Surviving the 100-year storm - Seeking success stories for flood, wildfire, wind, natural disaster

We've had some pretty bad weather and natural disasters around the world  these last few years.  Storms, hurricanes, tornados, floods, winds, wildfire, and so much more.  It feels like things are getting pretty bad.

And yet, I keep hearing people say "oh, yes, the local town got wiped out but the farm made it through with minimal damage thanks to..."  or "thanks for getting in touch, we were cut off without power or road access for a few weeks, but our life didn't change much thanks to..."

I would love to gather together these stories and learn more about what permaculture tricks actually work to reduce stress and damage during an emergency.  (and maybe use these stories to help bulk out this emergency preparation list.

What landscaping and permaculture techniques work to reduce storm and natural disaster damage?

In 2022, New South Wales in Australia suffered major flooding.  

wiki tells us that

Heavy flooding broke out in the Central Coast and Sydney areas of New South Wales, Australia, beginning in early July 2022.[2][3] Around 85,000 people were displaced by the flooding or requested to leave their homes by authorities.[4][5] The floods' damage was significant because rain fell on land that was already saturated after months of previous heavy rainfall. It was the third major flood in 2022 for some areas in the eastern seaboard.[6]

The river surged at 14 meters (45 feet) in places and there were spots that got over one thousand mm of rain (that's about 39 inches) during the event.

Here's some video of the devastation:





And here is what happened at Geoff Lawton's homestead.  They had some damage, but they had systems in place to minimize it.  Especially these ponds, damns, and spillways.  





Lawton called it a once in 100 year flood event.  I hope he's right.  But at least we can see some tricks for how to deal with this kind of excess water and what can be improved.  

My experience happened several weeks ago, when Hurricane Helene barreled through. I want to say upfront, that we did not have the devastation that many others did from this storm. We had a lot of large trees come down in our woods, but the only damage was minor to our fencing. We were without power for three days, and I have to credit what we've been learning about permaculture for the lifestyle changes that helped make those three days safe and comfortable.

First thing, of course, was our garden and everything we have preserved from it. The grocery store shelves were empty of many, many items (and still are), but we had everything we needed in our garden, pantry, and thanks to our chickens, ducks, and goats.

With food, comes cooking, and for that I was very glad to have a rocket type cooker and haybox oven, things that I learned about from a permies SKIP BB (https://permies.com/wiki/106017/pep-food-prep-preservation/Cook-Grain-Rocket-Stove-Haybox). We were even able to have our morning cups of coffee by heating water on it, making the coffee in a French press, and then keeping it hot overnight in a preheated Thermos bottle.

I think the biggest concern for us with food was the refrigerator and chest freezer. Living in the south, I really rely on these in addition to canning and dehydrating foods. What saved us there was a dedicated solar setup; not big enough to power the whole house, but enough to keep a small chest fridge and freezer going. We had a lot of cloudy days, so I had to keep an eye on the battery bank, but we didn't lose anything which was a relief.

A second smaller solar array and battery bank gave us enough juice to use a living room lamp and play movies on our DVD player. For light for the other rooms, we relied on candles, headlamps, and rechargeable camping lights. These are solar charged light bulbs with hooks to hang anywhere needed. I had one over the kitchen sink and one in the bathroom, so we had enough light. The headlamps are rechargeable ones that I discovered in permies gear forum (https://permies.com/t/72250/USB-Rechargeable-Headlamp-Loma-Creek). For dishes and showers, we heated buckets of water on the rocket stove.

Still on solar, one of my PEP BBs was to make a recharging station (https://permies.com/wiki/155316/pep-nest/Set-station-system-rechargeable-batteries). Has that ever come in handy! Mine consists of a 100-watt solar panel, 55-amp hour sealed deep cycle battery, and a 10-am MTTP charge controller. From the charge controller, I can recharge anything that takes a USB cord. I use it to recharge batteries, those camping lightbulbs and headlamps I mentioned above, and a small dumb phone. I also run a 12-volt light bulb from it for a back porch stove light.

