First must confess that I myself did not set proper priorities since I meant to do this at least a year (if not more ago) . No excuse, Sir.

While some might argue that this topic is not appropriate for our Class list, I would suggest that unless you are alive, you can't be around to discuss other *more appropriate* topics, so keeping your ass alive is germane to the intent of our Class list items.

Message is in two parts. This first part is about affordable and effective (as in life saving) home shelter addition to any home in tornado alley or hurricane country but far enough back from any body of water for protection from storm surge. This would be essentially the entire East Coast and of course the Gulf.

Second part, immediately following, is about an innovative version of a *home generator* which would pertain to anyone in storm shelter areas above noted, plus anyone in northern tier states or midwest where an ice storm could shut down regional power for weeks, and/or earthquake country where the same widespread power outage could last for even longer than mere weeks--or the current flooding in northeast could be a power outage in many areas.

Storm Shelter

One does not need a luxury basement room for storm shelter, and neither a dank unpleasant hole. What is needed for tornado protection (to include folks in hurricane country with those nasty spin-off tornados) is some place where storm driven debris does not destroy your space and you inside it. Texas Tech in Lubbock has a storm research group that built a *cannon* which fires 2x4s at tornadic speeds against various types of standard residential house construction. Those projos blast right through all conventional styles and materials. Brick, stud wall, stud wall with stone or brick facade, cinder block, ordinary concrete block, even stone. That's the bad news. The good news is that the same research group has developed and proof tested a style of construction for a successful *tornado protection safe room* addition to virtually any style of house.

I have a hard copy of their results. It is a booklet entitled FEMA Publication 320 Taking Shelter From the Storm -- Building a Safe Room Inside your House. My copy is dated August 99. There may have been an up date showing even better construction ideas. I have seen a weather channel short item that mentioned a this Texas Tech project and a combination of multi layer plywood and sheet steel but they didn't say how many layers of what thickness plywood or what thickness of steel. You might just google and web surf the Texas TechTornado Research project in what ever word combinations light your research fire. But for a quick and simple solution google on "Taking Shelter from the storm" + FEMA 320

You will get 626 hits and the first few are the bingo winners. PDF format copies of the booklet.Explains how to fort up one corner of a basement, for those fortunate enough to have a suitable basement. Better yet, it also explains how to build a safe room in homes without basements.

Main thing is that it explains how to add a walk-in closet to *a room*, with a slab on grade floor (tied to building slab or to building formation so the entire closet can't be picked up by tornado), concrete block--not cinder block, no, no, way too weak--walls with re-bar tied into the floor slab *and then the block cavities filled* with concrete plus a concrete slab with rebar ceiling also tied to the walls with rebar. Rough dimensions would be three or four feet deep and 10 or 12 feet wide. Could be bigger but keep it to the shallow depth so that slab ceiling is easy to support when poured. There is no expensive, heavy and difficult to hang/hinge storm proof door. Door protection is simply a segment of the same type wall, sitting out in the room, made wider 18" wider than the doorway on both sides and centered on the door opening--far enough from the door, say 18" to 24" or so, to allow person to pass through between blocker wall and actual wall, then turn to enter by the doorway; but still close enough to the door so that an approaching projo on an angle can't go through the gap and hit anyone back in the two outer end portions of the closet. (Makes perhaps more sense if you draw a sketch of the closet to scale, showing door opening and the door blocker wall, then draw trajectory of various angle projos.)

During normal times the addition is simply an additional (welcome) walk-in closet space, with a very small amount of that additional storage space taken up by emergency supplies such as a first aid kit, drinking water, hand crank radio and hand crank flashlight, family heirloom items, photo albums, birth certificates and other vital personal papers. (These all in a sturdy cabinet with a securely fastened door and the entire cabinet well fastened to the wall.)

Come time for tornado alert, just go into the closet, move to the far end (away from the door) and hunker down till it blows over. Take a camping mattress and sleep on the floor or move in chairs and a good book. (Better yet, take *The Good Book*) If you have a bedroom big enough to give up enough space for this closet to be built inside, that is fine. If not, add the closet outside with the door cut through existing wall. Must be built on concrete slab that is itself tied to the building slab or building foundation walls. Don't use existing wall *normal* construction for any of this space; it must have all four walls, the *door blocker* wall that sits in front of the doorway, and the ceiling all of tied together reinforced concrete at least 8 inches thick. Ceiling slab must also cover space between closet and door blocker wall.

