By Ourselves, For Ourselves: Part 5.1

It has been a long time since the last By Ourselves post. Over two months, in fact. My apologies.

Personally, I blame Boomershoot. I’m kidding! I actually blame myself for getting very busy as of the past few months and not taking the time to keep up with things. I will attempt to do better in the future

By Ourselves: Part 5 dealt with what you might face if disaster strikes and you are not at home, which is a very likely scenario seeing as how we all spend a decent amount of time somewhere else.

For those relatively new to RNS, you can click this link to get caught up on the series so far. In the coming days/weeks David will be sharing his rather excellent lists of items he keeps in his vehicle for emergencies such as what I wrote about in Part 5.

Today though, I would like to share with you some thoughts I’ve had since I first restarted this series. They focus around choosing the proper daily transportation.

For those who have followed this series or have just joined us after getting caught up, I started this after an rather caustic windstorm hit my locale back in November, followed closely by what is as near a blizzard as the Pacific NW region gets. While I was always able to get to work whenever there was work to do, I saw some rather questionable choices of vehicles that my fellow PacNW residents chose for their daily transportation.

At the time, I was driving my loyal steed, the 1997 F-150 named Goldfinger. In the Fall I calculated the number of years since our last snowstorm and decided that the winter of 2006 was going to be “the year” and had made the purchase of some very aggressive All Terrain rubber, which I am still thanking myself today for buying.

However, I saw a rather frightening number of folks who had put little-to-no thought or planning into their choice of daily transport vehicle. And that is what I’d like to talk about here today.

As always, I encourage your thoughts and opinions on this matter as I don’t know it all and while I have driven a great number of them, I haven’t driven them all. So please, feel free to share in the comments.

Now, if you would care to join me below the fold….

You really can’t be driving your SHTF vehicle to and from work. It isn’t good for you or your vehicle. So you have to settle for something that’ll get both jobs done: Getting you to and from work reliably and definitely get you home if the emergency arises.

Like I stated above, my daily driver during last year’s “inclimate weather” was a two-wheel drive full-sized truck. It did very well, though I would have probably appreciated a manual transmission over the slushbox. I did not, however, feel that I ever had the need of four wheel drive, though I’m sure it may have been nice to have available, just in case. These days I drive a 1992 Ford Ranger nameed Walker to and from my residence and my place of employ. This little truck has mildly aggressive all season tires and that manual transmission I was wanting in my full sized truck. It is a two-wheel drive, but again, I’m not so sure that driving 60 miles daily in a 4×4 is best for either the vehicle or for your “just in case” needs. Sometimes, espcially on ice, four wheels with power behind them can mean trouble.

But some of the vehicles I saw out on the road during that time defied all reason and I can come to no other conclusion than these folks had nothing else to drive, so they drove what they had. It is either that, or they didn’t care if their brand spanking new Dodge Charger Daytona Hemis and Nissan 350Zs got wrapped around stuff. Because that is what happened. I saw the guy with the Daytona pull out of his housing development onto the main arterial as I was travelling down the main arterial.

He made it twelve blocks before going up on the curb and stuffing a row of fifteen mail boxes through his rear passenger window and out his rear driver side windown. The guy with the Z-car went up an on-ramp, lost traction and came back down the on-ramp and into a large vehicle wearing a Peterbilt badge. Actually, I think the Nissan was wearing that badge by the time he came to a complete stop.

Those were just two of the more egregious willful idiots I witnessed. I’m sure there were hundreds more I didn’t see.

People with bald tires were common. I saw them when traffic was crawling and made sure to stay the hell away from them. Another decent sized group of people I saw were those who hadn’t taken care of their vehicle’s engine cooling system. I was getting gas and actually heard a guy who was waiting for a wrecker say “It’s below freezing. I never thought it’d overheat in this kind of weather.” Yeah, I wanted to slap him around too.

Murphy’s Law folks. I know that to be able to find RNS on the web more than a couple times, you have to be smart enough to know these things, but keeping that maintenance up still needs to be repeated.

During the windstorm we had more trees down across major arterials than I remembered from the last windstorm a decade prior. I kept a tow strap in the truck for the ones I knew I could drag out of the way and a chainsaw for the rest. But there were folks in minivans just driving over downed tree limbs and getting flat tires. I saw the driver of one standard sedan high-center their front-wheel drive car, and he was being rather cautious about it. A few others I saw (and heard) had ripped pieces of their exhaust off driving through the debris. My local shop told me that they had three punctured oil pans and even an odd couple of punctured transmission pans.

But by far, the most odd thing I saw during both the ice and snow and the windstorm was how many people had given up on getting where they were going and had gotten stuck in the Interstate and State Route Highway medians. They hadn’t just nosed off and over the shoulder and gotten stuck in the muck; you could see their deliberate tracks in the mud or the snow and could tell that they’d just been sitting in traffic for far too long and given up on getting to their destination. They’d entered the flypaper at either the wrong angle, or with faulty equipment and gotten stuck.

This is probably going to be your most common obstacle during an emergency. Earthquake, terrorist strike, etc. The folks in other vehicles travelling alongside you are going to find out about the emergency at the same time you do and will most likely have the same reaction as you: Go Home Now. They’re all going to want to turn around and some of them aren’t going to wait until the next off-ramp to do so.

You don’t actually want to be the biggest vehicle on the road during all of this. In fact, a smaller vehicle will be able to go and get through places a larger one will not.

You’re going to want more than the standard amount of ground clearance for driving over any debris and through goopy mud. You’re going to want tires that can dig and can take a good knock or poke on both the tread surface and the sidewall. Your standard two-ply tires won’t be able to do that.

Most important of all, you’re going to want to always have at least a half-tank of gas in the vehicle. Five miles from home could take a couple hours, depending on the time of day.

These are just a few things to think about for your daily driver. Like I said at the beginning, David will be along with lists of items to keep inside the vehicle in the near future. And again, your ideas, suggestions and comments are welcome.