I just hope to be at ground zero.
Agree with marvin100. When you start researching prepping you quickly realize that unless you know EXACTLY what type of disaster you’re dealing with, you can’t really effectively prep. The prep for flooding will be different than the prep for a nuclear disaster vs an EMP vs a hurricane vs an outbreak of disease.
And unfortunately even if you have prepped for the type of disaster that happens, unless you have a reasonable sized team who are all willing and capable of fighting and/or shooting, the right kind of defensible holdout (and it doesn’t do you much good to have a great fortress if the marauding hordes steal your crops while you’re barricaded inside) and huge stocks of ammunition, it’s only a matter of time before the starving/sick/freezing people come and take it. Not a pleasant thought at all.
To give an example: The people around here who lost their homes to the flooding for the most part didn’t have flood insurance (possibly it’s just not allowed in this area), lost all their possessions, might have lost their vehicles, and are not wealthy. Businesses were affected, too; some of those might still be closed or the owners might have lost everything and have to start over.
My takeaway is that to be well prepared for an emergency, you need to be prepared for emergencies that require evacuation as well as for emergencies that leave you housebound. Most important, having a lot of money helps.
Be sure you have a few basics in your car. $1 bills as there will be no CC’s.
We each have a backpack in our cars with two pair of heavy gloves, a small crowbar, water packages in foil (Amazon),
bills, cell phone #'s. We h ave a large crowbar hidden outside our house–if the electricity is out I want to be able
to wreck the garage door to get in. And lots of liquor and wine to use for bartering :P. We have many tubs of
toilet paper, bleach, ER blanket, crank radios, shoes, a change of clothes, back packs, a tent and crank tv—
all for our earthquake. Extra meds. did have pet food when we had a pet. It is an exhausting list and yet we
know we are still not truly prepared.
Oh, a few rolls of super heavy plastic to cover our windows to keep rain
and snow our with rolls of duck tape should we feel we can stay in the house. The windows are going to break. sigh. Just trying to make it livable as it could be weeks or months until our city gets enough help. Also just bought suture kits for stitches and adhesive tape to sew up wounds. Our materials say to prepare for at least one set of neighbors which we have done. The water is a problem so after trying many things we have a kit such as backpacking and about 15 flats of bottled water that we use and rotate as we replace.
I was a first wave mental health volunteer at Katrina and returned home convinced that we must be ok for at
least 2 weeks for our then family of 4. Our neighborhoods are setting up center 3 miles apart that are to be in
place within 3 days with food/shelter/water and such. I plan on getting trained to participate.
I’m a total weather geek-- I actually watch “Hurricane 360” and “Tornado 360” on the weather channel. I love storms and I’m aware of storms that are approaching. Any time a significant storm of any sort, from severe thunderstorms to a blizzard-- is approaching, I call my 88 year old mom to make sure she has milk for her tea and cake.
That said, everyone I know could live for several weeks off the food in their pantries. Yes, we would run out of bread and milk. But I don’t have young kids, so the milk isn’t vital. We could eat the tuna without the mayo that’s in the fridge and would go bad in a power outage; we would survive just fine.
I’m inland enough that flooding isn’t an issue-- we’re the part of the Island that people evacuate to in a hurricane. So for us, the largest flooding threat is the 4’ pool in the yard.
That said, there are things you can do when a severe storm is approaching: Fill the tub or washer with water (no soap obviously)-- you can use that clean water to flush the toilets or even for cooking all that pasta in the pantry. Make sure you always have batteries for your flashlights-- glow sticks work well with young kids when the power goes out. Make sure all the cars are gassed up when there’s a storm approaching. Make sure there’s always cash on hand; ATMs don’w work in a power shortage. If there’s always gas (or even charcoal) for the BBQ, cooking won’t be a problem.
None of that stuff takes any real effort. but could make a difference in a crisis.
We’re ready for an ordinary emergency, the type that would keep schools shut down for two weeks and people sheltered in their homes. We’ve had them in the area before, for instance a severe ice storm that took down trees and power lines all over the area. It took 3 weeks to get power back to some homes in towns surrounding us. The prep school our kids attended opened up the gym showers and the dining room to anyone without power.
