The Carolina Contractor Show
The Carolina Contractor Show
Western NC Catastrophe: Flood Prep and Insurance Insights…
What if a flood could put everything you own in jeopardy? On this episode of the Carolina Contractor Show, Eric Smith and general contractor Donnie Blanchard tackle the pressing issue of flood preparedness and insurance coverage, especially in the wake of Hurricane Helene's devastation in North Carolina. Drawing from personal experiences in hard-hit areas like Little Switzerland and Boone, we bring you vivid accounts of navigating blocked roads and prolonged power outages. Donnie shares his unique perspective as a former insurance adjuster during Hurricane Katrina, revealing the often misunderstood intricacies of flood insurance. You’ll learn essential strategies for protecting your home, including the use of high-capacity generators and how you can support recovery efforts through groups like Samaritan's Purse.
Our discussion doesn’t stop there; we equip you with practical strategies tailored for properties that are vulnerable to water runoff. Discover the importance of proper drainage systems and innovative solutions, such as water-activated flood bags and the DoorDam, to shield your home from potential damage. We stress the importance of disaster preparedness essentials, from maintaining a water supply and emergency kits to safeguarding critical documents. Our reflections on past disasters highlight the crucial roles of communication and planning, offering you the tools to stay safe in emergencies. Tune in for invaluable advice that could be the difference in how you face severe weather challenges.
Welcome to the Carolina Contractor Show with your host, general Contractor Donnie Blanchard. And, yeah, welcome to another edition of the Carolina Contractor Show. My name is Eric Smith, across from me, general Contractor Donnie Blanchard, and usually this time of the show we've been starting it off because of football season, talking about scores and teams and stuff like that. But that kind of takes a backseat to everything with what we had occurring with Hurricane Helene and we're not going to go over the destruction. It's pretty obvious, probably the most devastating thing that's ever happened to the state of North Carolina. I've been here my whole life.
Speaker 2:You pretty much too, donnie, you'd agree right, I would say the exact same thing and my daughters actually took notice. And when you have teenagers saying Dad, that's really bad, you know it's definitely worse than people realize and I told them. Not since those areas have been colonized have they had something like this. So when people started to move there and form towns, I read back where, I think in 1920 something they had similar flooding, but it didn't touch this one.
Speaker 1:My sister lives in little Switzerland which is just a little north of Asheville. Her house, pretty much, is fine. They had some damage on the A-frame at the top from trees falling over and they have no power. She said it was the scariest thing she's ever experienced. But below her there's a lodge or a hotel and they've got like 300 people stranded there. The roads are impassable and she even said when she contacted me she said we plan to be up here for weeks before we can get out or get power because they're not super isolated. But there's just so much, much damage and you have familiarity because you're an App State guy right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but I think App State sits high enough on the hill that they are okay. I've talked to several people in Boone this past week and I think that the passage from 321 south of Blowing Rock is all blocked off so you can't come in that way but you can still access Boone by 421. So you know, head through Winston-Salem and the people coming up from Charlotte. I want to say the 77 access, highway 77 access is back open. So they did say that they are shuttling generators into Lowe's and I got the same question from everybody what size do I buy?
Speaker 2:I said the biggest one they got, because you know a generator is going to take two people to load it up and you want to go ahead and get the one with the highest capacity that they have available. Because I said it's going to be musical drop cords. You're going to be figuring out if nobody's wired with a transfer switch up there. I mean, I'm sure there are people that were more prepared, but most of the houses don't have the external plug that you can hook the generator to and then flip the transfer switch in their breaker panel box and basically do this a safe way. So they're going to be reliant on drop cords to each appliance that they need. And I said it's going to be a situation where you may not have hot water but you can keep your freezer, your fridge and whatever survived the last three or four days going. But yeah, boone didn't get it nearly as bad as everybody else.
Speaker 1:We've talked about generators many times and people can go look up those if they want to go more in depth of what type of generator or alternative methods that you can use. The website's a place to start thecarolinacontractorcom. We've also got YouTube channels up Facebook, instagram. We've got podcasts. By the way, speaking of podcasts, the Carolina Contractor has like 200 plus episodes and you can find them, like on Apple. We have a five star rating.
