Sara:

You've been involved in many cleanup situations, personally and through your employment, so I thought you were the man to come on and talk about what happens after a storm. And I'd like to start on the personal level, at a micro level, and then build out from there. So, my podcast listeners should know who you are. But if they don't, go ahead and introduce yourself, and let's kind of jump into it.

Phil Rabalais

So I guess the short version is because Lord knows I could talk the ears off of Brass Monkey. You see, I am a 41-year-old husband and father. I've been kind of into prepping in some way or the other basically since I was a kid. Growing up on the Gulf Coast, we get chased around by hurricanes pretty much from birth. So, you learned the lessons of rice, beans, peanut butter, and bottled water very early. Because it's just a part of life down here to be ready to deal with an extended power. Footage and be prepared to deal with whatever mother nature's gonna throw in your lap because it's never a matter of if, it's when it's how long till the next time you all. Get hit, right? When I was 17 years old, I enlisted in the Louisiana National Guard, so I was on 9/11. I was at Fort. This is Virginia up in Newport News, and literally, they're in a break room in one of the hangars, watching the second plane hit the tower. So it wasn't until about the end of 2003. I got the call that my unit was going to deploy to Iraq. We went in for OIF 2, and we were there. Late January, early February of 2004 came home the very beginning of 2000 of February 2005. And, you know, Hurricane Katrina was right on the heels of that. So I was still in Louisa, National Guard, at the end of that August. We got hit by Hurricane Katrina down here in this area. I spent from the end of August until December 31 on orders with the state assisting in the relief effort.

Sara:

So, you got deployed as a member of the National Guard. Over to Iraq? Yes, interesting. OK.

Phil Rabalais

Yep. Well, I mean, for the build-up, numbers, and manpower they needed. I know that my unit went to Iraq; another unit that a bunch of friends of mine, an engineer battalion, went to Afghanistan. The DOD was not shy about tapping the National Guard and even the Reserve. Assets left and right, so there's all, there's a lot of us. Many of us aged 30 to 40 had a very interesting time in our teens and 20s in combat zones.

Sara:

Interesting. You and Chin are used to hurricane-type events. When I lived in Michigan, it was the winter events. Obviously, ice storms and things like that. That would take you out for extended periods. And then, in Cali, there are wildfire risks. So, I can tell you the rebuilding process is slow after a wildfire. Not just because it's devastating, but now, you're looking at rebuilding homes, and all the demand for supply goes up, demand for contractors goes up, demand for everything goes up. So you're just looking at really extending those times where? You're trying to put life back on track, and we've lost whole communities now.

This audience knows the basics, but if you guys have a couple of tips for just kind of unique things that you found, we talked this morning about the holes in your plan every time. It's a disaster scenario. You gotta get to test out what's going on, you know? So just some tips that people could really take away, as far as you know, things maybe they haven't thought about beyond what we usually talk about as far as your 72-hour food supply, your water supply, that kind of thing.

Phil Rabalais

Yeah, usually, when we're talking about post-natural disaster preparedness specifically, I don't draw distinctions between what kind of natural disaster we're talking about. Everybody has the exact basic needs. We all need food. We all need water. We all need shelter. If you don't have those three things. Bad things start happening very soon. What exactly we used to fulfill all those needs will be drastically altered by what type of scenario we're talking about in the event of a wildfire or a flood. Staying in your home is no longer an option. Your home is no longer a safe, secure source of shelter. You have to be able to pick up and move, and as a result, if those are the emergencies you're thinking about, you perhaps all have to be mobile.

On the flip side of things, if you're talking about hurricanes like hurricanes, by the grace of modern meteorology, we know those things are coming in within a margin of error. Several days, maybe even a week out. So you have you have sufficient time to make a decision on whether or not you need to leave. You need to hold where you're at. But at the end of the day, we all have the same base needs. So that's always what I try to explain to people: if you live in an area where a wildfire is your greatest worry. Then you need to have your preps mobile so they can move if the wildfire threatens your home. If your biggest worry is a big tornado like what my in-laws in North Louisiana have to deal with. You probably need to look at her at a tornado shelter, or you need some way to batten down the hatches and live through that storm. And in that tornado shelter, which will be your shelter, you also need emergency food, emergency water, etc.

