is in a disaster like this, water in comms,
and I kind of keep those as relatively equal because obviously,
like you can survive without comms in some situations, yeah,
and you can't in any without water. But if you
(36:18):
are in a situation where you're on the roof of
your house and your roof is not going to hold
out much longer in the floodwaters, colms suddenly become the
number one problem that you have, right your inability to
reach someone who might be able to get you out
of there.
Speaker 3 (36:31):
If you need to get help, then you need to
be able to ask for help. Yeah, I guess the
other thing I would say is if you rely on
any medicine, think about how and where you store them. God.
Speaker 1 (36:40):
Yes, a lot of people have been having to figure out,
Like I've been reading stories about people needing to set
up like battery and solar or generator situation, like their
fucking seapap machines, and they're like, you have people who
are on dialysis who are going to need to get
evacked because there's not going to be reliable dialysis you know,
in town in a while, right, Like.
Speaker 3 (36:59):
That kind of stuff some of that, you know, like
I have a big cooler and I can chuck ice
in there, and I can have enough insulin in that
bad boy for a year, you know. Yeah, another medicines,
you know, he's putting them in a waterproof bottle and
having that in your We I live in California. We
have a bag for fires and earthquakes, right everyone here does.
And just having a few days of your medicine so
you can grab and go. You don't have to think
(37:20):
about it. You don't forget something that you rely on.
Speaker 1 (37:23):
Yeah, and that's that's also what you should be thinking,
is like, if it takes me two or three days
to get evact and out to an area where I
can like spend money again to get access to the
things that I have on a daily basis, what shit
can't I survive without until I get to a part
of the world where I can get access to things again,
right right, Which is again why we're kind of focusing
(37:45):
on comms so that you know what's happening, so that
you can maybe reach people water and then underwater like
food and obviously things like thank god we are not
in a time of the year when this happened where
people are going to like freeze to death immediately right
in the middle of something like this. But that would
I would say, like access to warm and dry clothing
(38:08):
could be up there, equal with you know, water and cobs.
If you're talking about a kind of disaster that might
put people out of their homes in an area where
you can die in minutes in the front, like if
you live out in the fucking Great Lakes region, depending
on the time of year, we're talking about a disaster
that could be right up there. You know, you know
what you need based on where you live, but be
thinking about what keeps you alive. That's really a lot
(38:31):
of disaster preparedness is actually trying to understand what is
it that keeps me alive. A lot of our economy
exists in having that not be obvious to you.
Speaker 3 (38:41):
Yes, yeah, yeah, in putting your priority selfwhere. But yeah,
think about what stuffs you dying. Maybe have a couple
of spats and have it in a place. Having all
this stuff is great, if it's in seventeen different tote
bags in your attic, that's not much use to you
when you don't have very long to get out your house.
So having stuff like Robert said, by the door in
(39:01):
your car, in a backpack whatever, like, yeah, that you
can easily access and be okay. Then you have it
and then you when you need it, it's there and
you know where it is.
Speaker 1 (39:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (39:12):
Yep, well James, how we do it. It's happened here, buddy,
It's happened here. Yeah, like we said it would.
Speaker 1 (39:20):
Yeah it could like could, Like we keep saying this.
This was like I the messages I was sharing with
people immediately after this was like, oh, this is the one.
This is the one we were worried about. This is
the hand of God sweeping into a community and just
knocking it off the edge of the earth.
Speaker 3 (39:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:38):
You know, not that this kind of thing doesn't happen,
but this is this is the first one, at least
since I've been really focusing on this stuff in the
US where it hits somewhere that just was not on
my radar as a super vulnerable place.
Speaker 3 (39:51):
Definitely. Yeah. And it'll happen again next year and with
this one.
Speaker 1 (39:54):
It'll happen again. Yeah, and it'll surprise you. It'll surprise
you again where it hits. You know, that's the thing.
There's no climate haven. Yeah, it doesn't exist.
Speaker 3 (40:02):
Yeah, yeah, not on this planet. I would say, like,
if you have money and you want to help mutu
late disaster relief for.
Speaker 1 (40:08):
Great, Yes, let's talk about that. Let's go to ADS
one last time, and then when we come back we
will tell you who you can send some money to
to help people who are actively suffering and we're back.
(40:29):
Before we bounce, we wanted to suggest some places where
you could donate if you are looking to help people
who are in Ashville other parts of North Carolina. One
of the first places recommended to me is Appalachian Medical Solidarity.
They are providing. I mean it's obvious what they're providing
a lot of like medical care and support, a lot
(40:51):
of equipment and stuff that people need. Their VENMO is
at app med solid Their cash app is Dollar sign
Streets one de put flood support in the description if
you send them money through that. The other place is
Mutual Aid Disaster Relief. Their PayPal is mutual Aid Disaster
(41:12):
Relief at gmail dot com. Their venmo is at Mutual
Aid Disaster Relief. Yeah, just google them if you want
to find out more about what they're doing. James, did
you have anyone else that you wanted to throw out there.
Speaker 3 (41:23):
Those are the two we did an episode I didn't
episode a couple of years ago with Mutuladis after Relief
that you can now find in your podcasting app. Those
are the two big ones. I think, you know, if
you're on the ground, help each other. I'm sure you
already are. Yeah, yeah, those would be the two that
I would suggest, you know, if you buy yourself your
water filter and you have ten bucks to help out. Yeah,
how we make the world better?
Speaker 1 (41:45):
Yep. So until next week. Solidarity to the people who
are in the Atlanta area right now where chemical fire,
very similar chemical fire to the one that happened in
a place I used to live West Texas, has just
blanketed the air and beautiful. So remember, folks, weird disasters
could hit too.
Speaker 3 (42:04):
We're living the dream.
Speaker 1 (42:05):
We're not just talking about hurricanes and fires here. Anyway.
