Couple of great ideas there mate!

Revisiting our cyclone kit again this year, time to start looking at new batteries, throwing out the out of date stuff and upgrading a few things. I might work out a bit of a photo essay and put it up later in the year with what we have prepared for the upcomming season. Going to update my medical kit too. Now I'm an insulin dependant diabetic I need fridge tempratures to keep my insulin in good nick.

Also making some cyclone candles for the next season - not too sure what scents to use in them but Lemon Myrtle will be one of them. For those interested we will be selling these at the Willows markets sometime before the end of the year. Citronella will have to be included to keep the biteys away. Bloody mossies where in plague proportions after Yasi.

Here a very good link to get into.

enjoy.
http://www.ema.gov.au

http://www.bom.gov.au/storm_watchers_game/

Just finished the kit today, made sure to stock up on dog bikkies and canned food, got caught out once about 9 years ago when Maitland bridge was destroyed, Norwest Coastal HWY access was cut for over two weeks until they made a truck pass.

Thankgod for the inland road!

We buy fruit juice in 1 litre tetra packs (the cardboard type juice containers with the screw type lid). When we've finished the juice we wash them thoroughly and fill them with water and freeze them. When power is out they help keep the freezer cold, plus you can defrost them and you have drinking water if you need it. You can use the plastic milk bottles as well, but they must be very well cleaned if you're using them for drinking water as well as ice.

A hint for wheelie bins ... There are wheelie bin sized plastic garbage bins available, so if your bin isn't particularly clean you can place a bag in the bin before filling it with water, this gives you clean water for flushing the loo with, washing up, hand rinsing/washing clothes, etc. Take the wheelie bin inside and place it where you need/want it before filling with water, as they are extremely heavy and hard to move once full.

With important papers or photos and the like - scan them and save them on to DVD's. DVD's take up much less room than paperwork, they are waterproof and also, DVD's hold so much more info than CD's.

I forgot to mention that we always boil the water from the juice tetra packs and milk containers before we use it - not worth the risk of getting tummy trouble.

Also, we have swapped our bulb type torches for LED torches.
We now have 12v LED lights as well. Some of the lights have aligator clips type connectors which we can clip to the Neg & Pos posts on a battery, and some have cigarette lighter type connectors which obviously plug into a cigarette lighter socket. We have changed our torches & lights to LED's as they take a very small amount of power to run, whereas the older style torches & lights chew through the power, in comparison.

Jaycar sometimes have small 7.2a SLA Deep Cycle Gel Cell 12v batteries for around $20. One of them will run LED lights for several days.