Brief and very useful

Lifehacker -- top 10 things to learn from hurricane Sandy

You'll find that articles on Lifehacker and Gizmodo are often over simplified, inaccurate, and often biased.
#10 is a good example, land lines of today are very unreliable. My parents have learned to go without theirs for weeks at a time driving to a good cell service spot to make a check in call with a prepaid phone. There is very little profit anymore in home land lines and therefore nothing invested in maintenance of them. AT&T bought our local phone company and the land line service got so bad I ended up cancelling it. Wasn't any point in paying the ever increasing price for something that rarely worked.

Landline service reliability varies greatly from place to place. In some places it's the very last utility to fail, in others (like where I live) it's invariably the first. We cancelled ours as well.

Yeah, right. How about #8. Your Car Might Be Salvageable

If you’re in a flood zone, there’s a good chance your car became a submarine once that storm hit. In most cases, your insurance agent will pay to scrap it, but if you really want it back, you can salvage it—particularly if it’s an older car. It probably won’t do much to help you get around in the aftermath, of course, since gas may be in a serious shortage...

Right. I'm sure there will be plenty of mechanics roaming the flooded streets looking for something to do. Focusing on your engine will take their minds off their own miserable, flooded homes, garages and workshops for a few hours - after all, tinkering with mechanical problems is a great stress reliever whose value in times of dire stress should not be underestimated. Even if you anticipate that you won't be able to drive for at least two weeks you should delay in offering your car to any mechanic with tinkering abstinence syndrome.

Here is what I was taught about cars and flood damage when I was young and impressionable:

• Thou Shalt Not Purchase A Vehicle With A Salvage or Flood Title. Corollary: When Purchasing A Used Vehicle, Thou Shalt Watch Carefully For Title Washing Fraud.
• Thou Shalt Insist That Thy Flooded Vehicle Be Declared A Total Loss.

I've been fortunate enough to never have a vehicle get flooded (although one time the water was over the hubs and getting pretty close to the exhaust before I was able to move it). I'd be interested to hear if someone knows better than I was taught.

I visited there.Contains great information.Its dead easy and pretty difficult to go wrong.A very useful tips that will be referenced long into the future.

While true, official news sources are often not much better, and public officials often lie about what is going on, and often give really horrible advice. Since you may have no way of vetting what is being reported, there is no way to trust much of anything that you see or hear on any of the news and information sources.

During a mess like this getting accurate information on a timely basis outside of what you can see for yourself is often all but impossible.

Social networks around here ,ie fires and the recent cop thing for example were quite accurate while the 'news' was horribly inaccurate. Found a few postings were wrong,but the majority got the story out,and usefully.

One really good one we have is a lady who writes real time transcripts of scanner messages,awesome news source.

long ago and in far away exotic lands, I was tasked with extracting useful intelligence from radio communicatiions...real time intelligence and analysis can give you critical timely information with which to make decisions and take action...

I'm sure the internet savvy folks like AFLM can post a plug in that will allow you to obtain local emergency VHF/UHF broadcasts on your computer...though much is probably digital or encripted to some degree...

Locally our online scanner jams up pretty quickly and you cant listen.300 person limit,something like that.