Hurricane Awareness Webinar Replay

Transcipt

00:08:20:01 – 00:08:45:00 Jen Heller

Welcome, everyone. We’re excited to have you join us for a panel discussion on hurricanes, their impact on mental health, and how to best prepare for them. Three women who have experience in extreme weather events are joining me today. You’ll hear from the perspective of a FEMA case worker and mental health therapist, and a mother and daughter who survived Hurricane Helene.

Let’s get started with some introductions. All start. I’m Jennifer Heller, Jen, the founder of Here Comes Apocalypse and the creator of the Disaster Playbook. The Disaster playbook guides you step by step to create a thorough and flexible disaster plan. An emergency plan for your family. A lot of people think, oh, I’ve got some gear and a couple flashlights.I’m good, but it’s more than that. 

It’s about coordinated action and planning for communication. The disaster playbook and our and our additional tools guide you step by step through all of that. Amy, could you share your background and expertise with us, please?

00:09:28:06 – 00:09:53:22 Amy Conner

Sure. Thanks, Jen. My name is Amy Connor. I used to be back in the day a caseworker for FEMA, and so I got some experience in how people were impacted by different natural weather disasters and, what the rebuilding process looks like for individuals, families and communities. And now I am, in process of getting my licensure as a mental health therapist in North and South Carolina and, focusing on trauma.

And right now that has to do with a lot of survivors of Hurricane Helene. So that’s been a focus the last few months. 

00:10:03:23 – 00:10:14:06 Jen Heller

We’ve been talking about Helene. Yeah. I just wanted to say that if any of the attendees want to drop questions in the chat, we’ll be monitoring chat. Jennifer…

00:10:14:07 – 00:10:37:14 Jennifer Gardner

I’m the other Jennifer on this webinar. I live in North Carolina. In addition to being Audrey Ashdown’s mother, I also work in marketing and communications. And I have experience with hurricanes both in North Carolina and New England. I grew up on the coast of New England, where hurricanes were not uncommon.

I don’t remember them being quite as intense as they are now, and certainly I’ve seen more damage in the town I grew up in than I saw growing up. And then, my daughter Audrey, who’s joining us, I’ll let her introduce herself. She was born in western North Carolina on the front lines for Hurricane Helene. Hi.

00:10:59:23 – 00:11:20:13 Audrey Ashdown

Like, Jennifer said I’m Audrey. I am finishing up my junior year at upstate, so I was up here, when Hurricane Ian hit. I’m currently studying psychology, and I think that about sums it up.

00:11:20:15 – 00:11:31:22 Jen Heller

And I’m so curious. Audrey, had you heard what was your level of hurricane preparedness and knowledge going into Helene?

00:11:31:24 – 00:12:01:05 Audrey Ashdown

I’d say probably nothing. I, you know, I grew up in Chapel Hill and I don’t really remember a lot of. I don’t really remember any hurricanes. I know we definitely had tornadoes, so I kind of know what to do for that. Like, you know, get to lower ground or the bathroom or whatever. But I had never experienced a hurricane, and I honestly did not really know what was coming.

00:12:01:07 Audrey Ashdown

You know, it had been raining a lot, but I did not know that it was that, like, actually serious until we were literally stuck in our apartment and, you know, like the roads were like rivers. So, I would definitely say I did not really have any preparedness.

00:12:20:09 Jen Heller

Did the did your school prepare you at all? Like, did they talk about it? No.

00:12:25:13 Audrey Ashdown

No. I’m sure the chancellor might have sent on an email or something, but, you know, I get a million emails from her, so, like, I don’t think that’s maybe the most effective way to reach students about this. But from what I remember, it kind of took everyone by surprise a little bit. The school definitely, you know, tried to help once we realized how devastating it was going to be.

They set up, like, shelter, and like, food in the convocation center or for people whose apartments got flooded or just people who needed, safe and dry place to stay, but they were not really, to my recollection, communicating with us very much until the, like most of the damage had already been done.

00:13:15:23 Jen Heller

I don’t think anybody expected that hurricane as well. So everybody was caught off guard. And I think that’s the scariest part about all of this, is that we kind of have this expectation of where hurricanes happen and we have this expectation where wildfires happen. And as things are changing, those expectations are being shattered again and again. You know, I live in the Bay area in California, and I saw a video of a tornado in Scotts Valley, so around Santa Cruz, and I was just like Watsonville. We have tornadoes on the West Coast. No, I think not. No, thank you. But this is the kind of thing where unfortunately, things are going to just keep getting mixed up and we really don’t know what to expect. And so we really kind of have to be prepared for all sorts of different things.

00:14:05:19 Jennifer Gardner

And I would just add to what Audrey was sharing, the university also did not do a very good job of communicating with parents, so I felt really horrible when I found out that Audrey was in the situation she was in. I happened to be in Europe at the time, and I was considering, you know, what impact it would have for my younger daughter, who is in Chapel Hill.

And she said, mom, you need to check in on Audrey. And I was shocked that Audrey really had the experience she did. And, information was not coming quickly. And you know, when you travel abroad, you don’t get the same access to the internet that you get when you’re at home. And so I have a lot of guilt about the fact that I had not prepared her, and I could not help her in that moment because I was out of the country and she was, you know, by herself up in the mountains.

And, you know, she didn’t mention that her car flooded. So that was, you know, a challenge. She wanted to come home to Chapel Hill. And suddenly we realized that wasn’t, you know, going to be as easy as we had hoped.

00:15:05:19 Jen Heller

So, Audrey, you were suddenly in a hurricane with no expectation that you would ever face a hurricane. And, Jennifer, you were out of the country, totally powerless to help. And so, Audrey, can you share, like, a little bit of, like, how everything went down for you?

00:15:24:12 Audrey Ashdown

Yeah. So I think it really started to get bad. Maybe like Thursday night or Friday. I mostly remember the first day, you know, I think we lost power. And, you know, it was just raining a lot. It was like, honestly kind of fun in the beginning. We’re, like, just hanging out, like, together, like playing board games because, like, we didn’t have any internet. And we also, like, I was not aware o it. But once I regained internet, I saw that, like, people literally had, like, water, like, up to the ceilings of their apartments. The streets were flooded, like people were being stupid and literally kayaking in the streets. But, I just really did not have any sense of how bad it was for the people around me. But I just remember a lot of rain, and I, you know, eventually our parking lot started to flood a little bit.