If you're talking about a hurricane now, I'm in a unique situation where my preps. It helps if they're mobile because if I have to evacuate my family, I need to be able to take some stuff with me to take care of everybody. But if I'm gonna, if I'm gonna make, if I'm gonna choose to, like, stand my ground, I have to be prepared to be without I tell everybody modern anything for at least a week. Bare minimum. The exercise I always give to people is: Imagine if I walked up to your house, shut off your main water valve, and flipped your main breaker. What do you have to do in that situation to survive? You know that potentially is what you're going to have to suck up and deal with for the next one to two weeks after a major hurricane. There's no power, no running water, no gas, nothing. So if you don't have it bottled up, stored on the shelf, or raid rock'n'roll, you'll learn to do without quickly.

Hurricane Ida, which was only a couple of years ago down here. It was a powerful capital hurricane. Some people argue it was a. That 5 Winnebago lamp ball. I don't care. The weather station a mile and a half away from where I live, clocked 130 mile an hour winds when that thing went past us. So it was spicy, but we had the typical lines at the grocery stores and gas pumps immediately before that storm. All the people that waited till the last second were freaking out over.

In the immediate aftermath of the hurricane, some fuel stations could bring in generators because they had fuel on the ground. They just had to get power to pump it out. However, the supply was severely constricted. A lot of these places were only put. They were prioritizing first responders. If you had a police cruiser or if you had, if you had an ambulance, they divert the rest of the line. Let's you come fuel up. Well, that happens often enough. Then the guy trying to get 5 gallons to feed his generator to keep his food from spoiling doesn't get fuel.

That's why I keep going back to this idea. The idea that the hurricane passed yesterday, I can go out and get stuff you got. You gotta let go of that. Not only may you not be able to, but you don't want to be on the road when tree limbs and power lines are down. You don't wanna be in these lines full of angry, irritable people where things can pop off and have been known to pop off. You don't wanna be in any of those situations. You wanna be at your home taking care of your property and securing your loved ones. That's where you need to focus your energy. Suppose you have a good relationship with your neighbors. In that case, you must ensure everybody's productive, taken care of, and in a good place. And if you don't have a good relationship with your neighbors, you might wanna work on that. The following day, after Hurricane Ida, when we were all in the front yard, it was really quick to assess who was in bad shape, who was staying, who was leaving?

Sara:

Right. Yeah. Chin, you talk a lot about this, helping your neighbors back in the townhome days.

Chin:

Yeah, and that's when I met my neighbors after the storm, helping everybody get their shutters put up. And you know, in a townhome situation, many transient people come in, people go out, rental units and stuff. And they didn't realize it was the old hat there. So I was always out there trying with the ladder, trying to help people get organized. However,  we had a Walmart that was probably 3 miles away. I drove by it all the time. It closed up about four days out from the predicted landfall. So if you're game plan was to go to Walmart, you know, the night before the storm or the two days before the storm, you were screwed. It was blowing up. I'm surprised at how early they boarded that store up.

Sara:

Following that crazy snowstorm we had here, they couldn't get any trucks into Walmart. If people needed supplies, it wasn't happening.

Chin:

And a lot. In Charleston, they would direct all traffic going out on the Interstate. All four lanes were going outbound instead of coming in.

Phil Rabalais

Well, and that was also something I was gonna mention. Since you brought up the trucks. You know, Sara, earlier, when you talked about wildfires and how they just marched across the landscape and devastated everything. The other thing I don't think many people think about is that when discussing disaster recovery, you're talking about stretched supply lines at a certain point. After Hurricane Ida, I found out just from local word of mouth. Apparently, there was a man who had a two-axle trailer. He had several sizeable commercial fuel tanks on it. He was filling up about an hour East of us, out in Gulfport, Biloxi, Ms., and he was taking fuel with a manual transfer pump down to family. He had in New Orleans. He ran back and forth daily to keep them stocked with fuel for their generators daily. The reason he had to go that far was because where I was, there were only a couple of gas stations that were really open at this point. You would not sit there and get 200 gallons when everybody else was trying to get 5 gallons to keep their generator running; somebody would have started a fistfight over that. So, he had people have to go 100 miles in some cases, 50 miles in a lot of cases to get fuel, food, and water, and then bring it back into the area.

Supply lines get stretched very, very quickly. Building materials after a significant hurricane become very difficult to get in the local area because before trucks like your local Home Depot or your local Lowe's or whatever, wherever you normally get plywood, for example, they can get a truck full of plywood into that store to refill it so you can get whatever you need to. Fix your house. They have to get the power back up. They have to get fuel trucks in. They have to get fuel because if those truckers can't get fuel, they're not coming. Yeah, so it turns into this situation where. All these tasks must be done, and they cascade on each other. You have to get a done before you do B, and then you have to get C, and then you have to get D, and there is no putting them in a different order. It has to get done, and the order has to get done like that.