That's it for now, everybody, Good luck, stay safe, make
sure you drink plenty of water.
Speaker 2 (42:18):
Bye.
Speaker 1 (42:23):
It could happen.
Speaker 3 (42:23):
Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 4 (42:25):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts or Wherever you listen to podcasts, you can
now find sources for it could happen here, listened directly
in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.
A zone Media. Hey, this is it could happen here.
I am Robert Evans. This is a podcast about things
falling apart. Most of this episode is going to be
me and James Stout discussing the disaster in North Carolina
and elsewhere as a result of Hurricane Helene. But before
we get into that, and we'll be talking largely about
(00:24):
what this means for your own preparations for future disasters,
what we can kind of learn initially from everything that's
been happening. I wanted to start with a few minutes
of us talking to Margaret Kiljoy, who was on the
ground in the Asheville area doing disaster relief work right now.
And obviously the audio here is not up to our
(00:44):
usual quality, but it's only about five minutes, and then
you will get James and I talking crystal clear into
your ears. So here is Margaret.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Hi. Everyone, I just got on the ground about two
hours ago and immediately have been basically running or with
my van delivering food to different places just because van
did van thing. And it's I mean, it's intense. Everyone
is having an intense time. But also at the same time,
there's like, you know, more people are out walking around
(01:16):
and riding bikes, and you know, there's hundreds of people
gathering at every place that's passing out food and water,
and there's a very kind of community spirit happening right now.
I'm actually recording this from up in Marshall, which is
a small town immediately north of Asheville that also has
a mutual Aid distribution hub. We just came up here
to drop stuff off, and even in the twenty minutes
(01:37):
that I've been here, other people have come with pickup
trucks full of harm reduction supplies and diapers.
Speaker 3 (01:42):
And just all the things that people need.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
And everyone is trapped on basically little islands. Right There's
a very different style of flood than when you have
like a coastal flood. And what's happened is that the
houses that are near the river have been destroyed and
the roads a lot of them have been destroyed, and
a lot of them went under for a long time.
It's all the infrastructure is down, but many of the houses,
at least as I record this, seem to be intact
(02:06):
and then doing well. And what it is that everyone
is just trapped and isolated. Most people don't have food, water, sewage,
or even cell signal, although cell signal is kind of
the first thing to come back and power is starting
to filter back in, and we're hoping that some places
are maybe getting water. But one of the things that's
kind of come up is that, again, because it's in
(02:28):
the mountains, it's a very different setup, it's a very
different culture and community. And one of the things that's
happened is that, I mean a lot of people have wells,
and so immediately the problem has been more about distribution
of water and also getting generators to people who have
well so that they can pump. You know, a friend
of mine got a generator pretty quickly and you know,
pulled a thousand gallons out of their well right away
(02:50):
to get and distribute around. And there's a you know,
just while I was waiting outside my friend's house, someone
drove by and asked us if we needed water, and
then asked us if we knew about each of the
neighbors and who did and it didn't have water.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
Yeah, And I mean, one of the things that makes
me think of is like having the generator, having the well,
that's great, the kind of thing that maybe people wouldn't
think about as much as having the ability to put
a thousand gallons of.
Speaker 3 (03:18):
Water in something.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
Yes, totally. It seems like it was also crucial and
is probably would have been lowered down the list for
a lot of people. But there's really no replacing it
when you need it, totally.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
And but one of the things that again I mean,
I'm not suying to say that everything's fine here, it's
very much fine. For example, the only federal response that
anyone is talking about is that ice is already in
the area, So before anyone had been given food by
the federal government, they have sent ice to detain people
and question people.
Speaker 3 (03:46):
At least that.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
Is the word on the ground. Obviously, you know, details
and truths come later when you're in a crisis situation,
but we do know that ice is on the ground,
and no one I've talked to is so much in
the way a federal response besides law enforcement. But one
of the things that's happened here is that a lot
of people have pickup trucks in Appalachia, and so a
lot of people have you know, you call them water buffalos,
(04:08):
the big water tanks that you can put in a
pickup truck or a trailer. I definitely left this feeling,
you know, my first you know, I drove with my
van full of stuff and on the highway and being
passed by pickup trucks pulling flatbeds full of palettes of water.
Speaker 3 (04:23):
And things like that.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
But then even yeah, in the city, people are driving
around in trucks and filling them up with water and
delivering them. But don't get me wrong, Yeah, if you're preparing,
think about how to deliver water. Even some of the
things for me, for example, the city government has been
doing some things, and there are places where people can
go and fill up water containers, but they don't have
the water containers.
Speaker 3 (04:43):
So the people who.
Speaker 2 (04:44):
Were prepared by having a couple of five gallon toats
in their basement are in a much better position. And
that's like some of the things that I brought for
some of my friends. It's litergally just a couple of
five gallon water containers so that people.
Speaker 3 (04:55):
Can go get them filled up.
Speaker 4 (04:57):
Man.
Speaker 1 (04:57):
Obviously, you're talking about when we're thinking about the places
that people are able to drive around where the places
that you've been reaching are hit pretty hard. But we
also then have these more isolated mountain communities that both
seem to have suffered a lot more physical damage, although
that's not entirely clear at this moment, but are certainly
not accessible in the same way. And I think that's
(05:18):
one of those things we're still going to be waiting
to hear, like how extreme it is. But like we
talk a little bit on the episode before this about
people using burrows to deliver food and water in places
where vehicles can't even reach. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
And one of the things also, you know, one of
the things that went out on the mutual Aid list
that I'm on is people are saying, hey, if you
have your ATV, bring down your ATV, you know, and
that makes complete sense if you the listener are listening
to this, don't just drive down with supplies and if
you are plugged into a mutual ad to.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
Just roll to Ashville in your polaris.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
Yeah yeah, but but yeah, no, one of the hardest
things has been getting the supplies, you know. I mean,
disaster relief is just it's just logistics. And the same
way war is just logistics. You know, It's like how
do you get things from one place to another? And
what people have set up is all of these you know,
you centralize the acquisation of supplies and then you decentralize
(06:16):
getting them out. But yeah, people have been working. I'm
going to know more about what people have been doing
to get things out, but I've already talked with people
or heard from people who you know, we're getting rescued
by people a handsaws, right, and then one of the
main things that people are doing is that there's chainsaw crews,
mutual aid chainsaw crews going around.