But, you know, from where I was, I didn’t really see any of those very bad effects until I got online. But after the first night and day, I remember waking up, I believe, on Saturday, our power was still out, and then we had also lost. I don’t know if we either the water stopped working or we heard that it was not safe to use or drink or like even shower with the water.

That was very scary. We were having to boil our water and, you know, we couldn’t really I mean, I, like you could not drive to, like, a gas station to get bottled water or anything. So I feel like, you know, the power outage thing doesn’t seem super serious, but I feel like once you lose water, it’s like you kind of are like, whoa.

Like, this is actually a big deal. And I remember my, the, my three roommates, they all lived in Charlotte, and they all decided to leave that Saturday. And they got in their cars and were able to drive home. But I live in a totally different direction. And, you know, once I was alone in the apartment not knowing when I was going to get internet or water, I was like, I can’t be here.

I need to go home. I was very scared. And I went out to my car and the mats of the car were, like, muddy. It smelled really bad. So it was clear that water had gone into my car. You couldn’t see the water, but you know, the bottom of it was a little bit wet. And I assumed it was fine.

I got on my car and I started driving. And I remember I was kind of going up this slightly steep hill, turn onto the interstate, and I was pressing the gas going up the hill, and my car just started sliding back with my foot on the gas. And that was terrifying, because, I literally just did not know what to do.

And I had thankfully, like some people helped me get out, but I kind of realized then, that it was not going to be safe for me to go home. I remember calling my mom and she was like, you cannot drive us three hours in that car. Like you don’t know what was going to happen. Every single light on the dashboard was on.

And so I went back to my apartment, and thankfully I was able to get a ride with someone who lived in my area, who had space in their car to go home, which I’m very grateful for, that. And I was able to safely make it home, I believe that Saturday night, but I think the scariest part was definitely, not having clean water and then also just not having access to, the internet because I but the main reason for that being that I could not communicate with people, my service wasn’t working, my Wi-Fi wasn’t working.

So I’d have to, like, go outside and in the rain and walk around if I wanted to get a signal to ask someone for help or get updates from my apartment about when they would be coming to fix the issues. So, I think that lack of information was very difficult, but I will say I had it a lot better than other people in Boone, who just had cars fully flooded, apartments flooded, lost, everything.

So I was very lucky in the sense that I did not lose anything within my apartment. But I did have to sell my car. It was totaled, so I think that was definitely kind of a pain, but, yeah.

00:20:22:10 Jen Heller

So sorry that you went through that, Audrey. So, you know, I read that 28 days after the hurricane, they were still working on restoring cell phone service to some people. So you can I clarify, you didn’t have power, and then you had to boil water. How were you boiling the water?

00:21:01:16 Audrey Ashdown

I think we just did it on a pot. We also, I think we had some water left in our little pitcher, that we drank. So it wasn’t a super long time between when we were told it was unsafe to drink the water and when I was able to leave. But I believe we just boiled tap water.

00:21:02:15 Jen Heller

You had gas. You have a gas stove?

00:21:05:09 Audrey Ashdown

I believe so, yes.

00:21:06:12 Jen Heller

Yeah. Okay. Right on. So that that was still there for you. 

00:21:12:15 Audrey Ashdown

Power went on and off. So, you know, sometimes it would work and then it would go away again. So I think we kind of capitalized on the times when it was back on, but we were one of the only apartment buildings that second night that had power or apartments in our complex, like everyone else’s lights were off, but our lights were on.

So I think we also got lucky there that for some reason we had power more often than the people around us.

00:21:41:20 Jen Heller

So what do you think you wish you had known beforehand going into that if you had to face it again?

00:21:51:09 Audrey Ashdown

I, I don’t know that I have a specific answer. But just generally knowing what my options were and what I should do because, you know, I didn’t have internet to look it up and, you know, just kind of like what to do to keep myself safe, in those situations because, you know, kind of like you were alluding to, like, if I didn’t have, like, a gas stove, I would not have been able to boil water.

And had safe drinking water. So I think just generally knowing what to do in those situations, because I was very much lost and I, you know, had to call my mom and be like, what do I do? How do I leave? Because I just didn’t feel safe. So just kind of knowing what to do when you kind of lose access to everything that we usually have to live.

00:22:46:18 Jen Heller

Right. And I think what, like what I’m hearing in there is that if, you know, all of our resources are online, right? And you couldn’t access online stuff, and that’s why, you know, I made printed books, right? And so that you would have printed resources and of course, printed things can get wet, they can get ruined in a flood or whatever. Right? 

So it’s like thinking through all of that to make sure that you have stuff that you can reference. In the event that you really need to, you know, waterproof matches, maybe a Bunsen burner or something like that so that you, I can’t bring stove, so that you can boil water if you need to, if you’re under, boil, advisory.

00:23:33:11 Audrey Ashdown

My mom’s husband…actually, after the hurricane, he sent me back to school with, like, a kit with a couple of things. And one of the things in it was, radio. I think it was, like, battery powered or something. So that I would at least have access to some sort of, like, messaging from the town or whoever it be, because, you know, if you don’t have access to your phone, then you don’t really.

Radio is kind of the next best thing.

00:24:01:22 Jen Heller

Absolutely. Yes.

00:24:03:05 Jennifer Gardner

Yes. Well, and I would say growing up and we had hurricanes, it was radio or nothing. So I can remember listening to the National Weather Service and, you know, the Oceanic Weather Service, you know, getting updates for hurricanes. So I’m glad you have that radio, but we probably need a few more supplies on that.

00:24:21:18 Jen Heller

And also making sure you know how the radio works beforehand and having extra batteries and, you know, writing down your local emergency alert system radio station. Although I guess you can always just kind of go through the channels to find it. But if you have that stuff ready to go, then you’re in really good shape. I mean, when we first met, you mentioned that, working as a caseworker for FEMA really gave you a lot of respect for Mother Nature.