Speaker 1:Also want to thank all our listeners who take the time just to even just click the stars, let alone the ones that go and leave a review for the show. But we've got them listed by topic. So if you want to look at something that might be, we've done shows multiple shows on preparing for a hurricane and what to do after a hurricane. We've done shows multiple shows on preparing for a hurricane and what to do after a hurricane, and we've touched on flooding, but we've really not gone into depth of flooding. So we're going to do that today. That's the topic We'll be talking about flooding.
Speaker 1:If you want to help people in Western North Carolina, I suggest making a donation to SamaritansPurseorg. They're always first on the ground. I think Franklin Graham, billy Graham's son, who's the head of the Samaritans Purse. I think he and Trump were on the ground helping out Saturday, and the show isn't about, again, politics, it's just also. Donnie, I'm going to let you talk about this as we go through the show. You have a lot of experience dealing with flooding because you were an adjuster for the insurance industry when Katrina hit way back in the day.
Speaker 2:Yep, 20 plus years ago I was a baby-faced kid going into New Orleans and really hadn't been outside of North Carolina a lot at that point. So I went to Alabama and started and went to Dallas to train as a brand new adjuster and then got sent right in the thick of things in New Orleans. But to comment on what you said, I think the difference in today's show in terms of hurricane preparedness versus what we normally talk about we tailor everything around. If you live from the coast to ours inland, and this is something that we've never seen before and, like you mentioned, the flooding is the big difference here. And with a flood policy, people often get confused that your homeowner's insurance covers flood. It covers everything, and in New Orleans that was probably the best example I've ever seen of that not being true at all.
Speaker 2:New Orleans is in a bowl that's how people describe it, so they are in a flood prone area and more people had flood insurance there than probably anywhere else in the country, so they were more prepared by leaps and bounds compared to the western part of North Carolina, where you know you're on, you're on a hill, you're not supposed to get a flood. I mean, water is not supposed to get that high and we'll get into the reasons why in a bit. The reasons why in a bit. But a flood policy maxes out at 250,000. And the way that they figure that is that the chances of a flood being eight to 10 feet and all that are really unlikely. I know some areas that were low lining and the foothills did get that much water but they figured that 250,000 maximum policy is enough to put together the bottom four feet of your house and that should be enough. But during Katrina we maxed out a $200,000, maybe $400,000 or $250,000 flood policies a day. And that was just me as one adjuster. My company had 400 people down there and we were all doing that. The big difference between that and the mountains is that nobody was properly insured. So these people, it makes no sense to have a flood policy if you are, if you're at such a high elevation and you know the reason behind some of these floods were, you know all the rivers overflowing and they just got an insane amount of water and basically the structures probably aren't as well maintained in the western part of the state as they are and more highly traveled areas like the middle, middle third of the state, we get a lot of commerce from business to more people living here. It's just more dense and they take care of the infrastructure a lot better. So it was the perfect storm, no pun intended, and a lot of people were underinsured, you know.
Speaker 2:To go back to the flood policy, the difference between the flood, between being covered by a flood policy or homeowner's insurance, is surface water, and I could go into a deep dive on that. But a flood is exactly what happened. You have a river overflowing and you can't handle the volume, so that spills over into areas where a lot of residential housing, things like that and surface water is. If we get a very heavy rain for maybe two or three days, we're in the dry part of the summer. The ground can't absorb that water and that surface water spills into the house. That does not count as a flood, so that would be covered under your homeowner's insurance.
Speaker 2:Side note, we don't have a lot of basements in North Carolina like they do up north, but for people who do have basements, they often have something with a sewer backup. Because you have a bathroom in your basement, you know that has a connection to your sewer line and sewer backup has a specific endorsement on your insurance policy. So you you have to ask your agent, hey, or have to tell him, hey, I have a bathroom in my basement and it is prone If we get a flood. You know I'm going to have a problem with sewer backup. But insurance is tricky and the fact that you have to have a specific endorsement for the sewer backup, you have to have a separate flood policy and that's different than your homeowner's insurance. All that is just a lot to take in for the average homeowner.