Speaker 3 (06:34):
One of the big asks.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
That I came with a lot of was a bar
and chain oil, you know. And it's a little bit
hard because gas is also until just recently, gas is
starting to come back online now, but getting gas for
a chainsaw or an ATV or your vehicle has been tricky.
But people have been working on that too.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
Yeah. Well, Margaret, I'm going to take up more of
your time while you try to help in the wake
of a disaster. But thank you for being on the ground.
Good luck to you and everyone else who's out there.
We will be hearing more from you and more about
the specifics of what's happened in North Carolina and elsewhere
in the wake of the hurricane next week. So thank
(07:16):
you and thank everybody there. Good luck.
Speaker 3 (07:18):
Yeah, thank you.
Speaker 1 (07:20):
That is done. I am now going to move on
with our previously recorded episode. Here is James and Me. Oh,
welcome back to it could happen here a podcast where
it's happened for some chunk of our listeners who are
probably not listening right now, because as we record this
(07:41):
on Monday, the first technically a Tuesday, we're just now
getting word that internet has come back on, like mobile
internet has come back on to parts of Ashville and
North Carolina that we're in communicado for several days after
Hurricane Eleen tore through. So you've heard something about this.
(08:02):
I'm hoping. I'm different things from friends about how much
news attention there seems to be on this. I'm seeing
it a lot, but I'm seeing it largely through social
But the gist of it is, I mean, there's a
photo I came across right before getting on here, where
there was a memorial marker for the nineteen sixteen flood
in Ashville that was knocked out by what used to
(08:24):
be a road and was now nothing but rushing water
and mud.
Speaker 3 (08:28):
Beautiful.
Speaker 1 (08:29):
Three out of four highways into Ashville are down. I
heard yesterday from people who were coming in and doing
an aid drop that what had been previously a thirty
minute drive took twelve and a half hours. From the
state of the roads, and the number of checkpoints and stuff.
All of this is pretty common stuff for a natural disaster,
(08:51):
obviously amped up in severity because this disaster was correspondingly
worse than even most natural disasters tend to be known
in this country.
Speaker 3 (09:02):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
I was just looking through, just doing a little bit
of googling before we got on, and I found a
Reddit post from the Asheville subreddit from two years ago
saying Ashville is apparently the number one city in the
United States to be a climate haven, according to the CNBC,
although that article it just made the list of best
climate cities, but the original post has been deleted. I
(09:24):
don't know if that was earlier or as a result
of this, but that is one of the side stories here,
is that Ashville is not We're not talking about one
of these coastal cities in Florida that everyone is known
as doomed for forever, right. We're not talking about New Orleans,
which lovely city, great history, doomed as fuck and everyone
has known it for quite a while. We're talking about
(09:45):
places that are many miles inland, and that something like
two thousand feet elevation.
Speaker 3 (09:51):
Yeah, it's certainly not below sea level or even at
sea level.
Speaker 1 (09:55):
Yeah, it's an inland, mountainous community. It's just not the
kind of threat that people are used to having here.
And the devastation has been pretty total, like whole communities
wiped out. I think the death toll from the county
Asheville is in. Let me let me pull this up
to make sure I'm not getting it wrong. I've just
(10:15):
now pulled up a story from thirty minutes ago on
the Independent that says, yeah, at least one hundred and
forty three people have been killed. Yeah, that's a total
death toll from Helene forty people in Buncombe County, where
Asheville is six hundred people unaccounted for. Governor Roy Cooper
has told CNN that there are communities that were wiped
(10:36):
off the map. Kind of the first thing that I noticed,
you know, outside of the footage coming in was friends
of mine. Because I've spent a decent amount of time
in Asheville. I have friends on the East Coast, including
our own Margaret Kiljoy, who has a lot more friends
in Asheville, and I was in a couple of different
signal loops where people were trying to contact their people,
(10:58):
and there was a line from one of the folks
I was chatting with, who had reached out to multiple
people in the area, and said, I have not heard
anything from anyone in Nashville in hours. Nothing is getting
in and nothing is getting out, And that seems to
be consistent with everyone's experience. Starlink was largely not functional.
(11:18):
Starlink doesn't work very well when the weather's really bad.
Sat phones seem to have had some efficacy. I know
some people were getting messages in and out, but they
weren't super reliable because sat phones also are reliant upon
climactic conditions. Right, It's certainly better than just trusting your
normal cell phone, but it's not going to do great
when you've got a fucking hurricane dumping half an ocean
(11:43):
on your head. So that was the first thing I
was thinking about, because we talk a lot about disaster preparedness,
and we talk a lot about having stuff that would
have been useful in this, and that people who were
prepared and had water set aside and food set aside
were certainly in a better situation, because those both very
quickly became problems. I mean, I heard a devastating story
(12:03):
of an old folks home that was completely cut off
from the outside and didn't have enough water or food.
Hoping that story ends as well as possible, but there's
a lot of stories like that. But even outside of that,
there were people who were prepared, who had food and water,
but who wound up stuck on the roofs of their
(12:23):
house because the water just came in so quickly there
was no chance to really get much other than maybe
a bag. And when you're stuck up on there, like
what are you going to do if your SAT phone
or you don't have a SAT phone and that doesn't
work and there's no internet and there's no cell service.
