Disaster Planning

[bcr229]

With hurricane season coming up, how many folks have plans for their herps? Fortunately I'm not in an area that's likely to get hit with high winds or flooding, but power outages due to summer thunderstorms and winter snow/ice storms are a pretty regular occurrence, so I do have a generator.

[DestinyLynette]

Living on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, I want to know this as well. We haven't had a major storm since I've owned mine.

[Xaila]

Sandy knocked our power out for 2 weeks so this is definitely on my mind.

The house does have a generator now at least. I also plan to buy a few big bags of hand warmer packets or heat packs used for shipping. I also made use of hot water bottles like you get in the drug store.

Another thing I'd like to do is find out who in the area I might be able to hand my animals off to temporarily in the event of an emergency which involves them not being able to stay at my house (like, say, the house blowing up or something ).

[bcr229]

IMO a generator is a must-have. We have two refrigerator/freezers and a chest freezer, with probably $600 in rodents in the chest freezer right now since all but four of my snakes will happily eat f/t. I won't even get into the venison or butchered hog in there as well...
Also, I'm not breeding (yet) but when I start I'd hate to lose clutches because a power outage shut down my incubator.
I need to look at cooling methods as one (and soon two) of my snakes are BRB's. Last year we had a four day power outage in July after a bad storm. Our daytime high temperatures were around 100*F outside and 95*F inside, which apparently can be lethal for BRB's. I don't have enough KW available from the genny to run even a window A/C unit as well as the fridges. In a pinch I could take those two to someone who lives about 20 minutes away and doesn't have herps, so no worries about QT or keeping my snakes separate from his, and hopefully his and my power won't be off simultaneously. The boas, BP's, and kings should be fine as long as I made cool water from the tap available during the worst heat of the day.

If we all had to leave... um, I'm glad I have a Suburban and a pickup, because my fur-babies and scale-babies come with me!