And I think of that about your the way you phrased that, a lot, because I think that, you know, Mother Nature is extremely powerful. And, some of these storms, as we see, are becoming more and more powerful. So I would love to hear some of the stories of, like, those experiences when you really learned how powerful it could be in I.

00:25:17:11 Amy Conner

That’s such a good question. I remember always thinking how much I hated tornadoes because tornadoes are so arbitrary. There can be a there’s a watch out for a general area, and you’re supposed to kind of be watching and listening and and the warning. But even the warning is pretty nonspecific. My ex-husband tells the story of being stationed in Oklahoma and, having his then wife and kids, in a tub, and he’s got a mattress down on them, and he’s lying on top of the mattress.

And it was when they had the EF5 hurricane and go through Oklahoma City, and it hit a couple of streets up, but not their street. And you have no idea. So hurricanes were less scary to me because it was well, everybody on the coast knows it’s coming and you know it a few days out. And that’s what I’ve always used to keep my kids calm, saying, we prepare for things like hurricanes and there’s time, you know, and we can pack up the van and put the dogs and the cats and go to grandma and grandpa’s. Like, I was less frightened. And I won’t say frightened, but I’m a lot more wary now. I, I don’t think that I’m alone in observing that things are escalating the severity of the storms, the frequency of the storms and the frequency of severe storms all seems to be on the rise. And whoever thought that we would be talking about a catastrophic hurricane hitting Asheville, that was not on my radar.

And I, I think that type of thing. Plus, I’m in the Charlotte area, so I’m very familiar with all of this stuff and wildfires that was not on my bingo cards. You know, in terms of what I’ve prepared for, I am really not prepared for wildfire so much as I am hurricanes. And, what I noticed with people in recovery, there are a number of cities and people tend to think in the in the immediacy.

And in the first few days and weeks after Halloween, that was all. My feed was full of Hurricane Helene. All the time, and it almost got to be a flood of information. That wasn’t that way, because when I worked for FEMA, we didn’t have social media, so it was a little bit less of a firehose of information coming at you.

But there was the immediate emergency then, kind of like grief. There’s there’s a moment where you kind of, okay, everybody’s got somewhere to sleep tonight, and we’re kind of getting our pieces back, but it’s really a long road to recovery. And I think that’s what a lot of people are not prepared for. So they think I’ve got matches.

I’ve got some of these immediate things. But Jen, you’re often talking about make sure you have some books and decks of cards and games because you don’t think about, okay, we’re on day seven without power and internet. How do you think your 13 you’re doing? They’re going to be feral and climbing the walls and need, you know, give them something to do.

And that’s one of the things that I think, we used to be more prepared for and are less so now. So, looking at it from two different perspectives of what it was like 20 years ago and what I’m looking at now. To springboard off of you, Audrey, there were so many things that you talked about that were really just like sparking thoughts in my head. I’m not a big fan of the fact that your roommates left you, but we’re going to leave that for another time, because I’m sure that your mama has some thoughts on that. 

00:28:47:17 Jennifer Gardner

Yeah, I’m in agreement on that.

00:28:48:17 Amy Conner

Right. As a therapist, I’ll jump in and say, you should have been in that car with them and coming on back to Charlotte because Charlotte beats, we will get you to Chapel Hill or where we need to get you. But but one of the things that we need to think about, and I think in terms of preparing our families and our kids in particular, is community because these types of events are very isolating.

And what we found with Hurricane Helene, in the therapy circles is the therapists were overwhelmed because they just lost their houses. They just lost everything. Their business is under water, literally. They don’t know how many of their clients just died. So people are trying to get in there, trying to get access. There’s no communication. And what they were finding was, things were so cut off and so backwards that their neighbor hood thought that they were in a catastrophic situation, you know, in their small neighborhood.

And once they were able, once people were able to get to them or they were able to make their way out of a road, it was, oh my God, it’s bad. Up and down the oh my gosh, you know, they had no idea how extensive the damage was. But it was important that people not be isolated, that we get to community for practical purposes, because the more people you have working on something, you know, this person’s got skills, this person’s got resources, that person’s a nurse, and we can all work together.

We don’t leave roommates behind. We check on doors. You check on neighbors. And, Jen, in the last seminar that you did, which was general disaster preparedness. I love the fact that you talked about get to know your neighbors. Get kind of a, It doesn’t have to be the official town whatever, but kind of an ad hoc committee of, like, hey, people who are looking toward these things, let’s work together and combine our resources so that we never have to feel as alone as you do, because it breaks my heart to think of that.

And I know that you weren’t the only person, and you weren’t the only university student because you’re an adult. But it’s a young adult, and it’s completely appropriate that you want to call mom and, you know, cry and also say, what do I do next? And when we take those communication pieces away from you, we need to make sure that everybody is able to access some type of community, for mental health sake, just as much as for physical safety.

00:31:09:00 Jennifer Gardner

That is so true, Amy. When I was a kid and, you know, a teenager, when we had hurricanes in New England, my parents house was a house that all the neighbors came to. Yeah, everybody planned together and spent time together, and it made a big difference.

00:31:24:03 Amy Conner

And I think it comes back. I think it makes people more resilient because we saw that in communities that were tight knit communities, they rebounded faster, they became stronger. But we often had you know, we knew over at the gardener’s house, we’ve got, you know, whatever. But when people have a place to go to, there’s less of that feeling of helplessness because helplessness is going to drain your physical and mental resources so fast, that you just don’t have enough left to keep going, let alone pull people with you.

And that that can be a huge challenge in disaster recovery.

00:32:01:17 Jen Heller

I think our dependence on our phones and the internet hasn’t done anybody any favors, right? People are way more isolated just because they have so much entertainment on their fingertips, they don’t turn to community nearly as often. I was gonna say, Audrey, I was amazed you even had board games. And not just video games. So you had something to play.

That’s awesome, you know, and that you have, roommates to play that play it with, at least for a little while. You know, that’s really great. But, yeah, I mean, they’ve done a lot of studies that like, because, everybody’s on Instagram and then you have all this image crafting, right? So everybody’s got this beautiful life, right? And so then you don’t invite people over to your messy home or whatever because you’re like, oh, it’s not Instagram ready, you know?