Well that's why we're going to start today talking about
(12:44):
Ham radios, because those motherfuckers there's actually a I'll see
if I can pull it up through this like that
has been the most reliable way for people in the
area to communicate with the outside world, because if it
is possible to communicate using technology, you can do it
with ham. Yeah, right, Like that's just that's just how
Ham radios be.
Speaker 3 (13:06):
Yeah, they don't need to see the sky like, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
They don't give a fuck it. If there is any
way to communicate via technology with people in a disaster,
you will be able to do it with a Ham radio. Ye, sots,
let's chat about that, James. You have more experience with
this than I do. This is something I have been
working on getting into, but I certainly am not very
knowledgeable on the matter. So we'll start like, what what
do people need to think about when it comes to
(13:31):
like actually getting set up to communicate with a Ham radio,
Because there's definitely you could just go buy a Boofang
or something like that, Like you can get ahead. They're
not expensive. This is actually a very affordable thing to
have right now. Kind of the most recommended model is
the UV nine R Pro, which is eight watt instead
of five and waterproof.
Speaker 3 (13:52):
Yep, that's what I was going to say. And you
can charge it off USBC, which is really nice.
Speaker 1 (13:56):
Yeah, they're what like thirty something bucks.
Speaker 3 (13:59):
Yeah, you can get them cheaper in bulk. I think
you steel to get them cheaper on Alley Express, but
seems like they're kind of hanging them up in charging customs,
so you end up not getting them cheaper. Yeah, so yeah,
for real basic stuff. I think you do need to
be licensed to operate these radios on certain bands, right, yes,
And that's something that you you can, I believe in
(14:21):
a case of emergency you can. You can operate on
any band.
Speaker 1 (14:24):
No one's going to arrest you for a legal youth
unlicensed used to a ham radio if you're trying to
get people rescued from a flood, right, Like that said,
you should not be learning how to use a ham
radio when you're hiding on your roof.
Speaker 3 (14:38):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Like this is like you know the
people who buy guns and put them under their bed
and never shoot them and expect to be right because
the fucking marksman in a crisis or by medical gear
and never train with it again. Right, These things that
you want to practice before. So we use these a
lot of the boarder. We use radios to communicate. When
they were higher numbers in Cucumber, my friends and I
(14:59):
put a map sive antenna on the roof of the
youth center where we were. You know a lot of
listeners have been out there and they've probably seen antenna
that we put up. And then I was using a
radio on my truck and then we also all had
personal radios, right because cell phone signal is crap out there,
and it was the only way for us to communicate
and it worked really well. So the things that you
need if you want to get started in this are,
first of all, some kind of education or a license.
(15:22):
There are tons of local groups. Hand people fucking love
to be ham radio people. They love to talk about
hand radio. They love to teach you to do ham
radio so like, and it's not like a hobby, you know,
firearms people love to talk about firearms, but lots of
them are really toxic people. I haven't found that ham
radio is premised on talking to people all over the place,
and often very.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
Few people killed with ham radio.
Speaker 3 (15:43):
Yeah, I'm sure it's possible. But if you can find
a local club, but that's a great way to start.
They can clean you in on stuff. But I think
to begin with you also need someone to talk to, right, Like,
if you want to practice with your hand radio, you
need to be talking to other people on it. So
you can just go on to different bands, different repeaters
and do that, or you can get your friends and
(16:03):
study together. Yeah, get your license together.
Speaker 1 (16:06):
I too, bow things, you know, Yeah, give one to
somebody who you live close to but not right next to,
and work on it with them.
Speaker 3 (16:14):
Yeah, work on like, oh how far this work? You know?
Like I am one of the former guests for the
podcast James Corderra from Border Kindness. He and I were
doing that not so long go talk to each other
from our houses. But yeah, you can. You can certainly
get into this pretty cheap. I have a business license,
which is another option for people. I would suggest first
(16:35):
getting your ham operator's lescense and then going from there.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
Yeah, that's it's called a radio technicians license, right, Like
that's the most basic because there's three levels.
Speaker 3 (16:42):
If I'm not mistaken, Yeah, I believe. So it's been
a while since I did that.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
Yeah, I think it's Radio Technicians General and then amateur
extra if the note yeah are accurate.
Speaker 3 (16:53):
Still, and then in terms of cost, like the size
of your antenna is what's going to determine, you know,
how far you can transmit and how you can receive
along with like line of.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
Sight, right, it's about side.
Speaker 3 (17:04):
Ye, it's the biggest one possible. So you want to
be a size queen, like you can get yourself a
really big antenna. I would say if you're using those
handheld radios. So the company called Nagoya that make pretty
decent radios antennas that work with that UV nine R
that I use. I have like a telescoping one and
we've had pretty good luck with that, and then I
(17:25):
also use one in my VI So I've hard mounted
a radio inside my truck and I have an antenna
that uses the frame of the truck as part of
the antenna, and I can get really good signal with that.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
Yeah, that makes sense if.
Speaker 3 (17:36):
You're just doing it at home. Yeah, put something on
your roof, Like you can get a pretty good antenna
on your roof, you know, and it's not that hard
and you can get signal.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (17:43):
Much further.
Speaker 1 (17:44):
I've been recommended a little book that you can get
for twenty bucks in kindle form or it's like thirty
bucks for the spiral bound, which looks pretty durable. I
haven't received mine yet. Yeah, the ar rl HAM Radio
License Manual, which is kind of what I was advice
to buy and read through and the advice that I
got and you can correct me here. But this seemed
(18:06):
pretty hard to argue with. Is that, like the primary
benefit to doing the training and getting the license formally
rather than just buying it is it also teaches you
how to fix problems if you're trying to like get
this thing to work in a stressful, dangerous situation.
