TORNADOES In the Ozark's...How WE Prepare!

[Music] hey everybody welcome back to the homestead my name is Kevin while we're expecting some bad storms in the Ozarks tonight and that made me start thinking about tornado season as much as I hate to admit it it's here it's gonna be starting up real soon so today I'm getting our storm shelter ready for the season every year I like to go through everything that we keep down there make any improvements and just make sure that things are all ready so when we need to go down there we're ready to go we don't have to think about what to take so today I'm going to show you what we have down there what we keep in the house to take with us when we need to go down and just kind of our plan for when bad weather strikes you know one of the top questions we get either emailed to us or asking comments is about the weather here in the Ozarks and specifically about tornadoes well in the in the county that we live in since we've lived here which is now three years we've had a lot of tornado warnings but we have not had any actual tornadoes touch down which is great the surrounding counties they'll have had some while we've been here so I don't know if we've just got lucky or if this county just has less in general but we have not had an actual tornado since we've been here but we do get a lot of warnings I think the first year we were here we had something like 11 or 12 tornado warnings that during that summer last year we only had maybe four or five but still that's that's enough to you know make it worthwhile to be prepared so today I'm going to show you exactly what we have and what we take down into the shelter with us there's a couple things that I always like to have either near the front door or at least ready to go when we know that bad weather is about to come the first thing is my emergency weather radio to be honest this is just one that I picked up at a garage sale a few years ago but it works great and this is much more reliable than a cell phone or something like that during really bad weather you can always get a weather forecast the second thing is to have a nice flashlight this is an LED flashlight that one charged up will laughs I think about 16 hours on a single charge so that's really nice I use this all the time for everything around the homestead but especially during storm season so the last thing that I always like to have handy is our generator now this is something that we got new last summer this is called the Kodiak lithium ion generator by energy this is actually a solar-powered generator so it's got a lithium ion battery inside and then it can hook to solar panels to charge now you can also charge it with a wall plug which is great which is what I do most of the time but I do have two solar panels for it as well so if the power is out for an extended amount of time we can charge this thing back up now originally we purchased this as a as an energy source for our off-grid guest cabin that we have on the property but since that time we've actually found out that we use this for a lot of different things one of the main things that we like to use it for is when there's really bad electrical storms the wiring in our house is older and we get a lot of lightning around here so a lot of times we unplug electronics when we know there's gonna be bad storms so what we'll do is we'll unplug the TV from the wall but we'll plug it into here so we can continue to watch weather reports and get updates on how things are going and this has worked really really well for that there was even a time when in the middle of night our power went out and I just happen to have about 50 eggs in my incubator for the quail and I was actually able to run my incubator off of this until the power came back on which was really nice otherwise I may have lost all of those quail eggs so this we like to keep charged up whenever we know that there's going to be bad weather and we keep it near the front doors so if we get a tornado warning we can just grab it and take it down into the shelter with us so we can power some lights if we need to we can plug in our cellphones and have those charged up and it's just a really nice thing to have I'll link leave a link to it in the description if you guys want to check it out for yourself but it's a really nice tool to have for the homestead another thing that you can do with this is charge up your flashlights if you need to which is good if you are down there for any amount of time and you start to run out of light now this does come with some small LED lights that I'll show you when we get down in the storm shelter and this will actually power those lights I think for like five days or something ridiculous so it's it's a long time that you could have lights off of this and when you're done in the storm shelter it's so small and dark that it doesn't take a very big light to really light things up so let's go down and I'll show you inside of the shelter all right so the shelter that we have is rated to hold I believe seven to nine people I'll be honest the four of us down there is about as many people as I want to be in there with I don't know nine people that I want to be crammed that much into a shelter with but if we had to we could invite neighbors over and have them in there with us the shelter is a it's a solid concrete shelter it goes about five feet underground we bought this the very first summer that we moved to the Ozarks our house doesn't have a basement just a crawlspace and we knew that we really needed something to keep us safe during really bad storms so we have this installed the very first summer we were here it was by a company called Midwest storm shelters and they did an excellent job let's go down inside so we're down inside of the shelter you can see that there's plenty of room down here I'm five foot ten so this is probably about six three or six four maybe down here so unless you're really really tall which isn't a problem in our family I can tell you this is pretty comfortable down here really two vents down here which really supplies some good airflow but they don't let any rain down in we've never had rain coming in as we're down here which is really nice and there's also a screams on these vents that I do check on a regular basis but they keep the bugs and the snakes and birds and things like that out again we've really never had a problem occasionally you'll find a spider down here but nothing nothing much at all today it's really pretty nice down here so as far as seating you can see that we just you these camping chairs are they're fairly inexpensive I think we picked these up at Walmart for about six dollars a piece so it makes a real nice you know they're pretty comfortable they fold up small so if you do need to get them out of the way you can typically what we do is when we come down here we'll all get into our chair and then we'll take the generator if we need it and we'll set that on the stairs let me do that and then that keeps that pretty safe and then the first thing that we do is plug in the lights so the lights just plug in right to the generator and then we have a small LED in each corner and that provides plenty of light for while we're down here now what we do have certain items that we store down here that we leave down here all the time during storm season and we keep them in five-gallon buckets we do that because they keep