And it’s like nobody’s home. Is Instagram ready? Right? Like even those Instagram influencers rearrange everything right before they take the video. So, you know, we really have to invite people over. And I think that the question of community actually is really complicated when we talk about college students, because college students are only there sometimes for only a year, sometimes for half a year, sometimes for two years.

Not everybody goes for whole four years and can develop that community. And so I would say that, you know, that was on the part of the university, it was their responsibility to introduce some community for you, Audrey, so that you wouldn’t feel so alone. But, you know, without the internet, how are they going to reach you?

Right? I mean, how are they going to find you at that moment?

00:33:37:22 Jennifer Gardner

Well, and at a school like upstate, it’s complex because, you know, after freshman year, students don’t live on campus anymore. So that’s what I was going to say is, like, I have, you know, different communities and like my extracurriculars and whatnot, but my apartment complex is not really near anything other than like houses that, you know, actual don’t live in, and like some stores.

00:34:01:23 Audrey Ashdown

So, you know, if I had been on campus, I think, you know, I might have felt more of that, like, you know, you live in the dorm with people, on your hall, but it was really just me and the people in my building. When the flooding hit your area of Boone pretty hard to because you’re not far from Walmart, which was totally flooded.

Yeah. So you couldn’t even go to the store to be around other people, and it might not have been safe to even try to make it to the store. Yeah, without.

Access to the internet, you wouldn’t have known that. And you didn’t know how far that you weren’t going to make it to Charlotte.

Yeah, we did try to, you know, walk around because we were bored and we wanted to see, like, the Walmart. And it was totally destroyed and something also, a lot of college students were, you know, like swimming and walking around with out, like, rain boots on, you know, which is, I learned, like, very bad because, like, the water has a lot of, like, bacteria and, like, poop in it.

And I think a lot of people just didn’t really realize that it was, like, more than just rain. And it you know, college students are, you know, they’ll do, like, silly stuff like that, like swim in the duck pond. That was just, like a big thing here. But, you know, I don’t think people actually realized that it was like, harmful to your health, potentially.

00:35:25:02 Jen Heller

Dysentery regularly follows big storms because of all the flooding and everything. And so, yeah, it’s a real concern. I don’t know if anybody played Oregon Trail….

00:35:36:15 Amy Conner

You know, everyone died of dysentry on Oregon Trail. 

00:35:42:05 Jen Heller

Well, been back in a big way in a very scary way. I mean, I think thinking about the internet alerts and all this, it makes me really worried about the cuts to know a A and how that informs all of our weather knowledge. And that makes me even more. I mean, obviously, we’re talking about how we can’t rely entirely on the internet, but we do need the internet.

We need these storm warnings. And, you know, there’s some discussion about, you know, they’re cutting it so that they can be privatized. And then people have to pay for weather alerts or, you know, and that just to me, is not at all the direction this country should be going in. It’s just, you know, widening the gap between the people who have the money and the people who don’t.

And, I would much prefer a community solution such as the one we already had with free weather alerts. Jennifer being Audrey’s mom and knowing everything that she had to go through, what would you have done differently or what would you do the next time?

00:36:49:17 Jennifer Gardner

What would I do differently? Well, I’m realizing that it’s a critical life skill to know how to prepare for weather events. And so that’s something that, Audrey, you’re going to have to work on, making sure that she has the supplies and the knowledge that she needs going forward. I mean, you just don’t even think about it as a parent.

It’s not on the checklist like you think, oh, my kid’s going off to college. She better learn how to do a laundry and run the dishwasher. But it’s so much more than that.

00:37:17:08 Amy Conner

I’m so glad you said that, Jennifer, because my, I’m sending my first person off to college next year and all the preparations that you do and and all the preparations that you read about when they talk about your children, they’re thinking more of, like the children, children that, you know, probably more the 12 and under, but less so much the teenagers.

And then what about the ones who may not be under your roof at that time? And I’m so glad that it’s the two of you talking about this, because this is kind of an each group that I don’t think I’ve ever seen addressed anywhere about. What do you do with your young adult child? Sorry. We’re always going to think of you as a kid, but someone for whom you are responsible, you know?

And, everything, every cell in her body was screaming, get back to North Carolina and get your baby. And I, I we really haven’t prepared. My older daughter thinks that I’ve gone off some kind of, like, prepper cliff, like mama, do we need to talk about. And I said, no, we really don’t. I think you forget that.

I used to see what happens with disasters, and I’m not going bonkers. I’m not, you know, building a dugout in the back and, you know, arming it to the teeth to, you know, fend off whatever. But you are getting a go bag. Would you like this color or this color? So we all have a little go back now.

And I said anxiety, which is something she’s very prone to, is your brain’s, your brain’s primal attempt to prepare you and keep you safe. So knowing that, okay, we live in a modern age, we’re not running from cavemen coming after us or wild boars coming. You know, in general, it’s trying to think of all the different scenarios and some of the scenarios now are legit scary.

So what you can do with that anxiety is okay, fine. Put in a certain level of preparedness does not mean going off the deep end like my daughter was a little concerned about, but sorry Jen, I am going to plug your program for just a quick second. So the FEMA, FEMA part of me, the mom part of me, the former teacher part of me, the therapist, I love this because it doesn’t.

It’s not about I have no illusions that I’m going to be leading my two daughters through the wilderness, and we’re going to be backpacking, as we point out, like Navy Seals. And it’s going to be like, are you kidding me? After 48 hours of not having Instagram, they’re going to lose their minds. So I need to be realistically prepared of most likely we’re going to have to plug in.

And if that doesn’t work, where can we go. And okay, they no longer live there. So like we’ve talked about where would we go? Because it used to be my parents in Pennsylvania, they had a well and 13 acres. And you know, you could hunker down there for years. But I told her if a Hurricane Helene situation happened, I need you to think through, not worry through, but think through your plan.