Speaker 3 (18:21):
Yeah, you want to be familiar with it if you're
going to rely on it, right, just like anything else
this ham study dot org as well, which helps you.
You can also do something called a software defined radio SDR.
I've used those before as well.
Speaker 1 (18:33):
I'm sure we'll Yeah, we'll do a more dedicated episode
to this kind of thing once. I feel a degree
of competence too. But I think what's really important with
this is because I can tell you right now, as
much time as I spend, like thinking about water and
having a bunch of different water treatment options and spare
water stored, and I have like I literally have at
this point years of dried food on the property. I
(18:54):
can food all the time. I have animals, obviously, I
have guns, you know, I do stuff like know, go
foraging in the woods and shit. I had completely because
it's a pain in the air. It seemed like a
pain in the ass. There's a lot of numbers. I
hate fucking numbers, and I am choosing to use this
and we're we're starting out with this as coverage of
(19:15):
Halle not because like this is the end of it.
We're not. We are going to look at what's actually
been happening in the community. We have people Margaret Killjoys
down there right now, we have some other like friends
of the pod who are in the area doing relief work.
Now it's just too early for those stories, and we
don't want to like really bug people who are doing
useful work down there. Yeah, but this is the first
(19:36):
thing that terrified me was being like, well, fuck, I
have been negligent in my preparations because I don't have
comms locked down.
Speaker 3 (19:45):
Yeah, definitely, like people underestimated because it's not cool and fun,
right like guns and fun.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
I have a sat phone, So I was like, that's
probably fine, right, Like, well, it wouldn't have been wouldn't
have been in Ashville.
Speaker 2 (19:54):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (19:55):
Oh, people think that they can have stylink now, and
I think, yeah, you know, people, it's a lot of
emphasis on that, but I think, yep, going back to basics.
We were talking about this in our group chat. But
for things that you need, having a primary, secondary, and
emergency way of doing that makes sense. So yes, your phone,
your SAT phone. You know, I think Robert and I
(20:15):
both He's gum and in reaches like a sack communicator.
Speaker 1 (20:17):
I have an in reach and I also have a
Motorola smartphone that is a SAT phone through God, I'm
forgetting the name of the service, but a separate service,
like I have two different SAT phone services.
Speaker 3 (20:28):
And then you got your ham radio as your backup.
Well after that you got smoke signals and pigeons right.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
Well, that gets us to a general idea of preparation
which I was kind of when I started. When I
got advice from a colleague about war reporting, like the best.
It's still to this day some of the best advice
I've ever got is two is one and one is none.
Speaker 2 (20:50):
Right.
Speaker 1 (20:50):
If you have one way of doing something and a disaster,
you are very close to having no way of doing
it right, which brings me to transit because one of
the the thing that is probably going to wind up
being the defining characteristic of this disaster in memory is
the degree to which the ability to reach people in
(21:10):
an area that is we're not talking, you know. There
definitely are a lot of rural communities impacted by this,
but like Ashville is a significant place. We're not talking
the middle of nowhere. We are not talking about people
living on the edge of the world, right, Yeah, we
are talking about like one of the what was what
was up to this point, one of like the hippest
and more popular parts of the northeast.
Speaker 2 (21:30):
Right.
Speaker 1 (21:31):
The immediacy with which the ability to reach people on
the ground was wiped out, and obviously while the storm
was going on, there was no way to reach them
from air. Like you know, a helicopter can get places now,
but during the worst of the flooding, you're not reliably
getting a fucking chopper into a lot of these places.
So people were stranded very quickly, much faster than they
(21:54):
had been prepared for. You should be thinking about like,
oh shit, I could get flooded, because you probably could.
Most of the people listening to this. There's not a
zero percent chance a freak storm floods your community, right,
even if it never has before. It's not exactly a
common problem in Asheville, right, the last massive flood thing
(22:14):
was like nineteen sixteen, So we're not talking about a
place that's used to flooding all the time. But likewise,
like it's not just flooding that fire could do this, right,
I am thinking the last kind of near disaster we
had where I was was in twenty twenty. You know
where I live right now. I am in the city
of Portland, and we were like three or four blocks
(22:35):
away from where the evacuation orders had spread during the
fires in twenty twenty. It was not a foregone conclusion
that they would stop before reaching the city. You know.
This is also I think people in southern California. Yeah, definitely,
there's a shocking number of communities, communities with money that
are really built up that if a fire hit at
the wrong time of year, there's no stopping it. And like,
(22:58):
you need to be thinking about how am I preparing
to be informed during the seasons where this is like
of of highest likelihood, because the only real safety there
is paying attention to what's happening and building an understanding
of how quickly things can go badly so that you
(23:19):
get out ahead of time, because if the disaster just hits,
you're not going to get on the highway and drive
through a fire or through a flood. I don't care
if you have a fucking Safari snorkel. I'm looking at
those waters. You are not getting the most kitted out
land rover on God's Green Earth was not getting through
some of those waters.
Speaker 3 (23:38):
I'm sorry, Yeah, you need a submarine fish. Like I
remember my house flooded when I was probably seventeen eighteen,
and I remember that. A couple of the things I remember,
first of all, was like, most of your shit is
not that important to you. I remember being seventeen and
being like, oh man, we got this back then. Having
a widescreen TV was a big deal for us, and
just yeah, then thinking like, oh, my name is an
(23:59):
eighty some like I fuck the TV. I need to
check of those people, okay. And then people completely overestimating
the capability of their vehicles in floodwater, yeah, which.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
Which they always will do. It will always be the
people with the biggest trucks that cause the most problems
for everyone else to overestimate where their vehicles can get them.
Speaker 3 (24:16):
Yes, and like you can die in your vehicle crossing
relatively shallow floodwater. This isn't yeah, you know, it's a
serious business.
