Lessons learned from Texas ice and snow storm

well y'all talk about mess today is monday um monday what is it february 22nd 2020 and a week ago today i mean i live just outside of houston okay now i was i'm from arkansas grew up raised in arkansas area moved down houston back around 2007 time frame or so sometime in there but uh i live outside of houston now and we got a lot of snow and ice uh about a week ago i'm sure y'all have probably seen some of it on the news and whatnot and everything else that was happening down here it was crazy to to put it simply you know some you know kind of scary things happen now you know we've been without power before you know the the just the fact that the electricity went out for here where i live we lost power for about i don't know 14 or 18 hours or so on two or three different days the power to come back on for 10 or 12 hours then go back out again but what is scary about it is the fact that the texas power grid is managed by this company called well it's not a company it's an organization basically and i'm not an expert on it by any means but from my understanding from this hillbilly's understanding texas has produces all of their own power in state they don't bring any power in from across other state lines very limited so if they do very limited factory a percentage of it so what happened in short texas opted to do this so they were not federally regulated whatever that means i think they did this back uh gosh i don't know back in the late 90s or something i don't know for sure something i read online anyway when texas was having issues that was why we have issues you know when when they had this big ice storm and snow storm come in they started having problems with generators going down uh windmills of course governor abbott blamed it on windmills but they only account for like less than 10 of the power in texas anyway long story short it was a huge screw-up and a big mess and people died from it people died from it now the scary thing is you know not having powers you know that that sucks you know but you know it's not it's not something that you're that i'm exceedingly worried about except in this situation which brings my mind the scary thing is they said that we were minutes away from having a total grid meltdown of some sort in texas that's why they had to start uh pulling switches and turning off power because if they didn't our grid would have been destroyed in a lot of the capacity and a lot of texas or the majority texas would have been without power for months plural m-o-n-t-h-s months can you imagine how what that would have been like now i'm sure they would have done something brought in power across straight lines or whatever to keep essential services running but i mean think about it i mean really that's about as close to an emp type situation as you can get um no power think about it no gas at the gas stations no food at the grocery stores you know texas would have a huge migration of people leaving it if that happened you know thank gosh you know we got the property up in arkansas we could go to but anyway yeah it was a mess it was a mess you know i you know i know y'all up north uh you guys deal with these types of storms like that all the time i know there's a lot of people around the country that were without power a hell of a lot longer than you know 12 or 18 hours of where how long we were out rob if you're watching this i know you i think you all said you were down for over 30 plus hours but anyway yeah i mean and when you get a state where the vast majority of heating for the houses in the state of texas is electric now now we have gas because we're in the houston area but a lot of the more rural people stuff they heat their houses solely by electric and when you take away their electric you ain't got no heat and that's the problem you know a lot of times people have backup heat in other places like wood stoves pellet stoves oil heat and things like that up north but yeah it was anyway it was a mess it was a big mess so what did we learn from this well you all know that i've always been somewhat of a half-ass excuse my language i don't know if i could say that half-ass prepper of some sort so you know with covet happening last year and this little incident with the ice storm uh preppers rejoice folks my wife of over 20 years is finally seeing the advantages you know the stuff where she used to roll her eyes on when i say hey you know i'm gonna buy a few more cases of water to keep around or i'm buying this or buying that sorry my watch is smarter than me sometimes trying to talk to me but anyway i'm she's finally seen the justification from this and my my wife is coming to me and saying hey you know what we really should get uh this second generator i was looking at or we really we really should get you know some more mres or uh cases of water to keep around stuff like that it makes sense i mean this this just just this little incident shows you kind of how fragile our infrastructure is here in the states and that's something if uh if you guys have read any of the the prepper fictional stories and stuff like that that's something they attacked in some of those stories you know is go after the power grid because if you you take down the power grid imagine you know how many how how far back we'd roll the clock here in the states and try to survive it would be chaos if y'all have never read it check out and this is this is a good fictional story it's called lights out and back in the day a guy posted it i think it was on frugal squirrels which is uh like a prepper's forum i'm i've been a long-time member of it but it's an interesting read and it's not i'll be the first to tell you it's not very well written the guy who wrote it was just an amateur he was writing this and he would post section sections of it on the um on the forums as he completed it but somewhere out there there's a pdf compilation of his book now and i can't remember his name but i will post it right down here it's called lights out and this is the guy who wrote it but it's basically a story that centers around a suburb of san antonio