them nice and dry even though we've never had a leak in the storm shelter can get fairly humid down here sometimes so we like to keep things that need to be protected in five-gallon buckets and there's another reason why we keep the buckets down here I'll show you that in a little while so let me show you what we keep in our bucket so we always keep one bucket with just trail mix that'll be four if we're down here for more than a few hours then you know sometimes especially the kids will want to snack and then I can just keep some canned like chicken and canned tuna and things like that we've never actually you've eaten stuff like that down here but my thought process is if we ever do to be down here for multiple days at least we'll have some sort some sort of protein while we're down here we could bring our hand palm canned goods down here but it's really safer to just have something that's canned again metal so it doesn't break in here we also keep some drips some cups and a can opener and then just a little first-aid kit some bandages some ibuprofen some benadryl and that's really about it as far as that goes we don't ever plan to be down here very long but if we are we do have the canned goods that I have in here and some additional canned goods over in the corner no that is a bucket we have a few additional kind of tool type items there and I both keep a pair of work gloves in here just in case when we do get out of here if there were tornado and say there was a lot of damage we need to start you know moving things we have some work glove I always keep a little folding saw for the same kind of reason if I need to cut some branches or something like that when we come out of the shelter some extra batteries for our weather radio some matches and lighters some potable water tablets I don't have some of the basics I don't feel the need to go overboard down here but we do want to be at least a little bit prepared and then we just keep some decks of cards and well in case we're done you're firm you know a longer period of time we can do something to keep us busy now when the kids were littler we would also have additional things coloring books and toys and things for them down in the shelter but now our kids are older they don't need to be entertained as much as they did when they were a little little kids it wouldn't be a bad idea to have some things that entertain them while you're down here as well so I wouldn't have to shut the door so you guys see just how much these two little LEDs light this up it's really comfortable down here you're not struggling to see for sure let me also show you the inside of the door so you can see how it works and the extra safety measures that are on there so that the wind doesn't blow it open so first of all the door has a really heavy-duty latch but then it also has these two additional locks that go in and basically these are so that if a really strong wind comes it can't pull the door open I'm not worried at all when we're down here I've never heard this door even rattle or anything now one thing I didn't mention as well is that we've talked to our neighbors and we have a plan in place with our neighbors and I suggest all of you do as well that if there were an actual tornado or a really severe storm with lots of damage that they should come down and check on us afterwards and we will do the same for them especially if we don't hear from each other within you know a 12 hours or so after the storm has gone just in case say a tree or something landed on top of this door we weren't able to get out someone knows that we're down here and they would come looking for us so you should have a plan in place like that with your neighbors especially when you're out in the country and it may be a long time before anybody else comes looking for you so there's quite a bit of room underneath these steps for storage and we store a lot under there I'm going to show you what we store under there the first thing is something that I'll admit we've never had to use and I hope we never have to use one door down here but that is a portable toilet just a toilet seat that fits onto a five-gallon bucket and if we absolutely have to we can use this I told you earlier there was a reason I'm the second reason why we store our things in 5-gallon buckets and that's because if me if we really needed to we would now have four toilets that we could fill up if we had to be down here for multiple days I hope you don't mind you want to sit on the toilet while we talk how we also keep a bag of wood shavings down here and that is to use inside of the toilet to help cover up anything that goes in there I also keep just one of these storage totes and that has additional canned goods in it and then another five-gallon bucket that's just full of toilet paper I also have fifteen gallons of drinking water that we keep down here and I do change these out periodically just to make sure that the water is staying fresh but to be honest because it stays dark and cool down here most the time the water stays really nice down here now I did one thing that I did add is some brackets up at the top here and I do have a store down here I'm not going to take it out right now but we have a curtain rod and a curtain that can hang across here so if someone does have to use the bathroom they have some privacy while they're doing that not a lot of privacy because things that go down here but a little bit of privacy at least one thing that I forgot to mention is that most of the time when we come down here we have quite a bit of warning we know that there storms coming so we'll be keeping an eye on the TV and we'll put additional things near the front door especially the kids we'll make sure that they have a blanket to bring along down because it can get pretty chilly down here when you're underground so they'll bring a blanket and you know a book or something like that we could really you know spend our entire lives trying to figure out every little thing to try to fit in here really our plan is just to have the basics down here and do the best that we can once we're down here I think we have most of the basics covered you do have limited space and you do still want to be able to move a little bit once you're down here so you really just want to have the basics food water or place to go to the bathroom a way to communicate with the outside world and light so let's head back outside and see if there's some storms coming so that's how we prepare for tornado season on the homestead I'd love to hear how you guys prepare if you have a shelter like this or if you have a basement what do you do to make sure that your family is going to be safe if you're enjoying our channel this is a great time to hit the subscribe button if you know someone who would benefit from this or enjoy it go ahead and share this don't forget to check us out on all of our social media including Instagram and Facebook and until next time thanks so much for stopping by the homestead take care and God bless

Channel: Living Traditions Homestead

Views: 1,880,530

Keywords: Living Traditions Homestead, Missouri, Ozark's, homesteading, Ozarks, self-sufficient, homesteaders, unjobbing, tornadoes, tornado season, storm shelter, preparedness, thunderstorms, lightening, tornado bunker, tornado shelter

Id: iHB93x5M2Cs

Length: 15min 46sec (946 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 30 2019