Well, we’ve passed through the first “named storm” of the season in our location. Isaias was a hurricane when it hit NC, but a tropical storm when it got up the coast to us. That’s normally the protocol for us. We focus our emergency preparedness on a hurricane, and we get a tropical storm–which is fine with me! I’ll take “only” 40-70 mph sustained winds over 79+ mph! There’s more than enough clean-up to do afterward regardless. With Isaias, we lost one porch fan, a piece of siding, and a shutter from the front porch. And, of course, other storms continue to rock our neighbors further south.

Summer storms are our main adversary here, weather-wise. We get the occasional ice storm, or 10-inch snow, but those are every few years. We get heavy summer storms every year, usually with a few years between actual hurricanes. So emergency preparedness for summer storms is a real thing around here. The good news is that we usually get a good amount of warning that they’re coming.

Use the FREE Printable Emergency Preparedness on the Homestead Checklists at the end of this post to get your small farm or homestead ready for summer storms.

3 Key Parts to Emergency Preparedness for Sheltering in Place on the Homestead…

So the primary rule of Emergency Preparedness is…Know Your Evacuation Plan.

Having an evacuation plan for a small farm or homestead is complicated and nerve-wracking, but very important. It will be highly personal and there will be a lot of tough decisions to make. You should know your plan and lay out the criteria for when you will and will not evacuate. I’d suggest writing it down so you don’t have to try and remember in the heat of the moment. (If you’re looking for guidance on writing a family plan, check out Your Basic Emergency Plan.) Honestly, that’s a different post from this one. (Check out this post and this post on evacuating with a homestead.) We have a pre-storm evacuation plan for our children, but Mr. Fix-It and I are both Essential Personnel for our jobs during summer storms. So we are always prepared to shelter in place on the homestead.

This post is about emergency preparedness on the homestead for summer storms while you shelter in place.

1. Emergency Preparedness for your Home…Water, Septic, and Pets

For summer storms in rural areas, the key event you are preparing for is not having electricity, in the heat. Ugh!

When there’s no power, your mind immediately goes to the fridge and freezer and having non-perishable food. But if you homestead you probably already have good handle on a well-stocked pantry. Let’s talk about a couple other issues that will crop up. Like no a/c. In 90-100 degree weather. Not only is the heat miserable, but suddenly you have issues with piles of sweaty, stinky laundry; sweltering bags of trash, and no way to wash the floors from muddy boots.. It’s imperative to at least start with a clean house, empty trash cans, and empty laundry baskets.

If you’re on well not having electricity also means no water–because there’s no power to the well pump! So you’re talking about bottled water from drinking to washing to cooking. There will be no clothes washing. No dog washing. And any counter, floor, or people washing that happens will probably be with stockpiled wipes. (So stockpile some wipes!)

Depending on what type of septic system you have, you can also encounter reduced septic capacity. If you have an older conventional system, you might also have drain lines susceptible to clogging in heavy water events. Coastal areas also have higher water tables, so excessive rain can change the natural drainage patterns around your house. This can slow down drainage in elevation-based systems. In coastal and protected riparian areas (like ours) you might have complicated multi-chambered systems (like ours) due to poor soils. These systems run on pumps as well, and no pump means reduced capacity. There’s usually an overflow capacity available in properly function systems. But you’ll need to keep an eye out that your pump doesn’t overheat playing catch up after the event.

A note about your household pets. We save digital copies of our vaccine records “to the cloud” so that we have immediate access to them. (This is also helpful if you’re at the dog park.) We crate train our dogs. I’ve also started muzzle-training our dogs. These are key skills for your pet’s safety in an emergency situation. It’s not something you can try to do 2 days before a hurricane hits. The idea is to make them comfortable with the crate or muzzle before you need it. Then when it’s used in an emergency it feels more familiar and secure.

Take a few minutes to imagine scenarios where livestock are loose around the homestead due to electric fence being down, trees on fence lines, vehicle accidents involving livestock trailers…maybe not even your livestock! If you live in a rural area, it could be any neighbor’s livestock or pets that get out. Being able to quickly crate your pets in a safe, low-stress manner could save a lot of additional chaos.

And last–but certainly not least!–if there’s damage to your home you need to have good documentation to provide to your insurance company. You’ll need to prove that your home was in good repair prior to the storm and show that any damage was directly related to the storm. We photograph our house, inside and outside, at the beginning of every storm season. We save the pictures digitally on a flash drive and “to the cloud” via Google. The flash drive goes in our household lockbox. Each year we just throw the old one out and put the new one in. We also delete last year’s photos from Google and replace it with the new ones.

