THE Prepping thread - a new beginning :)

Yeah, you can see the thinking behind sacrificing farm land and villagers' homes to spare a town but it's cold comfort to those affected. Especially since they are losing out to benefit strangers and weren't warned. Even an hour or two could, if folks were already at home, allowed them the opportunity to move some treasured things like photos etc to higher places.

The truly frightening thing about flooding is that you can't compress water. With snow-drifts, you can plough it and pile it up, and even if it takes a long time to thaw, it's out of the way. But water just expands as far as it can, and if it can't go through or around an obstacle, it gets deeper and more dangerous.

We flood here if too much water is heading down the river and its tributaries at the same time as the tide in spate is heading up-river. If you add a spring tide (perhaps with a following wind) to a heavy rain over a catchment area already saturated with a lot of heavy rain, well, it gets interesting PDQ.

maryb wrote: »

They did have lock-ins, especially at girls' colleges. All visitors out by 11.30.

It was considered highly amusing to the high-spirited among the male undergraduates to set off the fire alarms at 3am and see exactly who had been locked into these temples of virtue

11.30? Good heavens. You should have tried being a girl student in the fifties. 10.00pm was the witching hour for us. No point trying to beat that as we were in a Cathedral Close and the gates to the Close were locked by the constable at 10.00.
Mind you, we had a river running through the back, and a certain leaky punt, and an accommodating friend who lived on the ground floor and for quite a low payment would leave their window open.

The winter of 62/63 was a grim, grim story. I won't bore you.

x

Minus 7 here this morning, feel sorry for the wee birds. Weather will be getting worse from now on, glad I'm stocked up.

On the cool side here too; it was a bit of a struggle to unzip the bantams' polytunnel this morning. It seems they have to stay in there until 28th February... well, they seem happy enough, despite losing their freedom to roam. It's a bit of a pain because I'd hoped to move it into its permanent position by then and be starting seeds in there, but considerably less of a pain than bird flu would be.

My family *roared* with laughter at my figure-it-out-as-I-go knitted mittens this Christmas. They aren't quite the same size and the thumbs - well, think sock puppets & you're close. (I knit for fun, creativity etc not beauty per se.)

This morning, *I* was chortling as I scraped down the car With Warm Hands, then started driving. Initially I thought no, no, two mittens bad. At still sub zero in the car my "safety" hand was getting colder & less reliable, so at the lights I stopped & yanked t'other mitten on and within a mile had full feeling & a good solid grip on the dashed cold wheel.

Has anyone missed the fuss over this Citizen Aid app - what to do in emergencies like nutter with gun, bomb etc? They're advocating applying a tourniquet - and using whatever's to hand not the appropriate tool & I'm distinctly paranoid. I was taught these things are for those who know what they are doing & it is well outside my First Aid At Work.

That said, if son has idiot moment with an axe, I will be whisking his belt off him & applying all sorts of pressure, but that is in the sure & certain knowledge that there's a walk in centre & delivery suite within 5 miles so I can have him properly gassed & blooded in under 20 minutes even using my own car & then share an ambulance while he's hauled off to someone whose job it is to tidy the mess up.

It's the have-a-go-heroes who scare the wadding out of me - "just let me check the app, don't worry" then heaving ho having practised on a sleeve with a rolled up newspaper in it... No Sireee! It Hurts, it's a very delicate balance between stopping the bleeding & losing the limb in the hands of an amateur & the app is gruesomely unhelpful as to what happens next - my light reading suggests if you do not get the lucky soul with the natty strapping off to a real medic within an hour then all sorts of complications start to build & there's nothing they can do about the pain. I exaggerate, but even trauma medics don't like it going over 90 minutes.

If ordinary first aid for crush is under 15 minutes shift 'em, over 15 minutes leave them to the experts, then a tourniquet is a get the experts incoming first... On the other hand, there are folk who took a nasty round to the leg who still have it thanks to a prompt bit of strapping by an army colleague & medevac, so maybe in a bomb gone off & my foot is pointing the wrong way situation I might not fight off the helping hands, I'd just rather they were in OG clutching a familiar looking bandage & not that app...