Comment by tehwebguy
3 days ago
Other Helene stuff I took note of:
- AT&T was completely down for us but Verizon and its MVNOs were up
- I had a Verizon MVNO secondary e-sim that came free with a home internet plan, unused until the hurricane hit
- It worked pretty well!
- The day the Verizon disaster internet trucks showed up at the police station in our town my Verizon MVNO internet went down
Non-internet learnings:
- Fill up your vehicle’s fuel or battery before any big storm, we spent a lot of time siphoning and otherwise consolidating fuel to get ourselves and neighbors out of town, particularly because we didn’t know how far we’d have to go to find a gas station with electricity
From a Pineapple Express a few years back (80+ mph gusts and lots of landslides):
- When putting in rural/exurb solar, make sure you have a secondary charge source for your house batteries. This can be a car or a propane generator, but check compatibility before buying anything. Solar won’t cut it (storms are cloudy), and propane won’t cut it (no roads, and also, there’s probably a shortage of supply and trucks).
- Whatever cell networks people fall back on will effectively be down (as you saw with verizon)
- all emergency services websites should fall back to web 1.0 forms and static images if they take more than 5-10 sec to load. Loading a pile of JS and CSS to load a fake modal that obscures the content affer 5 min of loading at 2G speeds doesn’t count (looking at you PG&E)
> and propane won’t cut it
Depends entirely on tank size really.
Standard (in Australia) is 2x45kg household cylinders (chest high to an adult) for household cooking.
(Finish one, switch to the other while waiting for swap).
It's not hard to have eight or more cyclinders on standby and to keep them topped up for when needed.
For rural / quasi industrial, furnaces, generators, etc it's not uncommon to have fixed installation 210kg LPG bulk cylinders filled by supply truck .. and larger.
When disaster strikes a bulk tank lasts a long time if the primary drains on it (eg: a tile or glass furnace) are wound back or turned off.
Eg: https://www.supagas.com.au/for-home/lpg-gas-bottles/tanks
> For rural / quasi industrial, furnaces, generators, etc it's not uncommon to have fixed installation 210kg LPG bulk cylinders filled by supply truck .. and larger.
Seems kind of small if you're rural/have regular delivery limitations? I've got a 500 gallon propane tank for domestic use (stove, waterheater, fireplace) and another 500 gallon tank for my generator. The internet says a 500 gallon tank at 80% full (max safe fill) is about 750 kg of propane. We've had a few two day outages, but no three day outages since we moved here, but neighbors report some outages in the 7-10 day timeframe. 500 gallon tanks seem pretty popular around these parts, commercial/government goes bigger, small properties go smaller; plenty of neighbors have no generator and may not have propane either; government runs warming centers if you can get there.
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> - AT&T was completely down for us but Verizon and its MVNOs were up
It really depended on where you were. In my area everything was down. Literally and figuratively. The only utility that worked was gas.
T-Mobile was the first to come back up but it took weeks. I could occasionally get one bar of LTE if I climbed to the top of the hill but even then I could only send or receive about 1 SMS every few minutes.
Once I was able to get out of the neighborhood I could drive 5 miles away and get cell service and spotty data on Verizon.
NPR's updates were our most reliable way to get information on what was happening.
> - Fill up your vehicle’s fuel or battery before any big storm, we spent a lot of time siphoning and otherwise consolidating fuel to get ourselves and neighbors out of town, particularly because we didn’t know how far we’d have to go to find a gas station with electricity
Having supplies on hand and being patient worked out for us. We waited until 40 was clear and were able to head to the Triad for supplies and gas. In the mean time the neighborhood got together and cut up downed trees and filled in the missing road so it was easier to get in and out of the neighborhood.
> we didn’t know how far we’d have to go to find a gas station with electricity
Corollary: carry cash, so you can buy things without depending on Point Of Sale systems being on and able to talk to the payment card networks. My favorite nearby ATM dispenses $100 bills, so I can have several hundred tucked in my wallet without taking a lot of space.
I recommend having a mix of bills; the other person may not have change.
Clarification: Sure, keeping a $100 bill tucked away in the wallet for emergencies is a great idea (and I do that too), but wherever you keep emergency supplies, I suggest having a mix of smaller bills.
Absolutely. The $100's are for getting a hotel room or something. The $20's are likely the largest other merchants will break.
My emergency cash stash has a couple $100's and a ton of $5's because I'm not super limited on space, and when everyone else has $20's and needs them broken, a bunch of $5's makes everything easy, and beats carrying a whole bucket of $1's. Learned that at flea-markets.
Agree.
Let time I visit the USA, many shop don't have changes for $100 bills. I found $20 bills the easiest to use.
(I am not an American, was on a work trip)
Not Helene for me, but another ISP frustration anecdote from living in a forested area (line damage from tree limbs is common enough) with imperfect cellular data connection:
- the Comcast Xfinity app is extremely bloated and runs into error after error on a poor connection, yet the only time I ever use it is when I have connection problems. Most other apps I use run smoother under similar circumstances. Boggles the mind why one of the US's largest ISPs wouldn't make their primary customer support portal be lightweight and reliable on spotty cellular data.
I have a dual-SIM phone with AT&T and T-Mobile lines (a Google Pixel). I wish they had a triple-SIM phone, then I could add Verizon.
Now that I think about it, I think you can have multiple eSIMs, but only one can be active at a time.
iPhones support 8 (or more): https://support.apple.com/en-us/118227#:~:text=You%20can%20h...
Unsure why they say 'or more' and what makes that happen.
2 can be active at the same time.
I can't find how many a Pixel can store at the same time though.
eSIMs are variable sized.
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FWIW, in my Galaxy S23U I can put 2 physical SIM and 10 eSIM.
But only two lines are active at the time.
The same is the case with pixels, never at least.
> Fill up your vehicle’s fuel or battery before any big storm
This is such a big one for any event anytime. Better yet, never go below a half-tank on your vehicle. You’ll almost always have enough range to get out of dodge and also have a mobile cooling / heating / charging station if you’re stuck in place. I grew up on an island and what I thought was universal storm advice was clearly not.
During Helene I had to drive 80+ miles from the Clemson, SC area through to Asheville to bail out my sister-in-law and her husband and their two month old stranded in Asheville. They had only two gallons of diesel in their F-250. The drive up I-26 looked like some kind of zombie flick with a line of 50-100 cars on every interstate off ramp leading up to defunct gas stations with crowds of people just meandering about.
If you’re a mild prepper type, GMRS radios (or a jailed broke Baofeng…) are a great tool. I had no cellular service for the majority of my drive. I was able to stay in comms with my “convoy” the whole way. Perhaps as importantly, a spare, unused Jerry can is incredibly valuable. In my case I have gasoline cans but not diesel and so I had to pay a greedy boomer 3-4x market rate to buy one of his four 5 gallon cans in the Lowe’s checkout line to get a clean fuel canister.