That was part of the situation we had post Hurricane Katrina down in New Orleans, and I only know this cuz my dad, at the time, worked for energy. He worked for a major power company. One day, I will get him to come on my podcast and talk about Hurricane Katrina cuz he can tell some stories. But you know, part of the energy situation was they were trying to restore power, cuz you needed to. But they had trouble doing that because so many of these areas were underwater. They had to get the pumps back on to pump the water out of the streets. They had to get the levee breaches fixed before they could do that. And before you can turn the pumps on, you need the power. It was this weird situation where it's like, OK, we have three things. It's like watching three dogs chase each other around in a circle.

Sara:

Even during COVID and all that back in California and the area I lived in, the supply chain started going down heavily. You could already see the movement from people in the city driving an hour out to the country stores to the country, grocery to the country grocery stores, because those were the ones that still had food left instead of those inner city grocery stores. I would almost argue that people in urban areas need to think about food more urgently than people in the country. So many more people are vying for those supplies in the store. If you think you'll be able to keep shopping daily, that's just not going to happen. I think most of them are on a one-day supply now. Like you say, we do this very delicate dance of supply chain, and they can easily be shaken.

Phil Rabalais

Extremely quickly, I mean, but this is also the reason why. When COVID first came to this country, the days immediately preceding the 2 weeks to "slow the spread," when no one legitimately knew what was going on because we weren't getting any reliable information from anybody who could have known anything. I sat down with my wife, and we seriously discussed how bad we think this is. What do we think is going on? Again, there was no reliable information, so I told my wife I was like. You know, bearing in mind that at this point, the decision to be made send everybody home, everybody's gonna remote work. That's how this is gonna be. And I told Gillian we have enough food, water, and everything in this house to nail that front door shut and wait this out. I don't care if it takes three or six months. We can figure this out. We don't have to go to the grocery store. We don't have to have contact with the outside world. But I can tell you what will happen in the next two weeks.

Sara:

Right. That's a feeling of security. We can weather this storm, and  I'm gonna be alright, you know?

Phil Rabalais

Yeah, but I told Gillian that one of two things will happen in the next two weeks. Either the entire New York City metro area and at least two major metro areas in California where you have that high population density will literally implode because this will prove to be so devastating and so communicable that it will wipe out whole metro areas in a matter of two weeks. Or that's not gonna happen. So, we didn't go to the grocery store for the next two weeks. We didn't do without. We had everything we needed. Hell, we were eating tacos and baking and stuff. Our preps are built around the idea that if I want it. I better find a way to have it and put some back on the shelf. So, we didn't feel the pinch, but once that two-week period passed and we realized that we now had some data coming in, we had a pretty good idea of who this was impacting where.

From that moment forward, my wife and I adopted a plan to go to the grocery store regularly, just like we do now. And we will continue to buy food whether we need it or not. The stores operate on this just-in-time system where they know when the truck will show up and bring you the widget right after you sell the last one. That's how just-in-time supply chains work. So I told Gilling we need to stay ahead of a potential supply chain deficit. We're gonna continue to buy stuff whether we need it. Or not. We're not going to eat into six months' worth of preps. We continue to buy things so that the period when we would run out of food every week gets backed up another week, and we've continued to do that. The last several years, I mean, we put a lot of effort into our food stock and into long-term into midterm into a chest freezer full of meat. And now we're at a point where we're trying to kind of like pull back on the range just a little bit be a little more strategic with what we buy because, I didn't realize until I went into that chest freezer or a week or two ago, I have probably 40 lbs of ground beef in the chest freezer, had no earthly idea how much I had, didn't care. I kept buying it every time it went on sale.

Sara:

One of the interesting things that Chin brought up to me last week that I didn't think about because I've been living in the country so long is the road infrastructure and the implications of having to do that work yourself.

Chin:

Yeah. My new home is totally rural. There's a country road and a small paved road, which you basically have to pull over to let another car go by. Then there's the road that goes up to my driveway road. So, I mean, I'm like. And from the end of the pavement all the way up to my house, a few neighbors and I have to get out there with shovels, rakes, and my tractor. We are the road crew.

Sara:

I've started thinking about it because we did the same thing when we lived off Penobscot Rd. You're literally out there filling potholes, taking care of that road, but in an urban setting like my current house, it would be like that's not even something you'd think about. As an individual, what if your roadway is damaged? Who's going to take care of that? Like, are you going to be sitting there waiting for help to come in, or do you have any kind of skills to be able to tackle that?