Speaker 1 (24:23):
Or get burned to death, which happens all the time,
has happened very recently in communities in like California. You know,
people just get fucking incinerated. So don't be that person.
Pay attention. Like one of the things to pay attention
to is like when the warning started to come in.
There will be good breakdowns fairly soon in places like
(24:43):
the New York Times on when warnings came in and
how much time people actually had. Ye But don't gamble
with stuff like this. Fucking drive to high ground or
you know, drive to whatever seems like the safest place
and fucking in your car if you have to. And
this is why again, when it does come to survival stuff,
(25:05):
I'm a big fan. If you have the money, spend
two hundred bucks on one of those buckets of dried food.
Because you can keep a bucket of dried food and
five gallons of water by the door. You can throw
that son of a bitch in your car, and carrying
the waters might be a pain in the ass, but
if you have to get out and run, those buckets
of dried food with a week or so of food
in them are not that hard to carry. You hold
(25:28):
it under your arm, you keep a backpack on your back,
and you run like a son of a bitch to
whatever evacuation exists, and you'll have some food with you. Yeah,
you know, like this is one of the ways I
think about stuff like this. You know, it's obviously preferable
if you can just hunker down in your fucking house
full of gear and equipment. But I'm sure there were
I'm sure there were people who had to evac or
(25:49):
who got flooded out in Ashville and their house that
got flooded out was full of survival gear. I know
for a fact that that happened to people. Yeah, and
it happens everywhere to people, right happening. But what should
be happening right now is an advertising break? Oh shit,
should have happened ten fucking minutes ago, James. Yeah, but here,
but here we are. We're back.
Speaker 3 (26:19):
You know.
Speaker 1 (26:19):
When it comes to talking about like the degree to
which people's high tech and expensive equipment, including vehicles, has
run out very quickly, one of the stories that has
been most interesting to me is of like, one of
the first groups of people to be able to get
supplies and significant quantities to some of these isolated mountain
(26:42):
regions was a guy with a shitload of donkeys. Oh yeah,
the mule team. The mule team guy. He was one second,
let me pull this up I've got this bookmarked. Yeah,
Mountain mule Packer Ranch, which I'm guessing is just some
sort of like a you know, you go there to
vacation and do like mule trips, mule hights and stuff.
Speaker 3 (27:01):
It's kind of people who want to backpack or take
like a really luxury as camping set up.
Speaker 1 (27:05):
Yeah. Yeah, they've been doing mule trains into a town
call into a Weaverville. It looks like and yeah, like
a mule can carry. It's something at least based on
this people article I'm looking at, they're saying about two
hundred pounds of supplies per animal, which you know is
actually very significant. That's not a whole lot more than
you're going to be fitting in like a compact car
(27:27):
at least obviously a truck's carrying more. But you're not
getting a truck into a lot of these areas. And
it just kind of goes to I'm not saying like
everyone go buy a mule. That's not really practical for
most people, although if you've got some land, maybe consider
getting the mule. They're real handy. They do come in
very useful in situations like this.
Speaker 3 (27:47):
Yeah, thinking companion animals as well. I think people haven't
felt like, if you have a hole or whatever, I'll
pack us too. But they can't carry so much, but
I'll pack. A packing is a thing, and in like Montana,
in places like that.
Speaker 1 (27:58):
Yeah, they're great. You know, if you've got to fight
in the mountains of Afghanistan a mule, you know you can.
You can do a lot there, So very useful in
a wide variety of situations. I know a lot of
our listeners are actively fighting in Afghanistan right now, so
that that could be very handy for you.
Speaker 3 (28:14):
Yeah, proud of you guys.
Speaker 1 (28:16):
Yeah. Yeah. America said we're done there, but you said
not me.
Speaker 3 (28:20):
It can happen here. You can't stop me going back
with my mule. That's why this is the official pocast
of the Islamic State Corusson Province.
Speaker 1 (28:31):
That is that's that's uh, oh, James, we shouldn't be
saying stuff. We can hopefully hopefully the government's busy.
Speaker 3 (28:39):
Well apparently because they ain't doing ship in a Nashville.
Speaker 1 (28:42):
Yeah, so, you know, I saw a lot of One
of the more heartbreaking posts that I saw was this
this lady posting a picture of her parents and her
daughter who was six on the roof with them, and
she was like a few minutes later, the roofs and
they were dead. Like she apparently managed to just kind
(29:04):
of barely survive and get out of there. But there's
there's like I'm I think a lot of people whose
last act was trying to get a good photo or
video of their location, you know, to post on social media.
I don't want there to be a lot of people
who made the decision to stay longer than they should
have because they wanted to get a good shot for
(29:25):
social media. But I'm sure that number wasn't zero. I'm
not saying that's what happened to that lady. There's also
a matter of like, well, if you are stuck up there,
what else are you going to fucking do but document it? Yeah,
I have some sympathy for that. Yeah, I'm not trying
to shit on these people, but it is one of
these there's that post that goes around every time there's
a disaster like this, where you know, climate collapse is
(29:47):
watching a series of horrifying videos on cell phones until
one day it's you holding the phone. Yeah, And I
think that that not that we shouldn't think about, Like
what's happened, you know, to North Carolina, to Tennessee, to
these affected communities. There's places in Georgia that got hard hit.
Obviously that's a focus. But from a practical standpoint, the
(30:08):
only good that you can make of a disaster like
this is to try and pay attention to what happened,
to what went wrong for other people, and make yourself
less vulnerable, because the less vulnerable you are one of
the things that we see every time there's something like
this hits, you know, and this is I would call
this a hand of God event. Right, You had a
bunch of communities that were a part of the developed,
(30:30):
you know whatever term first world one day, and we're
completely cut off from everyone else on the planet the next.