We were fortunate that we had no water supply problems, but for that we didn't have to worry because we've gradually been expanding our rainwater collection system. We now store about 5000 gallons of rainwater, most used for the animals and garden irrigation as needed. I have a Berkey water filter system if we ever need to use it.

As you can see, mine is a very small success story. The things we did were just little steps, taken as we work toward a more complete permaculture lifestyle. Every step was worth taking and they made a difference for us.

Justin Rhodes on surviving Hurricane Helene





Community is our greatest strength

I moved to BC (British Columbia, Canada), just in time for some truly horrid weather. We had barely arrived in early October, and had rainstorms, windstorms and finally, the locally famous 3 ft of snow in 3 days over the New Year's Weekend. It was called a "storm of the century" and did a *lot* of damage.  Coastal BC snow is heavy and wet. You can't push it with a snow shovel the way we could in Ottawa, Ontario.

I had never heard of "Permaculture". I was not quite a City city girl, and we weren't farming at that time, but this was still a wakeup call for me. Since then I've learned a lot about what Mother Nature is willing to throw at us. This was further pushed along when I happened to be back in Ottawa visiting the In-laws for the hugely destructive ice storm that hit from the east end of Lake Ontario through to Montreal, shutting down huge areas. We were lucky and didn't loose power, but I had relatives in the area who were out of power for a week.

"Preppers" can be a loaded word, but it also didn't fit what my vision was. It gave me ideas of useful equipment to have on hand, but I was looking for ways to make the land more resilient, not just me. Permaculture does that. Building soil helps water infiltrate deeper and faster, which in turn supports plants, trees and our well. Watching where the water goes, helps us encourage it to hang around longer, and stops it from washing nutrients into the ocean.

Is there more that I would like to do? Absolutely. I admit we're waaayyyy... too dependent on electricity. But we have moved a long way in the right direction in 25 years and will continue to do so. I no longer just look at plants as just something that grows. Native, introduced, edible, medicinal are labels I add to plants nowadays. Unfortunately, invasive also gets a spot, but even those plants are also labelled "biomass", or "raw materials".

I think the thing I encourage everyone reading this to think about is the concept mentioned in Geoff's video above. Many of the signs of extreme weather events are there in the landscape, hiding in plain sight. An acquaintance living up Island has a line on her land marking a Tsunami peak and we know from  Japan, that Tsunamis can be even higher than predicted if the wrong set of events coalesce into "the perfect storm".  Humans frequently don't think on long enough time scales. I think Permaculture helps to remind us that while we're building for our own comfort, we should also be building for our great grandchildren, human, animal, birds, insects, even if we don't personally give birth to them.

The concept of 'windbreaks' (or shelterbreaks) keeps coming to mind when I think about built in passive permaculture resilience. My first exposure to the idea comes from the history of the United States dust bowl and how the usage of windbreaks helped turn around desertification of agricultural land.



Windbreaks primary goal is to slow down wind and create more favorable conditions for people and crops. They protect soil as well as homesteads. There are a number of different plants/trees that can be incorporated into a windbreak; sometimes windbreaks can even be planted with things such as dogwoods to have a specific job such as trapping snow.

Timothy Norton wrote:Windbreaks primary goal is to slow down wind and create more favorable conditions for people and crops.

Here we use "hedgerows" which is the short cousin of the "windbreak". However, they have been proven to improve biodiversity and can easily be designed to produce a certain amount of perennial food and fuel. Even if all they do is feed and house the birds, many birds keep caterpillar numbers down and they fertilize the shelterbelt with their output!

I don't have a specific idea to share, but I do like the idea of the topic.  As the son of a Saskatchewan farmer who grew up in the 1930s, I notice that western society has forgotten a lot of things that were common a century ago.  

As noted earlier, people who plan to be resilient in their context are, sometimes derisively, referred to as "preppers".  Be Prepared is the motto of Boy Scouts that I grew up involved with.  Some of that preparation is with things on hand (such as the supplies and ability to charge things noted in an earlier response) and some of it is with having food stored that doesn't require electricity (canned, dried, on the landscape, etc).  Some of it is in having the tools and knowledge of how to use them to get through some sort of an event.