Structural walls made of CMU (Concrete Masonry Unit is the trade name for concrete blocks), when built with re-bar and the block cavities of each course completely filled with concrete as the wall is laid up, will cure into a wall as just sturdy and with essentially all the strength parameters of a solid concrete wall. Just a lot less expensive to build since the CMU replace the more expensive form work. Such a wall has been proven to stop all sorts of tornado equivalent speed projos (not just 2 x 4s) from that Texas Tech cannon.

Exterior of the shelter addition is finished to taste, as time and finances allow, for matching or blending in with home exterior. Exposed face (or both faces) of the door blocker wall painted to match inside room wall, add suitable decorations to taste, cover with pictures (extra copies, please) of family or whatever decor might seem attractive. Just nothing on the inside face of such material as might become a dangerous projo at tornadic velocities. Not uncommon to find piece of ordinary wheat straw driven into or even through a tree by tornado, so keep the inside face clear.

Cost is very modest compared to all other sorts of shelter plans for add on, or even when those other systems might be included with original construction of a new home or even any routine addition. Shelter is useful closet space at all times and a life saver at that critical time. Heck of a deal, and a screaming good price bargain at even a much greater dollar amount. FEMA Pub 320 has pictures (as in actual post strike photos) of entire neighborhoods with nothing but bare slabs remaining and one of these closet shelters still secure on one of those slabs. Entire neighborhood gone, blown away, but this closet still in place, with family having remained fully secure inside. Powerful closing argument in any discussion/debate/presentation.

I know everyone has lots of demands on all their resources, and on their time, but this seems to be valid insurance for future enjoyment of all those other things, and meeting all those other demands, for folks living in that geographic version of harm's way. Since tornado season has started and hurricane season is not that far off, now is the time for me to quit putting off this message.

Waiting to think about it some more, having more important things to do with your time or finances, procrastinating, or just ignoring the problem will be of little assistance once the storm hits. Apologize for not sending to our Class list long time ago. Permission granted for forwarding to any of your friends/family who might be in harm's way (whether you hate what you think you perceive to be my political views or not).

Sincerely recommend you obtain and study FEMA Pub 320. Validity of its testimony is not in any way impeached by the bad press FEMA got after Katrina.

Follow on to the storm shelter message.

Serious problem in any disaster situation (if one survives the storm or quake or fire or whatever), is that our homes are heavily dependent on electricity. Refrigeration and keeping frozen food from thaw-caused spoilage all at once (before one can consume by eating over several months), use of a microwave or electric stove/hot plate to cook and also to boil/purify drinking water, posting political rants or tactical/strategic insights on the Class list--all these life essential activities demand electricity.

When storm approaches, many rush out and buy Home Depot or Ace Hardware (or worse yet, Joe's Junkyard/Fly by Night Crooked Enterprises, Inc) home generator. How big a generator do you need? Then comes the really challenging parts.

Where to put it when you need to run it? Where to store it during normal times? How to hook it up? Where to store fuel? How much fuel to store? How to store fuel? How to get more fuel if fuel is even available in your area after the (whatever) hits?  Generator in the driveway or back yard attracts attention and possible theft by clown who neglected to get own in advance. Shooting clown who is stealing your generator causes police to consider that you are not an upstanding citizen, since the mere theft of a generator worth only $XX (fill in the line of demarcation between petty and grand theft in your locale but in either case, you can't shoot 'em just for theft). Running in garage still creates noise, plus carbon mono threat in house. Running it in garage or next to house under eaves (too close to wall) risks having hot exhaust gases ignite wall and burn the place down. (Don't laugh--that happens many times after every hurricane, just doesn't always make national news.)

Trying to refuel a portable generator when engine parts and cheesy baby bird (read that to mean cheep cheep cheep) muffler are super hot risks an immediate fire/explosion of remaining gas in the container from which you were just starting to pour and *how long a wait is long enough to cool it down enough to refuel it safely* is an interesting roll of the dice. After you get your ass half barbecued in a refueling accidental fire, your family has to both do without your assistance around the homestead (whatever help that might or might not have been) plus have the additional hassle of having you in a hospital burn unit at some significant distance away from home (few of us live conveniently close to a hospital with a burn unit). All of these are not good outcomes. Not good at all.