Speaker 1:And the average home insurer will be able to offer you flood insurance. The average cost in North Carolina is about $840 a year. Now some policies, the premiums are $4,000 or more a year, and there's obvious reasons. If you live at the coast, you're going to pay a lot for flood insurance because you have a higher likelihood of it. But again, as you pointed out, a lot of places in the mountains don't have it because they don't really think about getting a flood or the things that happen that are the result of the flood.
Speaker 1:And $250,000 is not a lot of money and, as a matter of fact, for a lot of the houses that we saw in Western North Carolina and in Florida, say in Georgia, that were completely destroyed or they're going to have to be torn down, that money is not going to cover anything. You're going to rebuild half the house, so it's better than nothing. But I completely can understand why someone in the mountains is thinking well, I don't need flood insurance because this literally is a one in every thousand year type event. Ask your insurance agency am I covered for a flood? What's an act of God, Things like that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, when you read up on that surface water versus flood water definition, I mean it sounds gray. I know what I'm reading and I've seen it all go down and it still sounds kind of gray. I mean it sounds like they'll say that you know, flood water can be caused by heavy rains. But then surface water is caused by heavy rains and I'm thinking to myself. Really the coverage comes down to the discernment of the insurance company. So if you have a good insurance company, maybe they say you know what?
Speaker 2:You got six inches of water, we're going to call that surface. But if you got four feet, eight feet, you know those are the definite floods. And I think the way that they will make that delineation is if it was a one day event or if it was a four day event. If you were underwater for three or four days, that's a flood all day long. You know, if you had water in your house and it maybe got into your garage and your baseboard got messed up, then they write that off as surface water. But it'll be interesting to see how this all plays out.
Speaker 1:Hey Donnie, what about water tables? We have that in my neck of the woods in Wilson, north Carolina. The water literally rises up. So I have a crawl space and when we get a lot of rain, or it rains for several days, or tropical storm, I can open up my little crawl space and look and I can see it be damp. What if that water table rises up higher? In other words, there's not water necessarily draining into your property or into your house, but the ground is so saturated and you're so close to a water table it literally seeps out of the ground and starts coming up. Is that flood?
Speaker 2:No, I would consider that surface water, so that would probably be covered under homeowner's insurance. To be honest, I've never asked that question specifically to an agent. I would say that you know that, having that vapor barrier I think you mentioned you had that put in your crawl space because with no light and difference in temperature in a crawl space it's notorious for being moist anyway and damp, and so that vapor barrier is probably your saving grace right there. I know you're further east than I am and a water table there is different than where I live, but I would say that if it did cause a problem where you had standing water in there and it did come from the ground, that sounds like surface water.
Speaker 1:Real quick. Last things on flood insurance you get it. You can't see a hurricane coming and call them and say put it in effect. It's probably going to take a month before it's going to be active. You can look at the FEMA website. They've got a program I've got it right here called the NFIP. It's the National Flood Insurance Program. You can research that. They know where the floodplains are. You can find out by a link. If you're living in a floodplain, there's lots of resources there. So if you have suffered from flooding or you just want to know, should I get flood insurance, fema is actually probably a good place to start to get information on what you want to do.
Speaker 1:What we want to focus on the rest of the show, though, is things that you can do to prepare for a flood, what to do if you have it. So let's talk about some of the things we can do to prepare for minimum flooding. Tropical storms are pretty normal. What are some things a homeowner can do to minimize it if there is an excessive amount of rain that the streets and the sewers and whatnot can't hold it?