Also noted earlier is community.  Back in the day, you knew your neighbours and looked out for them.  Today (at least in much of city life), we do neither.  I believe this is to the detriment of community.

A positive this brings up is doing an assessment of where you are with respect to the 8 Forms of Capital.  Since I learned about the concept in my PDC, I've liked to think of them like spokes on a wheel.  How much you have of them may help determine how far and how fast you can go on the wheel, but how balanced they are will determine how smooth your ride is.  It doesn't mean you must have all 8 at the same level (by your standard of choosing), but it may be an idea to look at the areas that are lowest in the ranking and assess how you can strengthen them (perhaps by reducing another area of capital or using some as exchange).  

I wholeheartedly agree that something as simple as diverse polyculture plantings can be of extreme value in the resilience of the land, in providing edibles and medicinals, and can be a deterrent to bad actors who may be too envious of your resilience.  The concept of a "fedge" (food hedge) is something that I'm working on growing at our acreage.  It can provide some diversity of services to me including privacy and dust and noise abatement while providing ecological services as well as those edibles and medicinals.  Ideally, it will also be something that we can consider as a thing of beauty, aiding peace and calm in our lives.  I guess another consideration in this is that shrubs in many ways are more resilient than many trees.  If the branches aren't large enough to cause significant damage when they fall, perhaps our buildings will suffer less.  Granted, we wouldn't have as much timber or shade or other yields, but everything is a tradeoff.  Having something like a rocket mass heater as a heat source can also us to take advantage when there is a free wood situation.  Thinking about it, perhaps a copse where we coppice trees is also a good idea (still not necessarily timber, but we can manage for a variety of size of materials).

Another element ought to be in our overall land use and design as a society.  Perhaps we shouldn't put trailer parks in tornado-prone areas.  Perhaps we should build above tsunami levels and flood levels.  Perhaps we should build a bit further inland from the coast rather than denuding beaches of anything living and replace with concrete and steel and glass to attempt to face the full fury of a hurricane.  Perhaps more of our buildings should be in the shape of a Wofati so that they don't take the brunt of winds and can be well insulated simply by being part of the landscape.  Perhaps we shouldn't allow our authorities to restrict rainwater capture and use.

There's a lot we can do as individuals.  We could also be doing a lot better as community and society.  Sorry for the tangential response.

Not tangential at all, Derek! You raised some important points that are very worth considering and working on.

One of the most common ‘disasters’ in the UK is short term electricity outage. This will often be storm or winter related in some way. A lot of UK homes have gas or oil or maybe woodchip heating systems. So in theory they should be fine in a power cut but the pumps and control circuits all run on electricity.

So for those of us who are living in ‘conventional’ housing and don’t have a fire with dried and split wood ready to go, an old computer UPS could be used to keep heating and hot water going through a multi-hour or multi-day powercut.

In the long term, rocket heats and solar are the way to go. But for anyone who isn’t in a position to make those things happen, a ups on the heater controls could just be the “set and forget” difference in comfort and safety in winter.

Timothy Norton wrote:The concept of 'windbreaks' (or shelterbreaks) keeps coming to mind when I think about built in passive permaculture resilience. My first exposure to the idea comes from the history of the United States dust bowl and how the usage of windbreaks helped turn around desertification of agricultural land.

Windbreaks are very important in a lot of areas. Unfortunately, they are very damaging in “tornado alley” (the Great Plains). Dome homes work best in these areas as wind resistance is high in with structures built this way. If not a dome, then an underground structure. This, however, is more difficult to build and not as cost effective.
Flooding is prevalent in the area I grew up in. We had two story houses and built the first story with the Sheetrock sideways. Most of the time we only replaced the bottom sheetrock after we dried out the studs. Here, too, a dome would have alleviated much of that hassle as long as the windows and doors were fitted with shutters that sealed well.
Logs that are fire sealed is hard to burn. Many a cabin and home have been saved when this was the first step of the building process. Forest fires were common in many wooded areas. Again, I must say that certain dome home materials are fire resistant. Styrofoam-cement is not one of them.
If I forgot to add something about surviving a disaster, please forgive me. I’m not as young as I used to be and I’ve forgotten more than I’d care to admit.