Neither is trying to get by without refrigeration, watching (smelling) the frozen food in your freezer go bad faster than you can eat it, getting sick from drinking bad water because of no means to boil it for a guarandamnteed killing of all the bothersome bugs and whatever. Again, not good at all.

There is a better way. Full disclosure, these people do not even know that I exist, let alone have me on their payroll or even offer me a discount if I pass info and sing some praises about their product. Company name in a minute. First some broad brush generalities. Small generator engines are inefficient, noisy and produce awful fumes. Plus the refueling problems above mentioned. You have in your driveway or garage a much more efficient engine, with a much bigger fuel tank, which can be refueled very safely (you practice that skill more often than you care to even think about, let alone admit). Said engine runs very quietly, attracts little attention on the basis of not being unusual, and with a tiny fractional chunk of additional careful thought-directed (as opposed to normal knee-jerk) effort on your part, can be made in many cases to run while attracting essentially no attention at all.

Ta Daaa. Behold the remarkable internal combustie in your car or truck. Your solution to the generator problems above identified and a bunch more I have not bothered to paint with a gloomy brush.The company is auragen  Go find them on the web.

Their product is an alternator that fits under the hood of your vehicle, runs all the functions that a normal automotive device of that nature ordinarily performs, plus delivers computer grade additional power for emergency vehicles such as ambulances and cop cars. Stop drooling geeks, the power and its means of delivery are more important than your computer stuff fix to preclude painful withdrawal symptoms. They also claim on the web site to sell to the military but these days it is hard to find many products which are not claimed on manufacturer's web sites to be supporting the troops.

Installation and purchase may or may not be more or less expensive than the ground mounted home generator you might be considering now or for which you might be backed into the corner of paying way awful inflated prices after the (whatever) hits. But when installed in advance, you is comfortubbbbliiiee in hog heaven for juice when the rest of your area is in suffering of lack thereof.

Keeping the vehicle gas tank full/topped off often is a good habit some of us should remember from Germany duty. It is a simple measure (so simple even a caveman could do it apologies to that corny Geico TV ad) to vastly increase the run time of your car in a generator only mode. First place, at idle (at which speed various models of this puppy pump out enough power for judicious home functioning all day long) virtually any car will run many, many hours. Running it only for a short while during accomplishment of specific essential tasks, can extend that idle run time to several days on one tank of gas.

Second place is that one can acquire at modest cost now (it will seem like an outrageously sinful good deal bargain price when the crunch later cometh) several five gallon gas cans, which are well designed, well made and fully capable of storing gasoline safely, as well we all remember. X, or XX gas cans (number determined by your common sense or storm threat paranoia or a clever combination of the two) in an unobtrusive back yard storage facility, small shed where garden tools live or so on, are no risk of burning down the house nor of attracting attention.

They can be kept, all full, all the time, and rotated such that the gasoline in any one of them never sits around long enough to go bad, and you don't need to goof around with any fuel additives for long term storage cause it will never store long term.

Each time your routine driving habits get your vehicle gas tank down to have about five gallons of waste space (read than to mean less than full, as in partially empty) you fill the tank with one, just one, of these waiting, eager to serve, five gallon beauties. Next chance you get, you fill said empty five gallon can at the local big oil rip off station, take it home and put it at the back end of the *rotation for refilling* sequence. Even old fart Infantry folks can grasp the concept and move the full cans up one at a time so that the former number two takes over first place and so forth. Now you always have a vehicle gas tank that is full or very nearly full, and you have *not going stagnant* storage of whatever amount of fuel you think necessary.

Notice how the frequent refilling gives you a smart slip, not a sick slip, excuse from having to worry about going to fill up your gas tank when there are long lines either caused by or causing a gas shortage. You validated that course and are exempt from the hassle.