And all you can really do in the immediate aftermath
of something like that is try to figure out what
can I do to make it less likely that I'm
a strain on resources during an event like this, And
(30:52):
obviously the best way is to not be there, because
then you're not a strain on resources. But the next
best thing is to have to pay attention to what
went wrong for other people and try to make yourself
less vulnerable to that, because not only does that protect you,
but you protect other people by not needing the resources
that rescuers can bring to bear, which will be terribly
(31:12):
limited in the immediate wake of the disaster.
Speaker 3 (31:15):
Yeah, I think like in terms of resources, I'll see
Margaret does an excellent podcast quuredly if the world is dying,
we can hear more about that stuff. I think the
thing that you can buy, I guess right now, if
you have like thirty to fifty bucks and you want
to be a little bit more repared, because I understand
that for some people this will be an oh shit
moment right where this is something that it ought to be. Yeah, no,
(31:36):
it really should be. Like you know, you've seen a
city that thought it was completely invulnerable be very vulnerable.
You can buy a Sooyer squeeze for like thirty bucks
right now. You can set them up in a off
a five gullon bucket yep, or you can use the
bag that it comes with. You can buy a back
from a company called Cannock CNOC, which is a much
(31:56):
better bag. I would recommend that. But like you can
spend thirty bucks. The like we said before, you should
have backup and other water filtering options. But yeah, there
are whole countries that use Soyer squeezes, right, the Marshall Islands.
I made a thing about Liberia uses in too, And
you can filter rain water with that, and you could
pretty much have a supply of water for as long
(32:16):
as you need it if you backflush it.
Speaker 1 (32:17):
Right, You've got like a family of four and a house.
You have one or two five gallon buckets full at
any time, and you have a Soyer squeeze, and you
can you know, in this kind of situation, you could
keep filling it up with you know, disaster water for
lack of a better word. And in that sort of
situation too, you can double up and triple up, which
I always recommend in an emergency. I've nearly diet of dysentery,
(32:41):
so I don't fuck around with this. Yea, get a
filtration option that's not the only one. Filter your water
and add iodine tablets too, right, like you know, filter
your water and use something like a UV light, Yeah,
a stiry pan, stirry pan. You know, don't just rely
on one method. Double up, there's no You're not going
(33:01):
to have a lot to do other than make sure
your water doesn't kill you. And that's a real good
thing to focus on.
Speaker 3 (33:07):
Yeah, you could even use bleachhouse help bleach. Just make
sure you're leach sucking around, it's not scented, et cetera.
Speaker 1 (33:12):
But yeah, you want to look up that ratio just
or not fucking up the ratio with them. But like, yeah,
that's a great you know, I keep a I usually
keep one or two, just big fifty gallon barrels of water.
There's like stabilization tablets or in liquid that you can
drop in there because water doesn't store indefinitely. But you
can use bleach too. People do I keep at all times.
(33:33):
I just have this as part of my outdoor kit,
but it's a good thing to have for a disaster.
You can have a camelback with one company that makes
them as called Catadin Kata d Ynn Catadyne. Yeah, Catadyne. Sorry,
but there's a couple of different water filters that you
can screw directly onto your camelback. So you pour water
in the camel back and by the time you get
the water in your mouth, it has gone through a
(33:54):
very serious filter arrangement. And that again, that can be
part of your I pick this up and I take
this with me, and no matter where I go, I
couldn't pour water into the camel back and me and
my family can drink off of it, or we have
two camelbacks or whatever. You know, I have four lids
on you. This is not free, but it's not prohibitively expensive.
It's certainly not like buying nice firearms, right, and it
(34:14):
is considerably likelier to save your life than an AAR fifty.
Speaker 3 (34:18):
Yeah, yeah, there are magazines of ammunition that will cost
you more than this would. And like yeah, yeah, with
all of these things, once it's dirty, it's not clean, right,
So like your camelback bladder is now dirty water bladder
and stuff, especially in a disaster situation, don't be mixing
a match. Just get a sharpie and run and it. Likewise,
I have a Jerry can. I just wrote the bleach
(34:40):
amounts on it with a paint pen and it's there now,
And now I know, like none of this stuff is
hugely complicated, and like everything else, right, like the more
familiar you are with it, that if you go camping
a lot. Yeah, like Robert was saying, you already have
a system in place, so you're already ready for that.
Speaker 1 (34:55):
Yeah. I keep something called a grail on me, which
is just like a cup that has a filter. Like
it's a two part like almost kind of a thermos
type deal, and you fill the bottom part with water
and you press the top part in and it fills
an internal reservoir with filtered water. And then I'll drop
a tablet in there or something and you know, or
I'll pour that into a larger thing and put the
(35:17):
tablet in there. But you can always have multiple options
for water. And it's the kind of thing where like
there's no reason not to a camelback and a filter
plus a bunch of pills, plus some sort of like
canned pump rig you're maybe out one hundred and fifty bucks.
You have three different methods of keeping your water clean.
Speaker 3 (35:36):
Yeah, I think they're surtplusing out a lot of the
MSR Guardians the US military used to buy. You can
get those pretty tech. Those are great, like I have.
I was just in the dairying gap. I used one
of those and then chemical treatment and like yeah, I'm okay.
And you can also bulk process with the gravity Guardian.
You could do ten liters at a time.
Speaker 1 (35:57):
You know, we're in this kind of conversation. We are
tree by what we think is the most important stuff
which is in a disaster like this, water in comms,
and I kind of keep those as relatively equal because obviously,
like you can survive without comms in some situations, yeah,
and you can't in any without water. But if you
(36:18):
are in a situation where you're on the roof of
your house and your roof is not going to hold
out much longer in the floodwaters, colms suddenly become the
number one problem that you have, right your inability to
reach someone who might be able to get you out
of there.
