Ivan will bring rain - let's all go crazy.

[Mark Healey]

My advice to Americans is: stock up on tinned soup, and keep that stock full.

Got lots of that. The can opener is my most used kitchen tool. Check.

Also keep a camping stove and a couple of small LPG tanks to heat it with.

I have a torch and some mapp gas. That and some hangers should do it. Check.

Then you won't have to panic, see? You can just stay indoors and wait it out.

Unfortunately I'm in SoCal. Earthquakes are our worry. By the time you're ready to panic, it's over.

[QUOTE=Chromatix;409316Unless your house blows to pieces, that is. But if it's that bad, you should have evacuated.[/QUOTE]

Unless your house collapses on you, then nothing matters.

Floods? Don't buy or build in a floodplain, you idiots.

This runs counter to a jillion years of history. Cities tend to be build at transportation hubs. Most navigable rivers flow through flood plains.

[South Texan]

After all the panic, we got not one single drop of rain. Ike went to the east, and on up north.

Yep, it is BONE dry in central and east Texas today. The folks in the eastern part of the state did not need more rain. WE DID!

And do not take that as a glib remark about Ike. It could have been devastating along the state's southern coast as well.

[Chromatix]

Not all riverbanks are floodplains. Not all areas away from permanent rivers aren't. There's this little thing called "catchment area", and it matters. One of my university's buildings flooded even though it was built nearly on top of a hill - because the car park had collected the water and channelled it in. Also, storm surges from the seaward side matter.

New Orleans was built on land that was already wet - and is now *below* sea level. It's a floodplain *and* a major storm-surge risk. So why was everyone so surprised when the whole lot flooded? Because nobody paid any attention to a poor, black-majority city in the Deep South.

As for earthquakes, I would personally avoid living near a major active fault. But then again, in Europe there *aren't* any major active faults. (There's some minor ones, but they don't cause any real damage when they go off - perhaps they dislodge a few bricks from dodgy chimneys.) They're a separate class of problem, though, and they have their own survival strategies.

The reason why tinned soup is so good, BTW? It's a source of both water and nutrients, and it doesn't go off easily. Water is the real key - you can do without food for a lot longer, and minimal food for even longer than that. In a pinch, you can even eat it cold, provided the tin-opener still works. (In short, don't rely on powdered soup.)