If I can’t get to mama, where do I go? If I can’t get to that, where would I go on campus? Where would I go? And your bag is going to have shelter and blankets. It’s going to have a weather radio. She thinks that’s the goofiest thing she ever heard. Wait till I tell her about Audrey. But it’s going to have certain things to make sure that you can take care of at least yourself, for at least three days, preferably longer.

But you can at least keep it together for a few days until somebody can get to you. Because that was the big lesson from Helene. And the thing that also makes me feel good is I have a lot of friends in higher ed, and I think there’s a lot of discussion among higher ed communities about, well, I don’t think we really have a what are we going to do if we face a situation like that, Oklahoma, the wildfires a month or two, I don’t know.

It’s all blurring together. But, a bunch of universities that were affected by the dust storms and wildfires in Oklahoma handled it differently because they kind of saw what happened with Helene. And there were ways for kids to get in contact with their parents. Because some people had thought through and, and talked with their kids about, okay, what do we do next?

00:41:20:15 Jennifer Gardner

That’s good to hear, because I was really surprised at how little came at it from the university and because we were in another country, as I mentioned before, like we could not get the access to the information that we would have gotten here. And so it was very spotty and I didn’t really know what was going on. And I was a little disappointed in the university, to be honest.

I don’t think that they handled as well as they could have, but hopefully the next time something like this happens, we’ll be better prepared and I will do my best to help Audrey prepare a little behind on that. But even just knowing, like memorizing each other’s phone numbers is a critical skill that that’s a big one. But yeah.

00:41:59:04 Amy Conner

Well, I laminated them and they’re in everybody’s bag because they know mine. That’s great. But if if Emily is at college and our areas hit and she can’t get through to me, she’s not going to know her grandparents phone number, right? She’s not going to know. If I’m in Europe and something happens because that’s not unreasonable, Jennifer.

And I’m really glad that when Jen asked you, what would you do differently, I thought, oh, here, here we go. I was really afraid you were going to have, like, buckets and buckets of mom guilt and mom shame.

00:42:33:12 Jennifer Gardner

I have some mom guilt. I’m not going.

00:42:35:00 Amy Conner

I’m sure you do. And I was like, please let her give herself some grace. Your daughter was still surrounded by a college community. And, you know, at the end of the day, she kept her head on straight. She majored in places. You sent her out into the world. Ready? And now it’s like, okay, now we can be also ready for this.

Like, what happens if your car gets flooded? Don’t try to drive it. I think I ever mentioned that to my kid.

00:42:59:22 Jennifer Gardner

But she never had a flooded car, so we haven’t thought of it.

00:43:04:12 Amy Conner

No, that’s not one that’s not on the checklist that they give you for sending your kid to college.

But I think right now a lot of people are sending their kids with some weather radios. And I did talk with my daughter. I said, you, you’ve grown up in the South and you’ve grown up in the area with underground utilities. You don’t know what it’s like to lose power for a few days. And you don’t know. I remember my sophomore year in college, they had rolling blackouts because it was such a severe winter storm, and it was so cold that the energy grid or the electricity grid couldn’t keep up with things.

So it was be prepared for all lights out and the like. We all gathered in one dorm room, turned all the lights out, and we had one light we’re trying to study, which actually became kind of fun, but because we knew we were safe enough, it got to be fun. Otherwise it would have been scary. And I told her, you’ve never had to dig your car out of the snow.

You’ve never been stranded on the side of a road without a cell phone service. And that’s not completely out of the question. So, you know, if you’re going to have a bag in the back of your car and it’s going to have a couple of things so that you can hunker down for a bit.

And, you know, that’s been more common in California, right? I think, you know, with earthquakes, people often do have supplies in their car. But down south here we don’t. So that’s an opportunity for us to be better prepared in the future.

00:44:22:24 Amy Conner

Same thing with paper maps. Jennifer, you drive home the paper, you drive home paper. And I’m so glad that you do, because everything that I have, I save it all on Evernote. And I’ve often thought I would be really screwed if I don’t have access to that. But I brought home. The girls think I’m goofy, but I’m getting paper maps for as many states as I can right now, especially states on the way to Canada and I brought home South Carolina.

They’re like, mama, we live here! Like, yeah, and if I asked you to get to Lexington, how are you going to get there? Okay. Ways in the zombie apocalypse ways doesn’t work. And during a hurricane, you may lose cell service. You may not have this. You need to understand how to read a map and how to make a different direction around.

These are just life skills that they don’t have. And I’m kind of old school, and I think you need to memorize a few numbers and you need to know how to read and refold a map.

00:45:23:16 Jen Heller

We had a team meeting earlier today, and literally everybody in the team meeting was talking about how they can’t read a map, and I was just like, okay, we need to take a break right now and get out a map and like, pick a location and get over there without using the GPS on your phone, because this is a skill that has been lost to time.

Audrey, do you know how to read a map?

00:45:49:20 Audrey Ashdown

I don’t know. I’m not super confident that I would be able to do that. 

I mean, I think I, you know, in theory, like, I could do it. But I have never had to really. So.

00:46:08:16 Jen Heller

Well, and this is the kind of thing that I think is going to be more fun to try to do it ahead of time than in the event of an emergency. Right? You know, I always say that like, it’s hard to make decisions when you’re feeling triggered. And in the event of the unexpected, it’s very easy to freak out.

Right? Which is why I’m saying try your emergency radio right now. You know, see that you know how to do that. You’re not, like, trying to, like, read through the boring instruction manual at that moment. Try to go somewhere using the map instead of your phone just to see if you can, you know, and then try it again, you know, maybe once a week for a couple weeks until you get comfortable with it.

One of the things that we have people do as part of the playbook and creating their plans is to designate meeting places. And so as we talk about college students going off, especially to places that they’ve never been before, like, you know, if I was going to college down the South, right, I never would have thought that I needed to learn how to prepare for hurricanes.

Right. Like that wouldn’t have been on my radar, just like it wasn’t, you know, on Jennifer’s radar for you, Audrey. But, now that we know that it needs to be a good step to consider for your college students is like, if you have to leave where are you going to go? You know, and getting some of your extracurricular groups, some of your friends, have the same designated meeting places so that if you had evacuated to higher ground, if you had a meeting place that was higher, just in case, maybe you would have seen some friendly faces and felt less alone and had some of that community.