and then there's an emp and it's about what happens in the subsequent months with no electricity pulled in the states now do this if you read it it is available on amazon you can buy it in the kindle version uh like an ebook version it's not very expensive it's less than 10 bucks but if you can buy that to support the author of it okay but if you can find the original unedited version which there used to be pdf running around out there somewhere of it read that instead because the edited version that's on amazon they kind of cleaned up some of the uh the writing on it and so forth but they took out a lot of the details that interest us preppers you know instead of instead of like in the original version he says well you know uh we we picked up a glock 17 for my daughter samantha to carry in the in the edited version on amazon it's like well we picked up an extra handgun for our daughter to carry things like that i i don't know why they did that but anyway i guess whoever saw to be that they published it did something along the lines of that but anyway interesting read but i tell you that to tell you this this is a good opportunity to to to sit back and see what happened and trying to kind of make some preparations at home i've got a little just a little 2000 watt inverter generator well it's actually like 1600 running 2000 watt output and let me tell you that thing saved the day this time around you can get those for 3.99 at sam's an ai power version there's a lot of them out there between 400 to 500 bucks and they're all pretty much the same now i opted for the one that was like 499 from costco that has a yamaha motor in it and actually a few days ago i ordered a second one the thought process being i can parallel those two together and get 3200 running watts versus 1600 and then run a lot more stuff with it my other point of reasoning behind having two of them was if one breaks down i always have one generator to carry us through but our house was a mess during this electric down because you know i would run the generator outside the whole time the power was down have extension cords running lunch of the freezer one to the fridge the fish tank always had to be plugged in things like that now i will say with that 1600 watt one in the extension cord i had running to the freezer the freezer was not starting as well as it should i don't think it was starting the compressor i hope i didn't screw it up actually but it seems to be running fine now that the power is back on but that freezer we had to repair it just when code started and they put a heck of a compressor set up in it and i guess that thing must draw a lot of watts starting out so i'm hoping when i get this new one paralleling together it should start it no problem have a generator on hand is what i'm getting at because they're very handy to have the inverter ones your neighbors will thank you because they're a lot quieter plus you can plug in sensitive electronics because they have a lot cleaner sine wave excuse me i got a frog in my throat have gas on hand another biggie i keep i generally have around between 20 and 25 gallons of gas on hand at all times um i like to use the eagle brand gas cans you can get them on amazon generally about 30 bucks you can buy them at tc tsc different places like that as well check the amazon amazon's not always cheapest on those sometimes you can get them cheaper at tsc and sometimes amazon has them cheaper but i like the heavy metal gas cans and i will buy gas for those once a year and i always get ethanol free gas which you have i have to drive up to the local buckies to get the ethanol free gas and then i add some of the startron blue enzyme treatment to it i'll post in a picture of the eagle gas cans here let you guys look at it for a second then here's the star tron fuel treatment here and generally like i said i i try to swap out that gas at least once a year in those and what i do is when the year is coming up like at the 10-month mark i'll let my truck run empty and i fill up my truck from those gas cans and then the very same day i'll drive and refill them at bucky so so bo decided to interrupt me he likes to sit up here in this window of my den looking out over the cul-de-sac in the neighborhood and then he lets me know whenever someone decides to god forbid open door or go walking down the street with someone you got to love him baby bo well randall what are you doing all right so sorry about that had a dog distraction uh i think he's quieted down somewhat but have gas for your generator have a generator that's the two pieces of advice i can give you for a power outage another thing is have a lot of water on hand in your house and have a lot of non-perishable food on hand i'm not saying you have to go out and spend all these big bucks for stuff you know think about it you can buy a case of water at sam's or walmart for what for four dollars maybe something like that the sam's choice or whatever um what's investing let's say if you want to get 10 cases of water to stick on hand what's investing 40 bucks for your potential livelihood if you can't have water for a few weeks i mean it's crazy not to do that not to have some water in hand if you have the room do it that's one thing people don't think about often is you know what you know like i always get water i just turn on the faucet or something well guess what it's not always the case we just came out of our boil water order uh yesterday i think it's monday yeah yesterday they lifted the order and there were people in my neighborhood that didn't have any water they didn't have the power to to boil it and they didn't have any bottled water on at home i mean anyway cheap investment for water buy you like 10 cases of water i i usually try to keep anywhere between six and eight cases of water on hand uh i'd like to keep ten but mine is a space consideration uh my wife i think is starting to see the the validity of having water on and for emergencies like this so maybe i'll be able to talk under taking up some more space in one of the closets or something for some water non-perishable food you don't have to go out and