Real Estate Broker Eric Andrews discusses Hurricane Florence and how to prepare for her in Pittsboro and Chatham County. Eric was in NC for Hugo and Fran as well.
Speaker 1: What’s the best way to prepare for a hurricane in Chatham county?
Speaker 2: In Chatham county? Well, I was lucky enough to be here for, for Fran several years ago. It was while I was teaching at Northwood. This storm that’s allegedly coming now, Florence, is probably stronger than Fran. Coming up the same track to trajectory. I was also lucky enough to be in Charlotte for Hugo, and that was a strong storm. The difference between Hugo and Fran. When Hugo happened, I was hiding in a closet, worried that the house was going to come down. When Fran came, I was on my back porch having a beer, watching it. It was much different. A lot of trees down in Fran and some areas were without power for a week to 10 days, which was a big to do. One of the main things people need to know in Chatham County.
This seems so obvious, but people really forget is that your well doesn’t work without power. So you get like 12 to 15 seconds of water out of your sink. You’ll get to flush each commode once or twice and everything. From then on it gets kind of tough. They suggest filling up bathtubs ahead of time. At least you could use that water to continue to flush your commodes. Some people in Chatham county need to worry about septic systems that have electronic pumps. So you’re certainly going to be fine for several flushes, but after a while, it can definitely get bad. A lot of people have generators, which generators are great. Probably not going to be able to run your whole house or very few people can run their whole house off of generators. We want to make sure that people don’t put them in their garage and get carbon monoxide poisoning.
One of the biggest things you can do to prepare. Make sure the chainsaw is sharpened, because you’re going to use it. A lot of trees down. Chainsaws are sharp and cut things. I know that seems obvious, but there’s so many people that get injured by chainsaws afterwards. We might have some flooding, that’s possible. There’s all these cell phone chargers and battery packs that you can buy right now ahead of time. We can actually do the self winding cell phone charger. I think we’re much more dependent on our cell phones. This go around than we were the last time we had a hurricane in a storm.
One of the best ideas I heard was put a coin in water on top of a frozen Tupperware. So freeze Tupperware, put a coin on top of it and then put that in your freezer. If that coin goes to the bottom, chances are your food is bad. So when the power comes back on, we don’t want people eating bad food and getting sick. So a lot of grilling going to happen. A lot of people are going to be grilling a bunch, when the power goes out. You got to be careful to grill. Same thing, carbon monoxide. You got to be careful of candles. I would definitely try to use flashlights and batteries. One of the big things is with the storm in Puerto Rico, I guess like 64 people passed from the storm, but then 2,700 people passed because the traffic lights were out and accidents. People have heart attacks with the chainsaw.
There’s just a lot of things that can happen afterwards, whatever. So we have a lot of good people here. You see the best qualities come out of people. I think everybody helps out everybody, neighbors help out neighbors. This is just the time to chill and it’s like the best excuse in the world to not have to go to work, not have to do anything, and just relax. It sucks to not have power and with a storm like this, we probably could be without power for a week or more, but it’s not all that bad. Take the opportunity to bond with your family.