00:47:52:22 Amy Conner

I like that a lot because it also, if you have groups who are checking in on each other in person when things are down, they notice that Audrey isn’t here yet. We should have seen Audrey. Let’s go take a couple people down and check her apartment. And that’s the kind of community thing that keeps us safer and keeps us more connected and less frightened and more, enabled, more equipped in an emergency. We need to feel that we have agency, that we have the ability to make some choices and to do something to change our circumstances, even when they’re bad. And that’s why giving people jobs to do is important. I gave my card. I’m like, I will get the nurses. I get all the documents and birth certificates.

You guys each get your cat, you’re responsible for the cats. And I gave them your list, which I love, which is we have 30s to get out of the house. What are you grabbing? We have five minutes to get out of the house. What are we grabbing? We have an hour to get out of it. And it’s so smart because they were both my cat.

Like, yes, your cat. But if the house was on fire and we lost an awful bunny, you’re going to care about that down the road. So all this other stuff we can, we can replace your phone, we can replace your laptop. What are the things that really can’t be replaced? That goes on the five minute list. And the same thing with college.

I need that list from you. And I need that stuff in one spot so that if you were not here, I grab your stuff and hopefully I can take it with me. But you know, you are responsible for your go bag and the things in it, and I know that. And who made the I think it was one of my daughters about Corgi going in it.

And I said yes, absolutely. That is I’m putting that in there with the bottled water and the food and that kind of stuff. And yeah, because comfort items after the initial emergency and that’s what we forget. Comfort items matter a lot. And then you have a community, especially people who’ve lost the things that make them feel good, their weighted blanket, their favorite pillow.

They’re, you know, and it’s not just the kids. We all have something that makes us feel at home and puts our nervous systems at ease. And, that’s where the community piece becomes important in the, as you progress out of the immediate aftermath.

00:50:02:16 Jen Heller

And mental health wise. Do you have some tips, Amy, in terms of like, recovery? So I read that if you play a lot of Tetris after a terrifying event, you’ll have less PTSD. You know, I don’t know that that’s a very actionable, to do unless you have Tetris somewhere you.

00:50:22:20 Amy Conner

Have access to, to keeping your brain busy is going to be a big thing, because the idle brain needs something to do. So it’s going to start to worry and start. And again, the anxiety comes in because now it’s going to be what are all the scenarios. And your ability to affect them right now is going to be limited.

So if you’re at a community shelter because of a hurricane, so you’re sleeping right now on a cot in a school like at state, from what I saw from other parents, I think they did a better job with the kids who were on campus. They kind of went door to door, corral them, and it was, okay, we’re coming to the dining hall.

We’re shepherding you over here. Everybody. You know, they were trying to get the word out for the kids who were there directly, but, keeping busy in some way, shape or form, and that’s going to look drastically different. One of the things I talked about before is feeling that agency, especially with kids, give them a job because when they when people feel powerless, I’ve lost everything.

It saps your energy. Oddly, when you when we, when you have community centers and it would be shocking people who have just walked through hell are in charge of sorting the donated clothes into sizes, and suddenly you see them coming back into themselves and feeling better about it. And, I want to I would advise against the I heard Jennifer, you said or I’m sorry, Audrey, you were acknowledging your grief and what you had lost and some of the traumatic things that you went through, and you kind of caught yourself and said, you know, most people had it so much worse.

It’s okay. You can acknowledge the people who lost family and houses and communities, and you can also feel the grief of what you went through, which was very, very real. So getting yourself into a place where you give yourself space, where you’re physically safe enough, you have shelter, water, food, give yourself a moment to breathe and feel those feelings. And even if you can’t get yourself over to it, sometimes you need to set a timer.

I’m going to take five minutes over here on the cot and cry like a fool. Get it out of my system. Let your nervous system reset. And then say, I’ll have another opportunity to do this tomorrow and make sure I have this chance. Something that we do a lot in trauma is bilateral stimulation. So using two parts, the two sides of the body.

So something we often do with especially kids, they like the butterfly hug. So you cross your arms across yourself and tap about once a second and keep doing that. And the bilateral stimulation for whatever reason, helps calm down the nervous system. It, it reassures the body that it’s present and that it’s safe in that moment. Because if you were running from wolves, you would not be doing this.

It helps reset things, so that you know that you’re safe. And the one, the one big tip that I often use with kids, there are going to be traumatic events no matter what. You cannot bubble wrap your kids and shield them from stuff. So, my daughter’s one. I used to let them ride. So there was a really long winter, and I let them ride brand new scooters through the house.

They had hardwoods, and just to keep them from going crazy, they would do like the Indy 500. Like between the kitchen and the dining room, they’d come around on the corner and they loved it. And this went on for weeks. And then I heard this scream one day and every mom knows that scream. It’s not just bad, but it’s bad.

Well, I came flying out of the shower and her dad came, right? Her sister came running and her toe was caught in the like machinery of the what? We couldn’t get it out.

We have remnants of that day, so, like, it’s our special toe, like, the most special thing, but her nervous system, you could see about every five minutes, and then 15 minutes, she’d be talking, and then she’d start.

Her body was reliving it and reprocessing it, and it was right. When you deal with kids and actually people of any age get them to keep talking about their story until until they get to a safe place. So the flooding came down and it was so loud and everything was going by. We saw the cars getting washed by the house and whatever they need to say to get it out.

But don’t let them finish that story until they get to the point where then somebody knocked on our door. Oh, and who was that? How many times they needed? It was the fire department, and they brought us out. And then some people took us on kayaks and we did this and we and then we got to. Right. And then you and then you got here to the shelter with us.

However many times they need to process that you make them get it to the end point of that story where they are physically and, as much as possible, emotionally safe. And that’s what kids will learn, is that, yeah, there are moments where it feels like the world is ending, but something some at some point this ends and I’m okay.

I’m going to be okay. Somebody comes and then she would laugh how mommy came running naked from the shower, all wet and soap and you know, and it became a funny story. But yes, everybody came. So it was very, very bad and everybody came. And Hurricane Helene was very, very bad. And people came from around the world literally to come and get you guys and help rebuild.