We shop at Costco so we have cases of some things like soups and pasta plus at least a month’s worth of TP and paper towels.
I think one of the most important aspects of prepping for an emergency is creating a connection with your neighbors. We have a neighborhood network and I’m sure that even any neighbor not in the network would quickly find help if they hung a sign in the window asking for it. We know who has a generator, who can provide extra wood for the fireplace, who has a chainsaw or a truck with a plow. In the above mentioned ice storm people banded together and had neighborhood barbecues and other events to spread resources. We offered a family a place in our non-frozen house.
In a Mad Max scenario we’d be toast but I choose to believe that in anything short of a cataclysmic catastrophe we’d see the best in people, not the worst.
This is great info. There are several things I hadn’t thought of.
We don’t live in an area that is prone to cataclysmic events like earthquakes and flooding. Even in some major ice storms where some people had no power for 2 weeks, the longest our power has been out is three days. We are on public water, despite our semi-rural location, so we can always flush the toilets and have drinking water. (We do actually have a number of gallons of frozen drinking water in the bottom of our chest freezer to fill the space, and we could use that, one by one, if the water supply were compromised.)
Heating is our big problem if it happens in the winter. Lots of people in Maine have wood stoves, but because of the configuration of our house we do not. We do have a small gas stove in one room, but it wouldn’t stop the whole house from freezing, I don’t think. I wanted to put a gas insert in our fireplace, but it turns out that the configuration of it won’t safely accommodate even the smallest one without removing some wood trim around it, and we would have to line the chimney, so the whole thing would be very expensive. We don’t use the fireplace because of the chimney. The house already burned down once, in 1913! 
I wish we had a generator, but every time we think about breaking down and getting one, the power comes back on.
Anyway, we don’t keep cash, water, extra food, evacuation kits, or any of the things mentioned earlier in the thread. We don’t have weapons. Possibly due to our location, we just don’t think that way.
I think many people decide they can stay in their homes for many storm emergencies figuring that their house is sound They don’t realize that after your neighbors have left, the power is out, the trees are down and/or the waters rise plus no cell phone service because the towers went down you are truly on your own and possibly trapped. And it might be weeks for clean-up.
I may have contributed to the previous thread on emergency preparedness so some of this could be a repeat.
I live in the Pacific Northwest in an area likely to be hit one day by a big earthquake. We get periodic earthquakes but they’ve been small and cause only local damage. But the possibility exists for widespread damage to homes, roads, bridges and utilities.
Our neighborhood (as defined by our school district boundaries) is working through the Know Your Neighborhood exercise bit by bit. The state of Washington military department has web documents that refer to Map Your Neighborhood but it’s realiy the same concept.
Near each bed in my house, I have a bin with a flashlight, leather gloves, whistle, sturdy shoes and a hard hat for each occupant of that room.
After an earthquake, there are specific steps we are supposed to take at our own home before meeting at a location in our immediate part of the neighborhood. First steps include putting on our hat, shoes, gloves and helping our own family, turning off the water and natural gas (tool for gas is hanging at the meter, water tool is right next to it), putting our fire extinguisher by the curb and hanging a “we are ok” sign (or “help” if needed) by the garage or in the front window.
Once we are secured, we are supposed to go to the prearranged meeting place and form our groups and check on our neighbors. Groups include folks checking the gas/water shut offs, checking on kids and elderly, and checking on “ok/help” signs.
We’ve been told by the local fire department that it could be two weeks after a major quake before they could reach our neighborhood. They’re usually about 5 minutes out.
At our house, we have our 72-hour kit-to-go and keep several months of food and about 2 weeks of water in the house.
We can’t plan for an apocalypse but we can plan for things that are likely to happen in our area.
“Anyway, we don’t keep cash, water, extra food, evacuation kits, or any of the things mentioned earlier”
Get cash-- credit cards don’t work. Water may not be available.
At LEAST think about that evacuation kit and what you should grab–phone numbers, your lap tap, insurance papers. a rain coat, flash light and sturdy shoes… the extra phone battery (because half of this stuff is probably on your phone).
Just making an evacuation list and doing as an exercise makes it easier when your brain blanks at the last minute and you wonder what to grab… Grab the booze on the way out…and I grabbed the baby pictures.