Speaker 2:I think that just having a good evaluation of where you stand and the height of your house in relation to the street the closest street or maybe the neighbor probably the most important part of that evaluation. Because, you know, during a heavy rain and I figured that this out with my personal house I had a couple of downspouts dropped from the second floor down onto my porch roof and they overflowed. So the way I had to solve that problem is I had to get in a rain suit, basically, and go out in the pouring rain on the roof and figure out what was moving where and why that overflow was was happening. And, um, you know, it's just not, it's not comfortable to think about going out in the pouring rain, especially when it's a gully washer, and seeing what's going on. But I think it's after we see what just happened, in a worst case scenario, it will serve you well to get an idea. If you are the downhill house from the street or the downhill house from your neighbor, you're getting all that runoff from from their lot, and so when you think of the thousands of gallons of volume that is passing across your lot or through your lot, and if we had a situation where we got this hurricane that thank God it was moving kind of fast or it would have been even worse. But, heaven forbid, we have something sit right on top of us, moving five, 10 miles an hour so it takes forever to get out of here. That runoff is everything, and so all that's going to be directed towards your house, your garage or what have you.
Speaker 2:The way to fix that, or the way to remedy that, is to have the proper drainage system in place and have positive drainage away from your house. Just with the grading alone, I'd say, is a single most important thing to consider when we build a new house. The code is you have to have 10 foot of positive drainage in every direction away from that house. So that means you have to have a fall on the dirt landscaping everything from your house 10 foot away. And if any water gets down by your house, you know it either goes around your house because of that elevated dirt right up against the house or it just it finds another way besides in your house.
Speaker 2:And so the drainage having a landscaping contractor come out if you're not great in this area, having somebody come out and say, hey, you know, take a look at my house. What do you recommend I do? Do I need to add more? Do I bring a couple loads of dirt in here? Do we need to build up this area?
Speaker 2:And you know from the street, if you're downhill from the street, that you get all that runoff from the street. There's no grass or anything to absorb that. So all that's coming to you and I've seen some terrible neighbor situations where the higher elevated neighbor was just given the lower neighbor the business. And it's not the neighbor's fault, but it's just the fact that you didn't make the right accommodations back when you had a chance to get the grading right. But I think that it's worth it to get all that in place, have your place evaluated by somebody who knows what they're doing. A landscaping contractor is a good place to start and I have a couple of guys who I really trust. So message us through the website if you'd like a recommendation or referral.
Speaker 1:So up on my little IG feed came this thing from Shark Tank water acted flood bags. You think of sandbags when there's a flood. People are holding them up and they're filling them up and they set them up, but these things are flat and I mean like maybe a half inch, but the sand or silica or whatever is in it, which is like a half a cup swells 300 times its size, each little piece. And when it gets wet it automatically becomes a sandbag. And then I read you can let it dry out in the sun and it'll go back down and it can be reused two, three, four times. But what a great thing to have around your house where you could set it in place and if water comes up to it it's going to automatically sandbag it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and even better than that, they're available. I looked those up on Amazon. There are a hundred different sites that have those on Amazon and they were available for overnight delivery. Even so, you know, storm coming in tomorrow, as long as trucks are running, or storm coming in a couple of days, you can get next day delivery.
Speaker 2:On those things and the fact that they are fairly cheap, I want to say eight bags were like $130. And you really only need those bags around the penetrations, like basically the exterior doors on the low side of your house. And they had an alternative on Amazon called DoorDam and they were anywhere from $600 to $800. And the more I looked at that thing I thought I can build that and I may be wrong. But with the Door dam it's a little bit more to it. But basically it's just a seal that fits in between the jams on an exterior door and it seals the bottom and the sides up to about three feet. And I can't justify paying $800 for that. But I could go to Lowe's and probably for less than $100, I could build a door dam. So if you're handy, that may be an option.
Speaker 2:And the other thing, this is hard as the owner of a roofing company, we don't like Flex Seal. When the commercial comes on, I change the channel because I kind of always felt like Flex Seal was a novelty. It's basically like silicone in a spray can and it will temporarily stop a leak. I'll give them that. But when I looked on Amazon for the water activated flood bags, the very top line was a total product line of flood prevention from FlexSeal. And what I just said is the most important thing is that it's a temporary thing, so you don't need this to be in place for months like you would on a roof. But with the FlexSeal they basically have a caulk, a specific caulk that goes in all the cracks. So around the door, under the threshold, you would caulk all those areas and then you either put a tape or a spray on there and the best thing about it is it's removable and it doesn't leave any residue. So I can totally, if it's that or water in your house, I can give Flex Seal my first endorsement ever.