Chin:

I mean, I know Phil's got some mad chainsaw skills now, I'm sure, after going through some hurricanes, but that's something that a suburbanite might not think about, but to have a chainsaw no how to use it, have the oils, bar oil, and everything. So you can actually run it.

Sara:

Right? Some essentials we don't necessarily focus on when you're in an urban setting compared to a country setting.

Chin:

I drove into town a year ago, and we had a thunderstorm. The next day, we were going into town, and a tree came down across the road. And there was a road crew. There were just two guys with pickup trucks and chainsaws. They cut the tree in two spots and then pushed it out of the way with their truck. They had to get by. They had what was needed in the back of the truck, and they moved it.

Sara:

Right.

Chin:

The road crew wasn't there yet, so yeah.

Phil Rabalais

It's definitely a different personality. Yeah, but since you brought up chainsaw skills, I'll be the first to admit that Hurricane Ida, when that hit my house, I didn't even own a chainsaw. Yep, I had never needed one. I live in the suburbs. Like I wasn't a complete moron. Thankfully, I had an axe, a bow saw, a pole saw, and typical homeowner stuff. For example, we had a tree, like a little biddy spindly thing, maybe about four inches around the trunk. But it was leaning over my yard from the wood line next to my house, so I went out there with the axe, took a notch out of it, and cut the backside.

I felled a tree with an axe because I had an axe. I needed the tree down I dealt with. The problem, but. When 2 oak trees are lying on your house, and one squashes your front yard, no amount of axe and bow saw will fix that problem. I needed it, so fortunately, we had some family come in from out of town, and my brother-in-law called me up the morning they showed up at our house, he showed up. They got there that afternoon. They called me up and said, hey, how much do you want me to spend? Yeah. And like that's when I learned how to use a chainsaw at age. I don't know if I was 38 or 39? Right, when I was, we were cutting all the junk in the front yard and figured it out. I mean, that's when learned that skill.

Sara:

Those things are coming to my mind because, in my books, it's not just a local disaster, right? It's a national disaster. So when you start having a disaster on that level where you have multiple impact areas and can't just shift forces, you know? And shift resources around as fast as possible to help people in those zones. That's when it could get really problematic. And so you as an individual have to be ready to go out and be your state, whatever road crew, there's nobody to call. If the trees are down, you'll have to take care of it. How are you going to do that? Like you say, with your axe or a tool that fits the job. That's why I say expand beyond the basics. So we're thinking about, there is road infrastructure here and severe damage. Everybody's like, oh, the government's going to come help. No, they're not, you know. If it's a nationwide something right now, they're talking about a coordinated attack that might happen to our country. Everybody should be prepared for this type of thing. You know? So, if it is something that's affecting multiple areas now, we are the response team. People really need to step up to that plate, be ready to step up to that plate, go out with your neighbors, and take care of it.

Phil Rabalais

But even on that level, I mean a disaster on the scale of what you're talking about. No one is coming to save you. You aren't going to figure your own life out. And that's just the way it is. But I tend to take a slightly different point of view even when talking about a localized disaster, like, for example, a CAT4 or CAT5 hurricane. Those things don't hit a neighborhood. They wipe out like 7 zip codes.

But I take the point of view that even if I know our neighbors to the East, our neighbors to the West, God bless Texas and Mississippi, can send aid to us, I got into preparedness because I feel like I have a duty as a husband and father to provide for my family. "I'm sorry, honey. The power is out" is not an acceptable answer when your kid is hungry or your wife is hungry. You'll have to, at a certain point, take the point of view even if I know help is coming. I want to be able to self-aid because I want help on my terms. I want to be able to do it the day after the hurricane because this is precisely what we did after Ida. But the day after the storm, my daughter played right in the front yard. She needed a little decompression time after the hell on Earth we dealt with that night.

I stood up at 10 x 10, a pop-up tent in the front yard to give me and wipe some cover from the sun and get us out. And, you know, get us out of the hothouse and did some ventilation. It was August, and I pulled out a couple of lawn chairs. Grab some bottled water off the shelf. Started up. I think I started a pot of something outside on the. Camp stove to get us fed, but like. I did not want to wait for the parish, the state, or God Almighty FEMA to show up to feed and take care of us. That's a level of helplessness. I'm just not willing to tolerate. So my point of view is whether we're talking about help not coming or help simply not being here in the next 5 minutes. Everybody has a fundamental obligation to assume that help is not coming. Because if it does show up and you're taking care of it, you alleviated a burden that could go to someone less fortunate. But if help is not coming, you have alleviated your own burden.

