If you live in a normal home in northern Taiwan, you don’t really need to worry about the typhoon. Just be prepared to hole up for a couple of days.
For preparation, have a look over here, although some of the links and pictures are broken:
A few things that come to mind for me:
- Try to get a couple of “hand-operated” fans: if the power goes out, it can be really hot. The worst I’ve personally had to deal with in typhoons here is about 12 hours without power, stinking hot, wondering if I was going to lose all the food in the freezer.
- Make sure all devices and power banks are charged, and that flashlight batteries are in good shape.
- Fill buckets with water. Occasionally the water gets turned off, and you want to flush that toilet, or wash yourself.
- Fill pots and pans with water. That’d be for cooking.
- Make sure you’ve got enough food around for a couple of days.
- Make sure you’ve got a bunch of big bottles of drinking water. Which you should have anyway, because we live in a country with many earthquakes.
- Maybe most important?: make sure the drains are clear on your balcony. For many of us, the main “flooding” danger is a blocked balcony drain and then overflowing water coming into the apartment.
- I suppose bringing in laundry is an obvious point?
- (Taping window has been mostly discredited I believe, and if you do this, you may be stuck with a diagonal line of leftover tape glue on your window.)
- If the power goes out, open the fridge and freezer as infrequently as possible.
- Don’t go outside to enjoy the show. All those signs that clutter up Taiwan streets? They fly. With momentum. And edges.
- If you’ve got a gas can on your balcony, close it, and just turn it on when you need to cook.