{Note…We use Google for most of our record-keeping around here. Check out this post to see some of the ways we use Google Calendar as well…}

2. Emergency Preparedness for your Livestock and Farm Animals

The most important part of sheltering your animals through a storm is determining the safest shelter location. You need a sturdy building and sturdy fencing. Since you might lose power, you don’t want a barnyard or sacrifice area that depends on electric fencing. Preferable on high ground.

We utilize mobile shelters for most of our operations, and they are not secure for high-wind storms. Our back field, with a large run in barn and woven wire fencing is our “sacrifice” field. Animals are moved to that field just before the storm, with food and bedding stockpiled in the tack room nearby. Then we secure our mobile equipment in the rotational fields to avoid additional damage from them blowing around.

Fresh, clean water is a key element to plan for in the case of losing power. Your well pump won’t work. We make sure to scrub ALL our water buckets and troughs and fill them. In fields we aren’t using, we cover filled troughs so debris doesn’t spoil the water. Five-gallon buckets are staged to catch rainwater, which can be used for anything from pet drinking water to filling the toilets so they can be flushed. That way you are saving your bottled water for human use.

Two weeks of food and bedding is usually a good standard to maintain basic farm management. In storm scenarios, it’s important to keep it located somewhere that you can access it without using your large equipment. Your fields might be too wet to use the tractor or truck for feeding. Store large hay bales where they can be accessed by hand if needed. Hurricanes and tropical storms can drop several inches of water, so putting in a good stock of absorbent bedding will be key to keeping your animals out of the mud in their sacrifice field. We usually layer straw–wood chips–straw–wood chips, so we keep stacks of both in the barn tack-room pre-storm.

3. Emergency Preparedness for your Buildings and Equipment

The majority of prep for your outbuildings and equipment center around long-term maintenance rather than last-minute prep. Hurricane season is from June to November. We get most of our storms from late August to October. So we look at August as our pre-storm-season prep period. This also usually aligns with our state’s Emergency Preparation Tax-Free Weekend at the end of August if we need to purchase supplies.

The idea is that keeping your buildings in good condition keeps them storm-ready. With equipment, you don’t know what you might need for storm clean up or in emergencies. So you want your equipment in good working order before the storm hits. You don’t want to find that you have a dull chainsaw blade when you’re in the middle of cutting a tree of your main fenceline!

So August is “maintenance month.”

This is when you want to change the oil, check the brakes, replace any hoses, grease all your fittings, sharpen your blades, and go over all your normal clean up and maintenance. Now is the time to make sure you have extra parts for your basic replacements in the shop–string for the string-trimmer, blades for the chainsaw, and hitch pins because the things get lost all the time! You also want to check over your garage, maintenance sheds, and lean-tos for any siding or roof repairs needed. Make sure door latches are secure and trim back any overgrown trees or plantings.

Then document the state of all your buildings and equipment the same way you do the house! Just like with our home documentation, we save the pictures digitally on a flash drive and “to the cloud” via Google. The flash drive goes in our household lockbox. Each year we just throw the old one out and put the new one in. We also delete last year’s photos from Google and replace them with the new ones.

Our last 48 hours on the farm are focused mainly on making sure everything is put away where we can find it, and making sure we are stocked up on fuel for everything. That includes filling up all our vehicle and tractor tanks, as well as stockpiling extra cans for gas, diesel, and combo fuel.

{Remember: Red cans = gasoline. Yellow cans = diesel. Blue cans = kerosene. I have also seen orange for combo-fuel tanks, but we stock ours pre-mixed these days.}

The Last 48 Hours of Storm Prep

The last 48 is focused on battening down the hatches and staging all our emergency supplies where we can get them. Fueling up, charging up, and hunkering down.

One important last-minute item that I don’t think gets mentioned very much is mowing and weed-eating all your paths and fencelines. After the storm, you don’t want to be wading through 12-inch grass to try and check your fencelines or get to your animals for feeding time. If an electric fence line is down, you want to have easy access to find it and access it for repairs. And you might not have a chance to mow again for several days if you get several inches of rain.

Here is a simple, 2-page FREE PRINTABLE Emergency Preparedness on the Homestead Checklist for you. One page is the pre-season maintenance checklist and the other is the last 48 hours checklist.

What specific emergency prep work do you consider essential for your family or homestead during major storm events?