Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
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The challenging winter survival situations that people are most likely to face during their life-
time, will probably fall under the first two of the following three primary categories of winter
survival situations:
1. A major power failure has occurred, and you are stuck in your home without any electrical power
for several days (or more) during extremely cold winter weather.
2. You are traveling in your car during a winter storm, and get stuck in the snow, or you are driving
in traffic that has come to a halt during a severe winter storm and people are abandoning their
cars.
3.Youarewithoutsubstantialshelterandmustsleepoutsideduringseverewinterweather,dueeither
to being lost (perhaps you skied out of bounds at a ski resort?) or perhaps there was a major dis-
aster, such as an earthquake, and you had to abandon your home and do not have an available
shelter to go to.
This chapter covers how to prepare your home and automobile for harsh winter conditions,
what to do when the power goes out for an extended period of subfreezing weather, and how to
survive in extreme cold and harsh winter weather, both indoors and outside.
Severe Winter Weather in the Home Without Power
As millions of people found out during the record-breaking ice storm of January 1998, when
the power goes out, without a backup source of heat (unless you happen to live in a well-insu-
lated solar home), the temperature inside most homes gradually cools until it approaches the
temperature of the outside environment. If the power outage is caused by a winter storm, and
the average outside temperature is well below freezing, within a day or two (sometimes in just
a few hours) all the pipes and fresh food in your house will start to freeze.
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In the winter of 2008, during an unusually warm spell of crystal-clear sunny weather, my wife, Josie, and I decided to
exchange the deep snows surrounding our home in the High Sierra Mountains for a few days of beach weather. We
packed up our trailer and drove to an ocean-side campground near Santa Cruz, California, where we enjoyed almost
unbelievable 80-degree beach weather in the middle of January. A few days later the weather turned, and what had
been a record-breaking January heat wave transformed into a record-breaking cold snap with ocean-side nighttime
temperatures dipping into the 20s, causing local pipes, crops, and palm trees to freeze.