get mres and stuff like this you know they're expensive freeze-dried meals they're expensive they're great because they last forever but guess what it takes water to activate those and you have to have a heat source to really enjoy it but you know with that said yeah i've got some freeze-dried meals but a lot of my staples are in canned goods you know you can go to sam's and get a case of chicken noodle soup for like eight or nine bucks for 12 cans you know the same concept buy you some high protein foods canned goods like beans and soups and whatnot and keep them on hand you know keep them somewhere in a cool dry place keep them on hand for emergencies because you never you never know uh and another thing is on those canned goods you know they always had that nowadays they have a best buy date on canned goods you know i'm not saying do this at your own risk but everybody knows you can eat them past those best buy dates someone tell my wife that please but canned goods the number one thing for canned goods is smell it when you open it smell it if it doesn't smell right don't eat it but anyway again so what i'm saying is for as far as the food and waterfront you know a guy can go out or a lady or a family however you want to refer to it could go out and spend 150 bucks and have preparations of food for their family for a couple of weeks it's just a matter of getting off your butt and going out there and doing it so let me tell you don't don't delay because every once in a while mother nature likes to flex her muscles at us and she did it in texas last week she could do it somewhere else next week it could be in the form of a tornado could be in the form of an earthquake could be in the form of a hurricane who knows what she's going to throw at us but you never freaking know and not to mention mother nature you know we always have the bad nature types in the world that can cause you know some sort of catastrophe so that's what basically i wanted to do in this video is just to let you know you know what hey it sucks not to be without power it sucks not to be without to be without water uh you know but hey you can get past it if you are prepared and and preparation to me is the same as it all added you know an ounce of prevention sure does defeat a pound of cure further down the road so i hope everybody that watches my videos i know i know there's at least two or three of you guys that watch them pretty pretty regularly so i hope you guys haven't been impacted too bad by this this storm i hope we've learned some lessons from it i know i've learned a few things a few tweaks on prep signing you do around the house and there are plenty of other subjects besides water and food but those are the two things you got to have water and food other tidbits i can throw out here from the last week always have batteries on hand always have some electric lanterns on hand for those batteries those little yuko candle lanterns you guys see my video on i'm sure if not this is what they look like they're little yuko candle lanterns like a single one and a triple one those things are awesome when the power is out and especially when it's cold and the heat is out because those actually put a little bit of heat into the air now it's only a candle but when it heats up those little metal reflectors on top it does help you can tell a difference i can vouch for sure and say you can tell the difference when you have one or two of those burning in the room you're in and your your power is out and it's cold outside those are a great item to have just regular candles are great make sure one thing i didn't have i had a whole box of emergency candles i bought at ikea of all places good candles i didn't have a single candle holder around the house that holds the tapered candlesticks something i never thought of and i had this whole box of candles which the only way i could use them was to try to melt the wax and stick it on a plate or something and that works okay but it's a lot safer if you get some type of a holder to put them in have all that stuff together in one spot you know when when our electricity went out you know i have camping lanterns and flashlights scattered all over the place so of course it was easy for me to find one but i'm going to tell you from moving forward i'm going to keep all that in a centralized location get me a big plastic storage bin and have all my lanterns and extra lanterns and flashlights in that storage bin little things like that are things you can do to make it easier on yourself when these preps come so i'm sure there's plenty more but i've rambled enough for this video i'm probably close to the 20 minute mark if not over and i don't want to continue to sit here and bore y'all so again i hope you all are safe uh you know take some of some of my advice on this you know keep keep some gas on hand if you have a generator if you don't have a generator get your generator it don't have to be a fancy one hell you can go out and find a used open frame construction generator probably for a couple hundred bucks or trade forward or whatever have a generator on hand get you some water on hand have some cases of water that should be the amount should be dependent upon how many people you have living at your home and get you some non-perishable foods to have around as well and last tip if you have canned goods make sure you have a can opener that is a manual can opener everybody's got a swiss army knife or whatever say oh i can open the cans with this well you know what you can but go to amazon or wherever spend you about seven or eight bucks and get you a swing away manual can opener because you know those electric can openers are great but when your electricity is down and you're not running your generator they don't work all right y'all be safe out there thanks for watching this video and as always please like comment and subscribe we'll speak to you soon

Channel: Hillbilly Musings

Views: 2,706

Rating: 4.9047618 out of 5

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Id: 0Jp5uvAM_go

Length: 20min 1sec (1201 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 22 2021