So that would probably be my my quick off the top of my head tips, particularly for kids.

00:55:52:04 Jennifer Gardner

Or something that I think it helped me and my husband was. So he got the emergency supplies for Audrey immediately. We still have more to get, but she has a few basics, and we also started donating supplies so we felt like we were helping with the recovery.

00:56:07:24 – Amy Conner

You did. You took agency. So I want to step into something. I want to help, I want to I need a job, give me a job. And that put you back into yourself and gave you a sense of balance and purpose and groundedness.

00:56:21:24 Jennifer Gardner

Exactly. Audrey, what helped you? I don’t really know. I think just generally, it was definitely nice getting some time off from school to just kind of reset and not really have anything to do. But I, I think it was helpful to, you know, I have a therapist, so I talked to her about it. And then also just to kind of spend some times doing things that I like, and, you know, are like, comforting to me or that bring me joy.

00:56:54:22 Audrey Ashdown

I played a lot of video games during the break. Hung out with my dogs and my sister. So just, like, kind of coming back to things that I, like to do and I know will, like, bring me joy. Well, and we have very snuggly dogs, so that does help. There’s a reason.

00:57:15:01 Amy Conner

Dogs they’re the best, especially with people who aren’t able to verbalize what’s going on, kids or people who are more stoic or who feel like, you know, I’m in charge of the family and I can’t have my feelings or anything. I can do it with a dog. So God bless his dogs.

00:57:38:07 Jen Heller

We’ve talked a lot about action, and I just love the quote that action is an antidote to fear because we’re in just such scary times and I think that doing the going through the process of creating a disaster plan and getting everybody on the same page is not at the top of anybody’s, like, want to do list, right?

You know? But it is a very important to do. And once you’ve done it, then you really can kind of relax because there’s so much that is out of our hands, right? You know, there’s so much that’s out of our hands. We really don’t know what extreme weather event we will personally face next. It hopefully we never have to face another one.

You know, but FEMA is the federal agency that generally helps communities to, handle the event and then recover. And, there have been a lot of threatened cuts to FEMA, that I’m personally quite worried about, especially as we enter hurricane season. Amy, and your experience at FEMA, how how do you think that, the changes the Trump administration is making will affect our communities?

00:59:00:13 Amy Conner

Pray for a moment that Jesus take the wheels of my mouth. FEMA can be. It may very well be a dramatically different agency than the one I served in years ago. However, most of the negative stuff that I saw after Helene was very clearly targeted disinformation about FEMA, what they were doing, what they were not doing.

There’s a Navy Seal bag out guide that has some good information. And then there’s this whole section of how to stay off FEMA’s radar when she lies. They’re literally handing out money to people because they the whole purpose was to make sure that everyone had a safe roof to sleep under at night. And I’m not sure when that became a bad thing.

I have grave concerns about the safety and security of our country. Of our communities. No state, no county, no town is prepared financially or logistically to recover from a natural disaster, especially something I’m they’re bad enough with, like just wildfires that are localized. They need assistance. And when you have something that’s bigger or better, a string of tornadoes or, hurricanes, they simply require the the bigger, better resources of the federal big brother.

Sorry. That’s just that’s just the way it is. There’s a reason everybody went to your house, Jennifer. It sounded like you had room enough for people to come stuff for them to do, food for them to eat. And that’s that’s where we need a federal agency who can take those funds or take those logistics and respond. There were boots on the ground before Helene hit.

Despite unbelievable information to the contrary, they were there. They were operating, they were handing out $750. And that money was not alone. You didn’t have to pay it back. And that was not all that people were given because they were not giving money to undocumented immigrants in their state. The 750 was being handed to people as they came to put in an application for assistance.

My house has been flooded. So sorry. Let’s get you on the roster. We’ll have an inspector out there. You know, it’s taking forever because they’re literally coming on horseback. But here’s your name. In the meantime, here’s $750 to go get diapers to go get some some water to go get meds to, you know, for it for your immediate needs today without that kind of access that towns, cities, states simply don’t have.

As we enter hurricane season, as we start seeing wildfires in places we’re not, sadly, flooding in the mountains, wildfires in the Carolinas. I am very, very concerned. And I think that that has implications for us in terms of safety. And it has great implications for us in terms of mental health, because when push comes to shove, if we start feeling like I have to start thinking about myself, me and mine versus the community angle, I that’s where I start worrying about security implications.

Because sometimes when we are feeling threatened and cornered, we don’t make the best choices. We’re not thinking out of the best parts of ourselves. I’d like to think that most of us would. But the reality is we have seen, you know, behavior to the contrary. And so I would, I have from a professional perspective, I have concerns about what that will mean for us, nationally, as we seem to have more and more severe, incidents that require more of a federal response.

Did I say that delicately enough?

01:02:44:17 Jen Heller

That was perfectly delicate. Yes, I could have sworn a little more.

01:02:51:00 Amy Conner

That’s okay. But if it were not being reported, Delta, I’ll probably wind up dropping a couple of F bombs.

01:02:59:24 Jen Heller

Yes. I actually saw a report that the insurance agency, released that said that, you know, capitalism will crumble due to the oil and gas industries continuing causing this, the extreme weather, because it will be so expensive for us to rebuild and, you know, my personal experience is that I have multiple families in my extended family that have lost their homes to wildfires, and watching those towns try to rebuild.

I mean, one of them, it’s been eight years and that neighborhood will never be the same. You know, there’s still just like large tracts that haven’t been rebuilt. And we’re losing housing faster than we’re building it because of the extreme weather. And also without FEMA’s, resources to help people, recover, at that brings the likelihood of dysentery even higher rate.

And dysentery is actually quite fatal. If you suffer from it, there’s a reason why so many people in Oregon Trail died from it, because it really is a terrible thing to happen. And it happens because of flooding. It happens because of extreme weather. And it happens because of lack of, you know, planned, relief. But we should end on a positive.

01:04:24:00 Jennifer Gardner

So let’s get empowered. That’s where I think we have to take this is how do we teach our young adults to take care of themselves? And how do we take care of our families?

