Part 1: Older Women Who Ride Out Hurricanes ALONE!

Mary Talks About Riding Out Storms Alone in Her YouTube Video

Please watch Mary in her related YouTube video that brings this blog entry to life!

There is a big storm heading your way and you know that you will be riding it out alone.  There will be no one there for moral support except maybe your cat or dog.  Your pre-storm anxiety is high, and you tell yourself, “You’ve got this” but you’re scared.  You know that every storm is different, and the damn things can take a turn and head your way even though the prediction said it was going somewhere else.   Then the storm hits, the wind is furious, and the rain is relentless, it goes on for hours and then the power goes out. There is no one there with you.  It is no fun.  No fun at all.

One of our 70+ year old friends moved to Sunny Florida from the North and I will never forget her saying to us after hurricane Ian, her first hurricane, that Ian was the most terrifying experience of her life.  We had become friends, and my husband Dan had performed many handyman jobs for her.  We had talked with her about hurricane prep knowing she had no experience with hurricanes.  She took Dan’s advice and installed electric shutters on her most vulnerable windows and her lanai.  She and I talked at length about food prep for the generally guaranteed power outage post storm.  Three years after hurricane Ian, she continues to thank us for our caring advice and the difference that it made for her.

Another 70+ woman friend of mine added electric shutters over her second-floor condo windows over the course of a couple years as her budget allowed.  After riding out Ian, this reserved woman, again with tears in her eyes, thanked us for encouraging her to install those shutters because of the comfort they provided during that horrific storm.  And, although she was no virgin to hurricanes, the monster of Ian was the first she had ridden out alone, with only her cat as company, because her husband had passed a couple of years before.

These are only two examples of an untold number of older women who experience the wrath of hurricanes by themselves.

While learning about hurricane prep over the years, I have watched so many YouTube videos and I read so much about prepping for storms and other emergencies, but I did not find one single video or book or article that addresses older women who ride these storms out alone.  Not one.  I would like that to change.

Let me introduce myself, I am Mary, a 70-year-old woman, and I have lived in hurricane country for over a dozen years, surviving hurricanes Irma and Ian, Milton and many other storms.  Although I am blessed to be married to a man who is very safety conscious and mechanical, I am friends with many older women who have endured some very serious storms by themselves, and the post-traumatic stress haunts them.  (That post-traumatic stress certainly is not just limited to them, as we can attest, especially after Ian.)  But sometimes I think about something happening to my husband and then I would find myself in your position riding those storms out alone too.  Things can, and do, change in an instant.

Yes, many of the things everyone needs to do for storm prep are the same regardless of your living situation, but let’s face it, the bottom line is that it ain’t quite the same for an older woman living alone.  You are probably not as physically fit as you were 20 or 30 years ago, and in fact, you might be using a cane or walker now.  You are not likely to have a generator, so that post-storm power outage will take on a whole new dimension.  You are also not likely to have a grill, camp stove, or other means to cook without electricity unless you have a natural gas or propane cooking stove.  You will probably not be bucking up downed trees with a chain saw, cleaning up your yard after a storm.   Despite these limitations, you will need to be as self-reliant as possible and find the inner strength to handle yourself and the situation, whatever happens.

As you may have guessed by now, my husband and I take storm prep incredibly seriously.  We have had two home inspectors perform wind mitigation inspections on the two homes we’ve had since moving to Sunny Florida.  Both summed up our physical home prep as “extreme.”  Fine by us.  Physical safety is number one.  We had neighbors mock us for installing shutters over our hurricane windows prior to a storm, but we didn’t have windows blow in, causing all kinds of damage as some of these people did.  We are frugal people, but not when it comes to safety.  Personally, I’d rather stay home and cook and then use the money we saved by not buying all those restaurant meals for hurricane protection like electric window shutters.  That cruise we did not go on bought some serious protection as well.  Please don’t get the wrong idea, I like to enjoy life, but physical safety during vicious storms is our first priority.

Besides our physical home protection, we are concerned about other aspects of hurricane prep.  Over and over, we had seen and read those storm prep “cheat sheets” that tell you how to prepare for a storm.  I get frustrated when I read them.  Seriously, that’s the best you can do?  Those abbreviated sheets are really not that helpful in my humble opinion because they just don’t give us the real-life practical information that we need.  I want the down-and-dirty practical stuff, not a blanket statement like, “collect important papers.”  Oh heavens, don’t make me try to figure out exactly what those papers are and how I should protect them!  Give me some solid help here!  The same applies to the food and water we’re supposed to collect, and on and on.  Those lists just don’t give enough detailed info to be truly helpful.  We actually saw one book that talks about hurricane prep, and they were bragging that the entire book was a 90-minute read. Seriously?  If you are really going to learn how to prep for hurricanes, there is no way you can do that in 90 minutes.

So, necessity being the mother of invention so to speak, we developed our own emergency plan that included in-depth checklists of what we need to do, from pre-season to pre-storm, to post-storm.  And they work!  We update our checklists as needed after storms, and we have been doing so for many years. Our battle-tested checklists keep us from forgetting something very important and they also help reduce our stress level when a storm is coming.  Shortly before hurricane Ian arrived, I looked at my husband and said, “I feel so much calmer and more confident because we can just go through our checklists and know we’ve done our best to prepare.”  Amen.

We moved to Florida from blizzard country and we were complete newbies to hurricanes and how to prepare for them.   We continue to meet people who are in that same newbie boat and some of these people have had disastrous results because they were not prepared when a storm struck.  There are so many newbies living in the vast area of hurricane country who need comprehensive info and they are the reason my husband and I wrote our book, Real Life Hurricane Prep, to provide the help and get the message out.  We sincerely wish we had been given a copy of our book when we moved to Florida back in 2012.

So, we’ll be talking about storm preparation and the aftermath of a storm from an older woman’s perspective. I would love to hear your stories about your experiences with hurricanes and what you have found to work or not work in your preparations. Let's share these stories and tips with other older women and help each other thrive. Our email is CameronHomeSolutionsLLC@outlook.com.

In the meantime, please go to Amazon and search for our book Real Life Hurricane Prep and take a few minutes to read the reviews of our book and then click on the ‘Read Sample’ button.  It will give you a real peek into the kind of right-to-the-point help that we are known for.

Until next time, take care.

Mary