Sara:

I love that point of view as well. That's a great point of view, and one thing I was going to talk about is personal versus state versus federal response time. I mean, if you can help yourself. By all means, help yourself, right?

Phil Rabalais

Yeah. Well, I mean, after I had my wife, would my wife walk around and check in on a bunch of the neighbors, finding an older couple about 1/2 a block away from us. They had no emergency. Water. Yeah. Now we're on city water, but like I told you earlier, the holding tank that services our subdivision got hit by a pine tree. So, the water pressure was 0 the next morning. Dried up, but this couple. Like they couldn't cook rice, they couldn't have anything to drink. They were dead in the water, and my wife was like, can we help them out? And I was like. Yes, I know I have 28 28-day supply of water bottled up on the shelf. Yes, go take them. Take some, and bring it to them. Call it an act of mercy. I don't want them to die there in their house when we can take care of them.

The problem would have been if that had been my last gallon of water. This she was giving away. What then?

Sara:

Right. And that's when you get into the length of disaster, you know, length of time before the supply chain gets turned back on cause you want to help. But at the same time, you can't. You don't know how long that will continue for so. That would be the next big ethical question to explore.

Phil Rabalais

But I guess my point of view is whether we are heading towards a severe systems collapse or we're heading towards another significant weather pattern shift, I'm always very pragmatic when it comes to preparedness in the guise of we're all talking about being able to take care of your base needs. I don't get to pick the emergency.

All I get to pick is how I respond to it. So I tell people when they look at a specific thread and think, I better get ready for this thread, it's like OK, that's like saying I'm gonna prep for Hurricane Katrina, but the next one in line, I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna worry about it. No, there's a line of thought here where you prepare to deal with the systems you depend on collapsing. You should be prepared for it. That collapse, no matter when it comes. The only good thing is that if you start preparing today, and it's a while before anything pops off, you're better prepared than waiting till the last second.

Sara:

And that's probably the biggest key to rebuilding because you were prepared for it. It's just like going into surgery or something. You want to make sure your body is as strong as it can possibly be before you go in and have that surgery so that you're not too weakened by it. You can bounce back quickly. And isn't that the same thing? The thing with preparing for any kind of disaster is that if you're prepared ahead of time, you can bounce back quicker on the reverse. Interesting.

Phil Rabalais

I mean, definitely. But let's throw mental and physical resilience into that discussion. Like you, I, Chin, and plenty of listeners, I know everything in a disaster situation. Harder, right? Everything takes more effort when the light switch doesn't cause power to come on, and when the water stops flowing out of the tap, everything gets more challenging. Everything takes more effort and more time. So, if your body is in better physical condition, you are better able to weather an emergency situation. And in the case of like post hurricane, that was some butt-kicking days to cut 3 oak trees, you know, and unwind all that mess. But it was the physical and mental resilience to not look at that mess we had in the front yard and just give up. Just quit. Just say we're never gonna fix this problem. I mean, the day after Ida, before I knew I had help coming, I was out there with an axe and a pulse off because that's what I had. And.

Sara:

Right? Do the best you can with what you got.

Phil Rabalais

Yeah, well, that and the fact that I had one pretty good-sized lamb that was sitting on top of the garage. Everything else was had glanced off the house. But I wanted to get everything off the beams of the house so I could assess the house and make sure it was safe to stay in. I tried to clear enough of the brush away from my wife's Jeep to ensure we had two working vehicles. We had to evacuate like I had tasks to take care of. I had to man up a bit, rock up and deal with the problem I had in front of me and not let it defeat and beat me down. Almost anybody has ever read about a survival situation: a person stranded in the wilderness, stuck or floating out at sea or whatever for days on end. The difference between a person that. Makes it and doesn't make it. It is very often whether or not that person decides to give up because if you quit, your body quits, and if you fight, your body will fight like the third ape on the ramp of Noah's Ark. Like you're not gonna. You're not. Your body will fight as long as your brain does within reason. So I always tell everybody, if you're mental and your fiscal resilience is up to par, if your preparedness and perhaps the materials you put back are up to par, you should get through that emergency at a minimum a lot better than you would otherwise. But if you don't take the time ahead of an emergency to put all those things in line, you're gonna be, you're gonna be. You're gonna be fighting uphill.