If you want to be a really well prepared person (or a horrible slob, depending on the extent to which you buy into all the greenie propaganda), make that vehicle a pickup truck with dual gas tanks installed. One can hire a certified master electrician or properly credentialed electrical contractor (now, in advance of all the crunch) to wire your house with what is known as a transfer switch. That throws power in your home from your local utility (which is no longer supplying power because of the *whatever* and its power lines are down) to your home generator. That is, as we said at Fort Benning School for Wayward Boys, *a* solution. It is not a bad solution, but not necessarily the best solution. You can have those same talented and properly trained/credentialed folks add an emergency power panel to your existing electrical system with the same transfer switch to let your local home operation take over, except now it only supplies power to the emergency panel. There are only very few, carefully selected circuits on that panel, having been moved from the main panel to the emergency panel, so that you can be certain to stretch your resources by not allowing *non essential* use of electricity when things are at this high level of unpleasantness.

The freezer receptacle needs to be on this emergency panel. The kitchen wall sockets which feed the refrig and the microwave are essential. At least one receptacle in the living room or family room so you can watch TV news and weather report, plus a receptacle (can be the same as TV or Microwave or independent) at which one can recharge cell phones. Counter lights in the kitchen and one bathroom, and wall receptacles in the hallway between bedroom, bathroom and kitchen. Garage door opener. Everything else in the kitchen is not and everything in the rest of the house is not. Not what? sez you. Glad you asked, sez I. Not on the emergency electrical panel and thus not on the emergency system.

You use the little trickle charge night lights for all the hallway routes from bedrooms to bathroom to kitchen. Use kitchen counter lights (with curtains closed) for cooking illumination or use the hand crank flashlights. Watch TV news or weather with the curtains closed. No need to advertise to your neighbors or roaming gangs that you have electricity and thus are an attractive target for theft.

Your freezer can run essentially forever (OK for several years) if you open it only long enough to get out needed food items, then close it quickly. Plug in the freezer once a day and run for an hour (less often if you transfer a few days worth of food to the small freezer in the fridge). Great incentive to finally get around to organizing the freezer contents so that you can actually find what you are looking for without moving half the items stored there.

Run the fridge for an hour or two each day, and lean on the whole family to decide what they want from the fridge before they open the door, not just stand there with the door open while they space out their decision making process.  But do not open the fridge while you are using the microwave to cook or boil drinking/dishwashing water, or watching news or weather, with the volume turned way down of course. Not trash TV, being still generated elsewhere and inflicted on your now depressed area by satellite. Get some good books, and a few of those wonderful hand crank wind up or shake -to-activate flashlights. You don't need trash TV. Kids will live without their MTV. Get over it and be grateful you are alive and eating, kid, not whining about missing MTV.

Where is the vehicle all this time? Safely concealed in the garage, where it is out of sight and out of mind for passing folks who truly have no *need to know* that you have enough gas to run your vehicle, and then wonder what else you might have that they deserve more than you do. Rig an exhaust hose extension using Ace Hardware aluminum dryer vent hose, water pump hose clamps and a wall vent similar to those for a clothes dryer. Either run a long vent hose or back the vehicle in to the garage so that the exhaust goes out in the back yard, away from the street and passersby. Run your car, on idle (or enough extra above just idle speed to discern that your battery is staying goosed up for future starting), when you are consuming power inside, on an intentional schedule of use. Then shut the car off to save fuel, even though you have quite a bit available.

If and when the gas stations have supplies to sell (remember, all their underground tanks go off line when there is no juice to run the pumps, so they might as well be out of gas), then you can unhook the exhaust line, open your garage door long enough to drive out (remember, you put the garage door opener on the emergency panel), close the garage door and then unhook the power cable from your vehicle to the transfer switch. This means the power cable has to be long enough for you to drive out in the driveway and close the garage door before you unhook the power cable. Then you drive to fill up your gas tank (have the empty cans available if there is enough gas and you will not be assaulted or arrested for hoarding) and go home to the relative comfort of having essential power for your survival needs.

If you want to do this the really inexpensive way, disconnect the garage door opener and figure out a way to open and close that door without juice. Skip the expense and effort of getting an emergency panel with specific circuits on it. Run extension cords from vehicle (auragen has some receptacles) to the freezer, the frige, the microwave and only plug in what your need to operate at that time. Unplug the fridge or microwave when you need to watch TV news or recharge your cell phone and use that extension cord to supply the juice.