The point about self defense is well worth heeding. We don’t need a total breakdown of law and order to need a means of protection. In both Katrina and the LA riots, people who wanted to keep themselves and their belongings safe had rifles in hand.
Also, as much as I would like to believe that disaster would bring out the best of people, this doesn’t always happen. Some people seek power, others seek to enrich themselves and others are just sick. Few of us know how we would react in truly dire straits - what if your child was dying of thirst or because they needed a medication? How far would you go to protect the ones you love?
We’ve been snowed in, even in the city, more often than force to evacuate. We survived even when we ran out of bread and potato chips. We used to lose electricity quite often in summer storms. After 3-4 days, times were desperate because our water was on an electric pump. It was hot and miserable, and sometimes we’d try to get an hotel just to take a shower.
Make sure you have dog food.
Another type of emergency that probably nobody expected to have to prepare for: houses exploding and catching on fire like they did in the suburbs north of Boston last week.
This all depends upon where one lives and is often one of our conversation topics with our lads. Remember… we do this for fun based upon shows we watch. We’re hardly the prepper type in reality. In reality we have enough to be comfortable for storms, etc, or even lean times in income, but I’m honestly not afraid of an apocalypse and the one most likely (nuclear if the Big Wigs get fussing) will put us pretty much at Ground Zero due to that “secret” site no one (except everyone around here - and probably in power everywhere) knows about for the Prez. We’re bound to be targeted within a close enough range to not have to worry at all about this life - just enjoy the next one.
But… getting back to it depending upon where one lives… this is where we’re fortunate enough to have that community one would need to survive. We have farmers, medics, metal workers, ex military, and essentially “MacGyvers” all within our small close knit very local community (neighbors). We all really like each other and would naturally band together - we already do - just for everyday life. If one of us needs something, we know who to turn to.
We’re also far enough away from the masses of starving/sick/freezing people that they wouldn’t get here. There are too many others between us and the cities (small and large) that so many of them would be done in (one side or another) well before reaching us. It’s an awfully long hike and finding us is not simple - even Google gets it wrong. By the time a few reached us, they’d better quickly decide if they’re friends (and offer our community something in exchange - work or something else) or foes (and in that situation, ending the conflict wouldn’t be difficult with our advantage points).
If we lived elsewhere, we’d have our problems. Living here, we’d take our odds.
Of course, we’ve also pondered where we ought to go if we wanted to try to avoid nuclear annihilation… a fertile island no one can place on a map sounds ideal, but one would need to work into that community the same way folks wanting to come here would need to work into ours… That would be the “last minute” hard part. Look at how much of the world wants refugees now…
I usually try to keep a tissue or two in my shoulder bag in case I have an emergency runny nose or sth.
I might start to eye that one surviving goldfish in the fountain…
JK, but it helps to know your edible plants. I have a love/hate relationship with taro (elephant ear). It’s considered invasive here, but it is striking to look at and that giant starchy root stalk could feed you for days. I guess I need some poi recipes.
Every time these threads come up I vow to buy water purification tablets. I need to get off cc and check that out! Someone said they could flush toilets because of city water. Don’t you worry something will happen to a city water system? I don’t want to feel dependent on the government in these circumstances, and/or be trapped in a city when these things happen.
We keep paper supplies and as many meds as I can stockpile (more because I’m usually fighting insurance.) Have guns and ammo. My main worries are fuel and water supply. Within weeks I’ll be back on well and septic, in an area with a high water table and soft soil. I’m making friends with my Amish neighbors for the transportation/fuel issue. Much of the year I could eat some type of crop and butcher livestock. Animal feed could be a problem in winter months.
One of my kids is the Bartering King. Hopefully he can secure whatever else we need
@gouf78, tell me what could possibly make me have to evacuate my house in a hurry with no warning and I’ll think about it.
And I mean evacuate, like in evacuate the area, not like leave the house.
Our problem is that our house might not be able to be inhabited. Certainly with the major earthquake we won’t be able to go in until after whatever the after quakes --72 Hour? anyone?
So the tent, blankets, etc. It is daunting to actually think about. Our house was built in 2003 so we have many earthquake seismic things in place.