Preparing For Storms

Multiple people told us that sometimes when it stormed and was windy, a lot of trees would fall and the power may be out for several days at a time.  We have a lot of trees out here in the Piney Woods, we are also in tornado alley.  We were in tornado ally in Dallas too...but, the trees in our yard were small and the power lines were under ground.

We are in the country, in a rural area if anything happened we would be on our own for awhile.  In Dallas we were subject to rolling blackouts during the summer at times, we thought it might be good to get prepared for the possibility of being without electricity for awhile.  We bought a generator so that we could have power for the fridge/freezer and lights.  We also have electric for our heat, but we have hookups for propane heat, so we bought a propane heater in case it goes out in the winter.  Crew also wanted some solar power, we thought we could get in on rebate programs or get in on special deals...those types of things are not available to rural areas like they are in large Metroplexes.  But I will get to that later...the solar project.

When we moved in and started cleaning up the yard, we found a bunch of gutters laying out back almost buried by pine needles and dirt.  We had some pretty bad storms and had discovered that the drainage was not good around the house...we needed to install the gutters.  We had some issues though, we found a bag of brackets but no fasteners to put them up with.We had to figure out what to use.  Normally...with a normal house screws or nails would work, but we have a metal house, so we had to do some research.  We tried calling the number on our building, but the lady that answered could not answer the question, and we left our number but no one ever called us back. Finally my son found some information about using pop rivets.  So now we needed the equipment to attach the gutters.  I order a lot of things on line these days, so I started looking for a pop-riveter and rivets too.  It didn't take but a few days for them to arrive.  Trying to get them attached to the house was another story...they are on, but they are not exactly on straight.  Crew and I worked on them for a few days and we couldn't put one section up because there was no real way to attach it to the house.

The back porch after screening and getting the gutters put up with gravel put down for drainage

We had storms that made the Gazebo lean way over so we had to basically strap it down, it rained so hard a few times that the water gushed over the tops of the gutters and made  deep indentations and holes in the ground around the house.  We have bought a number of bags of gravel to fill in the holes and to help with drainage, but one of these days we may have to put in some French drains to move the water away from the house better.  It is not uncommon to get 4 inches of rain in a day.  We have had up to 8 inches in a 24 hour period.  We have very sandy soil so it washes away easily. 

Fall and Winter are the rainy season in this part of Texas, or so we are told.  We have had a lot of rain.  This Summer our pond lost at least 2/3 of the water if not more...we could walk across the center of it and not get wet, we actually were afraid that the fish might die if we didn't get rain soon.  We didn't have to wait to long after we became concerned though we got the 8 inches of rain, and a few days after we received 4 more inches of rain...the pond filled up and the creek left its banks.  I actually had a river running at the edge of our cleared area that we call the back yard.  We have been fortunate that we have not had to much bad weather, although we have lost power several times the longest outage so far has been 20 minutes.

We really want to build a storm shelter, but our metal house is suppose to be able to withstand 160 mile an hour winds...so for now, we will work on other projects.

Storm clouds rolling in from the South