While prepping often focuses on major disasters, the reality is that winter throws its curveballs, and older adults are often disproportionately impacted. February, with its potential for snowstorms, ice storms, and power outages, throws winter preparedness into sharp relief. While evacuation may not be an option for everyone, there are steps we can all take to ensure our older loved ones are safe and comfortable when the snow flies.
This may not seem like a big deal, but the older a person gets, the more health problems they usually have. Adding these health issues to adverse environmental conditions can easily lead to dangerous situations or even death.
My mother, who is 87 years old, suffers from pleurisy (a lung disease) and has had pneumonia at least a dozen times. She lives in the Denver metro area and has been stuck in her apartment for several months now, due to smoke from the Canadian wildfires. My mother-in-law, who lives in Corpus Christi, faces similar environmental conditions, caused by dust from the Sahara blowing across the Atlantic Ocean, as well as smoke from agricultural fires in Mexico and Central America. These issues may not affect the average family, but they do for seniors.
Health issues can cause serious problems for older people as their bodies begin to deteriorate and their physical strength and stamina decrease. There are many things that older people cannot do for themselves that they could have done when they were younger. On top of that, they need medications to help them keep their body's chemical balance and everything functioning properly. Without these medications, their chances of survival decrease significantly.
Additionally, older people face the problem of having to get by on a fixed income, likely considerably less than what they earned while working. Yet, just like the rest of us, they need to prepare so they can survive whatever disasters come their way.
If you have elderly parents or other loved ones, I recommend getting together with them and making sure they are prepared to survive whatever disasters may arise. You may not be able to pick them up and bring them to your home; so you want to make sure their homes are ready to survive. This means making sure they have food, water and medicine; but there is more than that.
Manage heating and air conditioning
Every year I hear about elderly people who have frozen to death in their homes, usually during some sort of winter storm. The same thing happens in the summer, although it doesn't usually make headlines. Our bodies cannot withstand limited temperature changes and limited mobility makes the situation even worse because we lose much of the natural heating and cooling that our bodies can provide for themselves when we are not mobile.
As we all know, energy for heating and cooling is expensive, especially for cooling. Elderly people who die of hypothermia usually die because they cannot afford to pay their energy bills. Many live in older homes, which are not as well insulated, making these costs even more difficult to manage.
One of the keys to surviving temperature swings is to reduce the area that needs to be heated and/or cooled. That's the basic idea of programmable thermostats, which allow you to reduce the amount of heating or cooling when no one is using that part of the house. Despite more work, we can accomplish the same thing by opening and closing doors and vents, keeping heated or cooled air from the home's HVAC system to occupied areas of the home. This is especially useful for those who have rooms in their home that are not in use.
Please note that you may need to lubricate or even replace the vents in the parts you want to be able to cut, for this to work. Most air vents are stiff, caused by a combination of age, lack of original lubrication, and dirt. I went so far as to drill holes in the lever to open the vent and attach dowel rods, so that there would be a more accessible handle for opening and closing these vents.
For those living in warmer climates, the biggest challenge is cooling rather than heating. Air conditioning can be more expensive than heating, making it more difficult for retirees living on a fixed income.
As with heating, it is possible to block off rooms that are not in use, reducing the amount of cooling needed. The other thing that can be very useful is the use of evaporative cooling. Simply place a damp cloth on the front of a fan to produce air that is cooler than the ambient air in the room.
Dealing with air quality
But as I mentioned above, older people don't just have to worry about the air temperature. Airborne particles can cause serious problems for older people. Events such as wildfires and excessively dry weather will increase the amount of particles in the air, causing lung and respiratory problems. Fortunately, this is not such a difficult problem to solve.
Obviously, it makes sense to keep as much of it out of the house as possible. This means making sure windows and doors close completely, leaving no gaps, a common problem in older homes. Weather stripping may need to be replaced to keep dust out.
The other thing to do is to filter the air in the house, especially in the most used rooms. Commercially manufactured room air filters come in a variety of sizes, ranging in price from about $40 to several hundred dollars.
Another option is to make a homemade room air filter. This requires just a fan and filter that would normally be installed in an HVAC system. Most box fans are 20 inches square, which is one of the most common sizes for HVAC filters, making them easy to find. Choose an Austin high-quality filter preferably a HEPA filter, as it will remove more particles from the air. The filter can be stuck to the inlet side of the fan with tape, masking tape or packing tape.
Dealing with drug shortages
One of the biggest concerns older adults have is medications. Most take maintenance doses of medications to treat chronic conditions like type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure. Not having access to their medications can be life-threatening, especially in a stressful situation, such as a disaster.
The obvious solution is to stockpile the medications they need. If you have a good relationship with your family doctor, you can probably convince him or her to write prescriptions for additional medications to keep on hand. But that doesn't mean the insurance company will pay for these additional medications. You may have to pay for them at retail or purchase them through Mark Cuban's "Cost Plus" medications.
Another option for those who live close enough to travel to Mexico is to purchase these additional medications from pharmacies in Mexico. The Mexican pharmaceutical industry is excellent and primarily sells generic versions of many popular medications. A good number of retirees travel to Mexico each year to purchase their annual supply of medicines. The only drugs they probably won't have are new drugs that are still protected by patent law.
The other thing to look at is natural substitutes for these medications. The field of medicine began with medicinal plants, although the pharmaceutical industry today speaks ill of medicinal plants. While there is no natural substitute for every medication known to man, there are natural substitutes that will work for the most common conditions. Learn what they are and grow them in your garden.
Keep in mind that medications are subject to shortages, just like everything else. Some have been affected by shortages created by the COVID-19 pandemic. Earlier this year, one of the medications I take regularly was almost impossible to obtain. I mostly had to do without it for several months. Even though I survived that, it wasn't good for my body.
Coping with floods
Flooding is another thing that can be particularly problematic for older adults. This term conjures up images of waves piling up to 50 feet high, obliterating everything in their path. Despite this, most floods are a few inches to a few feet deep, with few reaching more than ten feet deep.
The normal way to deal with a flood is to evacuate; but as we've already discussed, this may not be possible for older people, especially if they don't have anyone to pick them up and take them. This leaves the possibility of overcoming floodwaters before it is too late. In a two-story house, moving to the upper floor will solve this problem. Otherwise, the only solution (apart from the boat) is to reach higher ground. Make sure you know where the nearest high ground is located near the house and how you can get to it quickly.
Never enter an attic to try to escape a flood; if floodwaters rise too high, anyone who climbs in is trapped, unless there is an escape hatch.
Speaking of exit hatches, it would be possible to install a skylight on most roofs, even if the attic is not occupied. This skylight could have either a window or a removable panel, which would act as an emergency hatch. Taking this idea a step further, a balcony outside the dormer window would be both decorative and practical, giving anyone trying to escape the attic somewhere to walk, while climbing higher onto the roof.
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