Speaker 1:As you would say, being a former insurance adjuster, if you show that you tried to mitigate damage, whether you use Flex Seal or pillows or piled up washcloths, anything that shows that you try to mitigate damage is going to make an insurance adjuster happy and more likely to help get that payout be higher. So, whatever you can use, yep, good point. I want to jump through a couple of things, and this is what to do in anticipation of a flood. Again, we're not coming on the back of the floods in Western North Carolina and go, hey, you should have done this, but a flood can happen anywhere at any time. So there's some things you can do in advance. I think probably the biggest thing is document, document, document, because whether it's a flood or a fire or something, when you go through the process of getting insurance money to pay for what you've lost, they want documentation. They want to know not that you had clothes, they want to know what clothes you lost. They want to know what TV you had. They want to be great.
Speaker 2:Well, imagine plugging in item for item into a spreadsheet. That's not so great, that's very tedious, but if the homeowner came to me with the spreadsheet, yeah, we're good, we're great. Thank you so much. I can copy and paste that. But the contents documentation is everything to the tune of $100,000. I mean, if you don't document it, you're shorting yourself as much as $100,000.
Speaker 2:And what I tell people all the time, walk through the house, take a video of your furniture and you don't have to take individual pictures. You can do a video and do screenshots from the video, but just anything showing that, hey, I really did have this. If you have really expensive things, like you know on my Best Buy account when I buy a TV, that I have records for 10 years back on all of my electronics and I can just log into my Best Buy account and pull the receipts up. So that's pretty black and white. But with furniture, especially if you have designer furniture, furniture touches the floor and if the house leaks it's going to be on the floor. The bottom of that furniture is probably going to be ruined.
Speaker 2:And if you paid more than rooms to go prices for things, you probably want to document all of your receipts for the furniture and jewelry is another big thing. Take pictures of your receipts for the furniture and jewelry is another big thing. You know. Take pictures of your jewelry and it's not like you have to share that, just have that stored in case this comes up and not the jewelry would get ruined in a flood, but maybe if the water was high enough. And I know for a fact that they have free contents, spreadsheets and basically paperwork that you can get right there on the internet and you can download that, print it off and plug those in yourself. If you have a day or two to prepare and you're at home and you're not working, then that is probably the best investment of your time that I could think of.
Speaker 1:And you know what. Maybe using a thumb drive was a bad example. I've showed my age. But one thing you're right about everything's on the cloud Receipts. You can take a video of your belongings, you can take pictures of certain items, you can take pictures of contracts and stuff or make copies of them and upload them, because, no matter where you are, you can access that information anytime. You don't have to say, well, it's all at my house. You could be at an office or another building, or you had to have temporary housing and go. I can get you any information you need about my house. I have it all in this file that I uploaded to the cloud. Here it is on my phone or pop open a laptop. You don't have to physically have that information anymore, so that's a great advantage.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think one thing that I would add to that and if folks are taking a list here, of course you know inventory all your contents. And that leads me to the point of you want to know how much contents coverage you have. And your house is coverage A, your outbuildings, any kind of other structure, detached garage, that'd be coverage B, and so if you have $500,000 worth of coverage A, you automatically get $50,000 of coverage B. So your policy puts 10% on that and that's just an insurance thing. But your contents is the one variable that you have. You can specifically ask for a certain amount of contents coverage. It may affect your premium, but that's the one thing that you do have control over.
Speaker 2:And I know that we've said this on the hurricane preparation shows. But know your insurance policy information, know your policy number, know who. You'd be amazed at how many people I ask, hey, who's your insurance company? And they, well, I don't know. I got to go check with my wife or, and at least one person knows in that scenario. But when I was an adjuster, I would say that 90% of the people that I visited to handle their claim were first-time claim filers. They said we've never filed a claim before and that was a pretty interesting stat to see in real time. And people just don't know you pay your insurance premium or you got it on auto draft, and having that information handy in the event of an emergency is a really big deal.