01:04:33:13 Jen Heller

So what’s something that we’re all going to do in the next month to prepare for our households?

01:04:43:02 Amy Conner

I told my daughters that by the end of this weekend, by Mother’s Day, they have to have their checklists done and it’s going to be on their their bedroom on the back of the bedroom door. It’s going to be an a, page protector and stick it back there. And then something happens. There it is. We know what you’ve got to do.

01:05:00:19 Jennifer Gardner

I love that. I think one of the things that I want to make sure that my daughters have is that they can get their prescriptions that they need, right. So making sure that we have that information stored somewhere so that if they need a refill in case of an emergency, that that’s something that is accessible.

01:05:20:04 Amy Conner

Jennifer, I would also piggyback on that and say, I think the website is Mama Bear or Mama Bear legal. If you have a young adult child, if they’re agreeable and they probably will be, there’s a set that you can buy of legal documentation that gives you a power of attorney so that you can refill a medication for your kid if she’s she needs whatever she needs in Asheville and they don’t have it, and you can refill it in Charlotte and get it to her or something like that.

Or it also gives you the legal ability to call up the hospital and say, I need to. I need to know Audrey Ashdown’s medical status. Have those documents and make sure you have card copies of them, preferably laminated or in some kind of a fire box, that kind of thing. But these.

01:06:06:06 Jennifer Gardner

That’s when you don’t even think of. Right?

01:06:07:23 Amy Conner

Like, oh, but.

01:06:09:00 Jennifer Gardner

It’s like Audrey is going to be 21 next week. And I realized that I can’t talk to the doctor anymore, but I never thought of the fact that you.

01:06:15:12 Amy Conner

Haven’t been able to talk to her doctor for some time.

01:06:17:22 Jennifer Gardner

No, I haven’t, and that’s been fine, but but it’s it’s stuff that.

01:06:23:03 Amy Conner

And we go. And that was what has happened. In a completely unrelated situation. It was a mother whose daughter there was a circumstance at her university, and she wasn’t able to talk to the hospital about what was going on with her daughter because their daughter was 19 or like, we can’t speak with you. So that’s the kind of thing that you want to make sure that you do that you have take care of, as your kids go off to college or jobs or the military that you have the opportunity to do that.

I’m going to throw in another plug for the Disaster Playbook. I love that itjust it’s done for you. There are a couple of F-bombs in there. The jokes are great. 

She’s thought through the practical things where again, we’re not going to be, you know, surviving in the wilderness and doing that. But these are the things okay. Think about this and then okay, if a tornado tornado hit and you’ve got kids at three different schools, what’s going to happen? Where are we going to go? I live in a, nuclear zone, a nuclear whatever.

We’re like a couple miles away from a nuclear reactor. So I’ve talked with the kids about this is the plan, and they send it out every year. Here’s the pamphlet. This is where these schools will be taken. So I will meet you somewhere you’ve never been. But I’ll get there. You stay put. You listen to the adults in charge, and I will get to you.

And now that they’re getting older, I have to change that plan because it’s like, well, one’s not going to be here and the other is going to be in high school. And so what are we going to I got to revisit my plans.

01:07:47:19 Jen Heller

Always the thing that will always be true. We need to maintain.

01:07:52:08 Amy Conner

The stock, refresh the food and then refresh the plans. Like, okay, my parents are no longer Pennsylvania. Where’s our, hits the fan location? Where are we going to go? And if that’s not available, where do we go from there?

01:08:05:22 Jen Heller

Audrey, any take home actions that you’ll be taking?

01:08:10:05 Audrey Ashdown

I really like the checklist idea. And it also made me think about storing, the, you know, my, like, kind of important items in one place in my room at my mom’s house. You know, in case something happened and I wasn’t there to go find the things, that are kind of scattered around the room.

01:08:29:22 Jen Heller

That’s awesome.

01:08:31:01 Jennifer Gardner

And we’re going to learn about reading maps.

01:08:33:11 Jen Heller

Yes.

01:08:35:23 Amy Conner

And none of this is about living in fear. It’s living in preparedness, which should reduce the anxiety because you’ve done what is practically possible. And at some point you say, I’ve done what I can reasonably, if it’s this much worse, you know what? Maybe it’s your time.

01:08:52:01 Jennifer Gardner

Like if the if.

01:08:52:16 Jen Heller

It’s like it goes off, it goes,

01:08:54:05 Amy Conner

You know, there’s only so much I can do. I can’t fly a helicopter. I don’t really have access to one, so. But I can make sure we have enough food to like my. My family can withstand a month, and I’m not publicizing that on social media, but, you know, I would make sure that my next door neighbor, single mom, is in good shape.

And tell her, come over and stay with us if that’s what you need, that kind of thing. I have a generator and she doesn’t, so come on over.

01:09:19:09 Jen Heller

That is community coming through right there.

01:09:22:11 Amy Conner

Yeah, yeah, I think. Like my leave off final thing, at the end of the day, I still, despite the last ten years, I still believe at the end of the day, most people are tuned toward good when it’s in front of them, when there’s a need, when there’s a person in crisis. I think most of us, whatever our political beliefs, are going to have something in our in our character that wants to help.

When they see a young woman who’s far away from home and has no way to contact them. I have a hard time believing that people in that community wouldn’t bring Audrey in and say, hey, we have a spare room, or we have a working cell phone, or we have a walkie. You know, my husband’s a ham radio operator or something.

Yeah, we step up and we give, but we have to help people because I, I haven’t seen a disaster where it hasn’t happened yet.

01:10:18:11 Jen Heller

That is such a wonderful way to sum up. And today because my therapist when I freak out always says “look for the helpers.” The helpers show you that humanity is actually quite good. And we’re seeing a lot of terrible examples of people being pretty awful humans in the world. But I agree with you, Amy. I think in general, humanity, humans are good inside.

This weekend I will teach my eight year old the difference between right and left so that someday he might build a road map. Cause I don’t think you’re really going. And, thank you all for joining me today. It’s been such a pleasure talking with you. If you’re watching online, please visit our website. Here comes the Apocalypse for more resources and look at our upcoming events page to sign up for more events like this.

Thank you everyone and have a wonderful day!