Speaker 3 (36:31):
If you need to get help, then you need to
be able to ask for help. Yeah, I guess the
other thing I would say is if you rely on
any medicine, think about how and where you store them. God.
Speaker 1 (36:40):
Yes, a lot of people have been having to figure out,
Like I've been reading stories about people needing to set
up like battery and solar or generator situation, like their
fucking seapap machines, and they're like, you have people who
are on dialysis who are going to need to get
evacked because there's not going to be reliable dialysis you know,
in town in a while, right, Like.
Speaker 3 (36:59):
That kind of stuff some of that, you know, like
I have a big cooler and I can chuck ice
in there, and I can have enough insulin in that
bad boy for a year, you know. Yeah, another medicines,
you know, he's putting them in a waterproof bottle and
having that in your We I live in California. We
have a bag for fires and earthquakes, right everyone here does.
And just having a few days of your medicine so
you can grab and go. You don't have to think
(37:20):
about it. You don't forget something that you rely on.
Speaker 1 (37:23):
Yeah, and that's that's also what you should be thinking,
is like, if it takes me two or three days
to get evact and out to an area where I
can like spend money again to get access to the
things that I have on a daily basis, what shit
can't I survive without until I get to a part
of the world where I can get access to things again,
right right, Which is again why we're kind of focusing
(37:45):
on comms so that you know what's happening, so that
you can maybe reach people water and then underwater like
food and obviously things like thank god we are not
in a time of the year when this happened where
people are going to like freeze to death immediately right
in the middle of something like this. But that would
I would say, like access to warm and dry clothing
(38:08):
could be up there, equal with you know, water and cobs.
If you're talking about a kind of disaster that might
put people out of their homes in an area where
you can die in minutes in the front, like if
you live out in the fucking Great Lakes region, depending
on the time of year, we're talking about a disaster
that could be right up there. You know, you know
what you need based on where you live, but be
thinking about what keeps you alive. That's really a lot
(38:31):
of disaster preparedness is actually trying to understand what is
it that keeps me alive. A lot of our economy
exists in having that not be obvious to you.
Speaker 3 (38:41):
Yes, yeah, yeah, in putting your priority selfwhere. But yeah,
think about what stuffs you dying. Maybe have a couple
of spats and have it in a place. Having all
this stuff is great, if it's in seventeen different tote
bags in your attic, that's not much use to you
when you don't have very long to get out your house.
So having stuff like Robert said, by the door in
(39:01):
your car, in a backpack whatever, like, yeah, that you
can easily access and be okay. Then you have it
and then you when you need it, it's there and
you know where it is.
Speaker 1 (39:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (39:12):
Yep, well James, how we do it. It's happened here, buddy,
It's happened here. Yeah, like we said it would.
Speaker 1 (39:20):
Yeah it could like could, Like we keep saying this.
This was like I the messages I was sharing with
people immediately after this was like, oh, this is the one.
This is the one we were worried about. This is
the hand of God sweeping into a community and just
knocking it off the edge of the earth.
Speaker 3 (39:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:38):
You know, not that this kind of thing doesn't happen,
but this is this is the first one, at least
since I've been really focusing on this stuff in the
US where it hits somewhere that just was not on
my radar as a super vulnerable place.
Speaker 3 (39:51):
Definitely. Yeah. And it'll happen again next year and with
this one.
Speaker 1 (39:54):
It'll happen again. Yeah, and it'll surprise you. It'll surprise
you again where it hits. You know, that's the thing.
There's no climate haven. Yeah, it doesn't exist.
Speaker 3 (40:02):
Yeah, yeah, not on this planet. I would say, like,
if you have money and you want to help mutu
late disaster relief for.
Speaker 1 (40:08):
Great, Yes, let's talk about that. Let's go to ADS
one last time, and then when we come back we
will tell you who you can send some money to
to help people who are actively suffering and we're back.
(40:29):
Before we bounce, we wanted to suggest some places where
you could donate if you are looking to help people
who are in Ashville other parts of North Carolina. One
of the first places recommended to me is Appalachian Medical Solidarity.
They are providing. I mean it's obvious what they're providing
a lot of like medical care and support, a lot
(40:51):
of equipment and stuff that people need. Their VENMO is
at app med solid Their cash app is Dollar sign
Streets one de put flood support in the description if
you send them money through that. The other place is
Mutual Aid Disaster Relief. Their PayPal is mutual Aid Disaster
(41:12):
Relief at gmail dot com. Their venmo is at Mutual
Aid Disaster Relief. Yeah, just google them if you want
to find out more about what they're doing. James, did
you have anyone else that you wanted to throw out there.
Speaker 3 (41:23):
Those are the two we did an episode I didn't
episode a couple of years ago with Mutuladis after Relief
that you can now find in your podcasting app. Those
are the two big ones. I think, you know, if
you're on the ground, help each other. I'm sure you
already are. Yeah, yeah, those would be the two that
I would suggest, you know, if you buy yourself your
water filter and you have ten bucks to help out. Yeah,
how we make the world better?
Speaker 1 (41:45):
Yep. So until next week. Solidarity to the people who
are in the Atlanta area right now where chemical fire,
very similar chemical fire to the one that happened in
a place I used to live West Texas, has just
blanketed the air and beautiful. So remember, folks, weird disasters
could hit too.
Speaker 3 (42:04):
We're living the dream.
Speaker 1 (42:05):
We're not just talking about hurricanes and fires here. Anyway.
That's it for now, everybody, Good luck, stay safe, make
sure you drink plenty of water.
Speaker 2 (42:18):
Bye.
Speaker 1 (42:23):
It could happen.
Speaker 3 (42:23):
Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 4 (42:25):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts or Wherever you listen to podcasts, you can
now find sources for it could happen here, listened directly
in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.
It Could Happen Here News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Evans
Garrison Davis
James Stout
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