Did you know that your electric dryer could help in a tornado?
If your safe room also happens to be your laundry room, your dryer may offer additional protection to small children or pets. Being a double-walled metal appliance your dryer gives an additional layer of projectile protection and crush resistance.
But, as with most preparedness options, we need to cover a few details:
1. As with all preparedness measures, we must first take a clue from the Hippocratic Oath; “First, do no harm.” So, when choosing an area to be your “safe area” during a tornado, make sure it’s either free from items that could become secondary hazards, or that those potential hazards are secure. Our list here would include:
- Water heaters. Try not to be in the same room with it during a destructive event. It could topple and spill gallons of potentially scalding water. Whether it’s in your safe area or not though, it’s best to secure your water heater with anchor strapping.
- Gas lines. All gas lines running to appliances should be flex lines. However, somewhere along the way the line will be pipe and is subject to breakage during structure-damaging disasters such as earthquakes and tornadoes. Best to stay away from gas lines when planning your safe area.
- Breakables and droppables. Anything in your prospective safe room should be secured as much as possible. This includes seemingly minor things like irons, ironing boards (since we’re still going with the laundry room theme here), wall hangings, etc. Make sure everything has a bracket or is in a cabinet with closing doors and those doors have latches on them.
2. All your heavy appliances, such as your stove, oven, fridge, freezer, washer, and dryer, should be anchored to the wall as well as possible. Most appliances come with kits, and your local hardware / home / appliance store can give you some guidance on better anchors. Anchoring helps in a number of ways. First, if you have small children who like to climb, anchoring keeps appliances from tipping over on them. Second, no place on earth is completely immune from earthquakes and anchoring keeps your heavy machinery in place. Third, any time you bolt something large and sturdy to a wall, you actually strengthen that wall a little, which is a good thing in any potentially destructive event.
3. Speaking of destructive events, if severe weather is heading your way (don’t wait for the actual warning that a tornado has touched down) prep your safe room accordingly and put your small pets in their individual carriers and put a few towels or a blanket in the drum of the dryer for a little padding if it’s your child that’s going in. (And, still have them wear a bike or skateboard helmet if they have one.)
4. If you choose this option and put a child in the dryer for safety, don’t close the dryer door. Prop something in the opening so that the dryer door can’t be closed accidentally.
5. This option is really good if all you have for a “safe room” is an interior hallway where your “laundry room” is a closet that opens to the hall.
6. Again, if the water heater is in your laundry room, or you have a gas dryer, rethink using the laundry room as your safe area. A broken or toppled water heater will spill gallons of potentially scalding-hot water, and a broken gas line could be a deadly fire hazard or a suffocation threat.
Watch for future installments where we pull even more bits and pieces from “Disaster Prep 101” and describe additional attributes of a good safe room and some of the safety equipment that should be stored in one.