Speaker 1:We talked about this right before we started the show and there are survival tips you can take advantage of if you're stranded at home, and I said a flood survival kit is kind of like a camping kit. Think of all the things you would want if you were gonna go out camping for four or five days. If you had that same kit at your house and you were flooded as in. You couldn't get out of your house, you couldn't leave your property. These things would get you through. We know obviously you have to head to higher ground. If your house starts taking on water, you could end up on the roof or the attic we saw in Western North Carolina. Sometimes that's not high enough, but let's focus more on your stuck at home. What are some of the things we want to have in our possession that would help get us through a catastrophe like a flood?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a genius analogy, by the way, I love that you created that to camp. And I think the thing that crossed my mind is I said, well, maybe this is a good couples exercise. You could sit there and give yourself a $200 allowance on Amazon and watch the movie Castaway, and just you know, just bye, bye, bye. And I'm not a prepper, but I don't think that preppers are thinking the wrong way, because you know it could hit the fan at any moment with all we have going on with. You know, storms and politics. You never, you never, know.
Speaker 2:I think that water supply is the first and most important thing, because if a flood cuts off your water supply, whether it be your electricity to the well or the city water supply, you can survive without a lot of things. You can lose 30, 40 pounds without food, but you can't survive without water, and I think that I read the rule of thumb is one gallon a day per person. So if you think, if you translate that to what's going on in Western Carolina, man, that that's a lot of gallons of water and, um, maybe, taking the time when things are really good, going well, going ahead and, you know, stocking up cases of water, put those anywhere. You can store those, even if it's in the attic and I know that people would frown on me saying that because not supposed to let those get uh, get hot but at the same time, if it's uh, either drink the water that's been in your attic or or nothing, then I would. I would take that all day long.
Speaker 2:But you know, an emergency kit is is, um, or emergency medical kits, not a bad thing.
Speaker 2:I did uh read where, uh, it's common, when you're scrambling around after a flood event, that if you cut yourself, that that emergency kit may come into play. Side note, there is, you know, be aware, if your tetanus shot is updated, because a lot of bacteria and flood water, so you have an open wound, that's something that could really burn you and, you know, end up in a worst case scenario, kill you Flashlights, things like that. You know, having a pair of good pair of rubber boots I know if you're a city slicker, that might sound crazy to you, but rubber boots aren't that expensive and go to a sporting goods store and get you a pair of rubber boots so that if it's six inches or a foot of flood water, you're still okay. You got to take care of your feet and ask a soldier from Vietnam how important that is, and they'll give you the rundown there. But with several other things we talked about before we started the show, I'll let you lead into those.
Speaker 1:Well, I think, if you can at your house, turn off your utilities if you can and you know how, which is why it's always good to know how to turn your water off. We've already talked about protecting your documents. Make sure you can, even if it's something short notice, like in the mountains, throw them in Ziploc bags, something waterproof, and don't set them somewhere. I'd advise you keep them with you because you don't know if you're going to have to run out and then you don't have that paperwork. But it's also important, like a lot of us at our house, at the Smith house, our rule is, if the house God forbid ever caught fire, we meet at our neighbor's mailbox across the street. Kind of the same thing with a flood. Do you have a plan if you had to vacate your house quickly, where you would go?
Speaker 1:Some people will paint on their houses that they've left A flood. Do you have a plan if you had to vacate your house quickly? Where you would go? Some people will paint on their houses that they've left. You know this from going to Katrina. You'd see houses where it'd mark empty or something and some people literally were painting insurance information on the side of their house or they were listing. Call me or I'm at this or I'm safe, so be able to communicate with people if they come to your property to know, hey, they actually got out there, they're OK. And you saw that, katrina, a lot probably.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, more so from a video standpoint. I don't think I personally witnessed that, because they wouldn't let us in there for about three or four weeks after the storm had passed through. So you know, the floodwaters had subsided and basically, people who were stranded in a worst case scenario, like on their roof, which brings me to a good point. You know, when I sat down to put some notes together about the show you can read on Google all day long about flood prevention but I thought, let me put myself in their shoes and what would I do? And probably the scariest thing that I saw was that people were actually. They were in their house, they were riding out the flood, had nowhere to go, and once the water gets up to four feet, you're thinking, okay, it's going to go back down, and if it does not, you know, your attic is the only place that you can go to keep, to keep alive.