All moving around at night or cooking prep at night is done by hand crank flashlights. Everything else stays about the same.  What is the importance of the *low profile* approach? Think about this angle.  This is the proverbial *Ant and the Grasshopper* story, writ large and in real time for all of us these days. Do nothing, keep your head in the sand, and pretend everything is, and will continue to be just fine. Folks such as those I call, muttering quietly under my breath, the hunkdorry-ists. They think there will always be food on the grocery store shelves, power from the utility company, gas at the corner station plus law and order in their streets. (That last one is the kicker in this situation.)

Yet you cannot possibly stockpile enough *stuff* or build a big enough shelter, for all who will come flocking around when disaster strikes and all the unprepared suddenly decide they *deserve* and they have *a right* to enjoy the fruits of that same level of preparedness which you have scrimped and saved and worked hard to provide for your family.

Laws are written by folks with their heads in the sand, pretending there will always be peace and quiet with everyone behaving in a civilized manner. Laws about what a homeowner can and cannot do to protect his or her property--when written in the bliss of peace and tranquility envisioned by the hunky dorry-ists and their elected legislators of a similar mindset--do not adequately address the conditions of lawlessness that erupt after a disaster. Katrina saw armed gangs in the streets, taking occasional breaks from their looting to shoot at assistance givers and rescue helicopters. Some gangs were local, some were reported as having come in from Miami and elsewhere for the ripe pickings. Hospitals were looted at gun point and the nurses gang raped. The *entirely predictable* response of the local city authorities was to announce the confiscation of all civilian firearms, but no meaningful effort to disarm the gangs.

The liberal mindset insists that government is and must be the solution, and the only solution. No matter what the problem might be. All must conform. Individual actions and initiative make waves and cannot be predictably controlled, so those must be eliminated in favor of *the gummint agencies* doing all that and everything else besides. Thus the theory of *call 911* as the only acceptable means of defense; firearms must be removed from the citizen and the police will handle everything.  Except the police cannot and will not be everywhere at once; in a crisis, the citizens are on their own for quite some time until the police can respond to each and every call. Answering YYY % of calls in XXX time frame under difficult and trying conditions can be spun to look fairly decent after the fact when the citizens' commission is investigating. But if you are not one of those YYY % or if XXX is not soon enough, you are still holding the bag.

Laws will not be written with this in mind and homeowners will still be exposed to application of laws written by the tranquility minded when some future crisis swirls around them and their families.

When law and order breaks down in a post disaster situation--and there will be more hurricanes even if the liberals and environmentalists rise up en masse and banish the evil conservatives while enacting measures more dramatic and restrictive than Kyoto ever pretended to require--there will be a breakdown in the food delivery to grocery stores, and power from the utility company, and gas supplies at the corner station. The result will be looting by the unprepared.

That was why I opted to recommend the *keep a low profile* course of action.

Will problems caused by natural disasters actually happen?  Think about this. Global warming and driving SUVs does not cause earthquakes.  Hurricane numbers, frequency, and magnitude last season were the worst since back in the early 1930s. Flooding in New England is the worst in 70 years. 1930s???? 70 years ago?? George Bush Senior was only in late grade school then, and Cheney was not yet born let alone former CEO of Halliburton, so those long ago *comparative* rounds of hurricanes and flood levels just might not have been the demonstrable true-believer fault of the present administration or evil capitalism or SUV's and greenhouse gasses.

Sound electrical engineering and code compliance will forbid the extension cord routine. That is because over time, folks walk on them enough to wear a raw spot in the insulation, cause a short and start a fire. Yours won't be there for that long a duration, and will be purchased in lengths sufficient to hang up high over non insulation damaging supports, where they won't be walked on, and besides, there won't be many code inspectors roaming about during this situation. Am presupposing you have sense enough to buy heavy duty, at least #12 conductor, three wire three prong extension cords in proper lengths so that you don't have to make a stuck on stupid collection of many short ones cobbled together all over the house.

How big an auragen do you need for your house? Come on folks, this is really not rocket science. Read the data plate on the fridge, microwave etc; volts times amps equals watts and you can figure this out by yourselves. This is from a goat, and just a grunt at that, so I am sure all you genius upper section studs can vastly improve on my crude offering, but won't do you much good unless you get off your butts and get all these things done (my dumb idea ones and your brilliant idea ones) before the crunch comes.

Again, permission to forward, if and as you see fit. Hope this can be of use to your and yours.

Higinbotham