I've been looking at "rain gardens" for years now. First I wondered if they were just a fad, or would they prove their worth in the long term. Then I wondered if they were only applicable to certain ecosystems.

Now I know the answer is - yes, they are proving their worth, and yes, they can be adapted to many ecosystems and many needs.

R Ranson found this excellent CBC article about a fairly new version of a rain garden in Vancouver, BC. It is well known for it's rainy winters, but in recent years the Atmospheric Rivers have been bigger and more frequent and I would love to see more rain gardens built there.

St George Rainway The recent Atmospheric River was it's first serious test and it passed!

It seems like an advanced version of some of the work done in Tucson so far as continuity is concerned, but I was unclear how much it actually infiltrates the rain water vs just cleaning it and giving it a safer place to flow to the ocean than down the street.  However, Tucson is about 150 miles from the nearest ocean, whereas, the Rainway is just a little over one mile to the ocean! Tucson is a desert area, where as Vancouver gets more than its share of rain every year.

Even if these don't infiltrate the rain, so long as they help to control flooding and decrease the money spent on constantly repairing infrastructure due to that flooding, that's a win. The green space it represents will help if they get another heat dome, once the trees I see in the picture gain a bit of height.

This next link is from the Capital Regional District of Victoria which is on Vancouver Island. Most of the CRD doesn't get as much rain as Vancouver, but issues of road run-off damaging Salmon streams is a big concern. Their What is a Rain Garden article identifies different flavors of rain gardens and their benefits.  

Many older cities have equally antiquated storm runoff infrastructure which isn't coping well with the combination of urban sprawl (more hardscape and fewer forests) and bigger storms. My sister lives in Ontario and parts of her city had serious flooding last year. And yet, when I go for a walk, all I see is front lawns of grass and a few shrubs. The more I read, the more I can imagine the flood reduction by simple curb cut rain gardens with more layers than "a tree with grass".

The Rainway was a success - hopefully we'll start seeing many more similar ones!

That's a far cry from Brad Lancaster's guerrilla methodology before it was legal.  I wonder if leaving it in the hands of the city is the most cost-effective scenario.  Typically something like that is added on to property taxes over a period of time to pay for it.  

In front of the next door neighbour, a raised crosswalk was installed last year (a year after the street had been repaved and curbs rebuilt) as well as a speed hump down the block.  Two years in a row we had the street closed for construction and year 2 deconstructed work done in year 1 (redoing curbs and landscaping).  One consequence is that it has disrupted the flow of water down the street from rain events, so water pools rather than draining into the stormwater drain.  I wish a bit more thought had been given to this.

I almost laughed, then almost cried, when I saw the link in the CBC article to a headline "Burying Rivers is a Bad Idea" (or similar).  Captain Obvious to the rescue!

I guess I'm struggling to think how we, as citizens, can implement projects like this on a bit bigger scale than our yard, while striving to keep the costs from ballooning when a government agency gets involved.  It would help if we all at least had our own property set up to infiltrate water and not flow into the hardscape of a city.  More boulevard gardens rather than grass?  One of the big issues is that society has altered the land in ways that don't facilitate the water cycle, such as draining marshes / swamps, burying rivers, steamrolling paradise and put up a parking lot, etc.  

Here, the cost of damage from storm overflow is added to taxes.  The rain gardens are mitigating that damage and saving taxes long term.  It also stashes water for our summer drought to cut back on watering needs for city trees.

Although there is also a lot of free education and encouragement for individuals to include rain gardens in their own landscaping. That's showing a lot of improvement and reducing rain runoff near where I live.  The massive flood of 2021 had very little damage in areas where rain gardens are already the norm.  Several new developments had to install them on the city verge when improving the sidewalks.  

Rain gardens? This is something I’ve been wanting to look into, but time and circumstance have prevented me. Does anyone have pictures?