Speaker 2:And I kind of thought well, the average person who doesn't have power tools and all that, you know how could they do this? And it's definitely important to have a hammer and not the one with the curved claw on the back. You want a straight claw and if you're going to do this. You know you have to if it's life or death. You'll take that straight claw and you can get through the roof from the inside. But you got to think there's plywood that are nailed to the rafters and you got shingles and underlayment on top of that. So it's pretty darn strong and it's made to keep weather out, but it's also tough for you to get from the inside out, and so you know, if you have access to a Sawzall, you're not going to have power. I would say an investment in battery power tools and go somewhere cheap like Harbor Freight. You know I hate to give them an endorsement on the show, but Harbor Freight is good for a one, one or two shot deal and it's, you know, having a Sawzall, having having a drill with a wood bit and just being prepared with a, that should be part of your emergency kit, especially if you're in a flood prone area. But even more so than that, you know, fast forward to the scenario, that you have to do that and you have to get out on the roof to survive. And hopefully there are helicopters in play, like there were in New Orleans and in western North Carolina. That's what they're doing now and you know they're flying drones and droning in supplies, and I've heard a lot of mixed things about that, that some people are shutting that down and I don't understand why, but I hadn't had time to dig into that to have credible information.
Speaker 2:But having some solar panels on hand, that's something you can use whether it's a flood or not and it can cut down on electricity. But small solar panels are cheap. It's enough to charge your cell phone. I've been hearing a lot about that that people are losing cell service and they don't have a way to charge the phone. Well, if you've got a panel, you can move all that out to the rooftop. While you wait on somebody to come get you the paint example that you mentioned, you can paint on your roof help something in big letters, so when they fly over they know that there's somebody still stranded there.
Speaker 2:One of the things I have in my personal house is a crank radio. So I have something that you can crank a few times. It takes 30 seconds and then boom, you've got a powered up radio and you have at least an incoming means of communication from the outside world. And that led me to my next point. I started making notes about how can you communicate with the outside world. So of course I get on Amazon and I look up the range of the latest, greatest walkie talkies, because walkie talkie sounds like a dinosaur word, but they have walkie talkies out there now that will span I think Motorola was the manufacturer. You hadn't heard about them since pagers and early cell phones. But they have walkie talkies for a hundred bucks that will span 35 miles. So that's strong and I think that that's just a very, a very wise hundred dollars to spend. You know, just anything that would charge any kind of electronic is a good bridge between technology and disaster.
Speaker 1:Yep. Well again, if you want to help out what's happened in North Carolina and other parts of the Southeast, but especially Western North Carolina, I highly suggest SamaritansPurseorg. That's Franklin Graham, billy Graham's son. It's an incredible organization and cash is king. That allows them to decide what needs to be purchased first Is it gas, is it water or supplies. So so many little things you can do. Prep, because a lot of people in Western North Carolina will tell you right now dang 30 minutes of prep could have made a big difference for me. So we'll put this information up on the website Links to Samaritan's Purse if you need that, and ways you can help, and the website again is thecarolinacontractorcom. But be thinking and try to make a donation to help somebody in the western part of North Carolina after Hurricane Halina. Yep.
Speaker 2:Agreed. Eric, Thank you for all that and take care of yourself everybody. That evaluation of your house and just how you guys would react in the event of massive devastation like this is everything, and it could literally be life-changing for your family. So please take care of yourself.
Speaker 1:Well said and God bless everybody and we hope to see you next week on the Carolina contractor show. Thanks for listening to the Carolina contractor show. Visit the Carolina contractorcom.