1950s fallout shelter (public domain photo by Fastfission at en.wikipedia, from Wikimedia Commons)
Do any of you do any prepping? If so, how the heck do you find the time, money, and energy to do it with young children?!
I really want to do whatever I can to be prepared for possible disaster. I’m not talking about the stuff of tin foil conspiracy theories involving martial law, FEMA camps, or the total collapse of the economy. I’m thinking more along the lines of natural disasters likes hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and blizzards. (On the extreme end of the spectrum, I’d like to be prepared for EMP effects of a CME.) In addition to wanting to have enough food to handle my family of six trapped in our house for a few days, I’d like to be prepared to have no electrical power or running water for an extended period (such as happened to many people hit by Hurricane Sandy).
We have done a very small amount of prepping already. It’s something we started in preparation for our first child. Whenever we make a soup, stew, or sometimes a casserole, we save some in our chest freezer. Once the baby’s born we can thaw and heat up the saved meals instead of cooking something new. After our second child was born we didn’t have to cook any new dinners for three months! Unfortunately, this preparation is of a kind that will do us little good in the event of long-term power outage that disables the freezer.
I want to do more, but what? What small improvements can I make to my preparedness? I’ve been told that anything I chose to do is better than nothing. That’s small comfort, though, when analysis paralysis sets in.
Every time I start to seriously think about prepping I freeze up and have a panic attack. There are just so many things to do that I don’t know where to start. On top of that we’re broke. Disposable income is pretty negligible. I have no clue how to most efficiently use my scant resources to protect my family in an emergency. The icing on the cake is that our lives are so busy with work and family commitments that time is a precious and limited resource.
So, gentle readers, how should I proceed. What things can I do for little money and in little free time?
ADDENDUM:
A commenter on Facebook asked me some helpful questions, so I’m answering them here.
Can you give me a starting budget, both in terms of money and time/manpower?
Both money and manpower are extremely limited. Assume that I’m working with loose change and stolen moments of free time.
And I’m assuming that you want to prioritize power loss, and short-term disaster survival. Let me know if that’s not true.
I’m not so much interested in recovering power (such as with a generator), but short-term disaster survival. Actually, “disaster” might be a bit too strong. In the short term I’m just interested in preparing for something like being snowed in without heat and power or stuck in a Hurricane Sandy scenario. I’m not prepping for TEOTWAWKI yet. 😉
Things I want to learn include non-obvious first aid supplies, most essential every day carry, the best foods (other than canned goods) for storage, and the best prepping “hacks” and “secrets”.
Give me a list of your basic needs–does anybody require medication?
Nobody uses any medications that they can’t do without for a few weeks or longer. The only other special needs are those associated with the newborn due next month. Our basic needs are those typical to a family of 6 – 2 adults in their 30s, a 6yo, a 5yo, a 3yo, and a newborn.
What things do you definitely want to have power? Is there anything ‘weird’ or odd that you consider a priority? To use myself as an example, I consider my dissertation data absolutely critical.
Cell phone chargers. Nothing else jumps to mind.
It would also help if you could provide me a list of what emergency supplies you already have–medical gear/medication, food stores, etc.
I recently put together a rudimentary first aid kit (meant mostly for hashing), and we have a store-bought kit in the car. We have several days of food, perhaps a couple weeks, without grocery shopping. However, no effort has been made to strategically build up stores.
Also, let me know if you have any skills/training that would be useful. For example, if you’re a good hand with a soldering iron, and have had a couple semesters of circuits in an electrical engineering program, you have *a lot* of options. Or if you are owed favors by a civil engineer, then we have much to discuss.
Not sure about any favors, but I’m pretty skill-less (in a practical sense). I’ve never soldered. I always worked in software or with bread boards. I have no carpentry skills. I don’t know jack about cars. I’m a noob around guns. What have I left out?
Have you ever been camping or fishing?
No fishing. Never did any rugged camping. Always somewhere with bathroom facilities. I badly want to do “real” camping, though.
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Every time I go grocery shopping, I buy a few extra canned products, and double the amount of pasta or rice that I need. Then it gets added to the pantry. It’s just a little at a time, but after only a couple months, there’s enough for my husband and I to be set for food for a couple weeks. Make sure you have a butane camping stove too, with plenty of fuel canisters, in case of power outage.
put the pasta in a freezer bag to avoid mites etc
I am a bit beyond just starting but certainly not “ready”. I’ve mostly been focusing on food/vitamins so far. While a long-term prepper may have buckets full of food that are specially packaged and radically different than their day to day food I think short-term prepping should involve having extra of the foods you normally eat. During a 3 month long crisis a picky kid may go for an entirely new food but during a 2 week crisis I’m not going to count on it and add the stress of kids refusing to eat to my plate. Another good thing about using foods you already eat is that your emergency supplies are always fresh because you can practice stock rotation.
My first step in prepping was to start doubling up on a shelf stable item or two every time we went to the grocery store. If something was on a good sale maybe more. That combined with regular grocery trips that don’t wait until the pantry is empty easily got me to a surplus. Say 3lb of pasta, 10 cans of beans, a bottle of olive oil, 2 jars of peanut butter, a bag of rice, a bag of nuts, 2lb lentils, a few cans of pasta sauce. Basically a few days worth of food even when due for a grocery trip. Every time new cans or bottles come home they go in the back/bottom so I am always using my oldest supplies first.
The next step was starting to buy the things we already use frequently (so I know they won’t go bad) in bulk. Amazon subscribe and save has been my friend in a particular way here because we have 3 wheat/gluten free people in our family and that stuff isn’t cheap at the store (with 5 items in one month’s order I get a 20% discount). We eat oatmeal or grits for breakfast most mornings. We also have a favorite gluten free baking mix that has buttermilk and nut meal in it so it only requires fat and water for the most basic recipe. Instead of buying one package at the store every couple weeks I get a box with 4lb. grits, another with 12lb. oats, 12lb. baking mix, 12lb. bread mix, 4lb. honey, 12lb. brown rice every 3 months. I also buy a 15lb. bag of white basmati rice at the Indian store every couple months and bulk red lentils, also from the indian store. If we didn’t have food sensitivities I would be comparing Amazon to Aldis/Costco for those kind of items. I would also add boxes of saltines, cereal and other grains that don’t require cooking.
Right after my new bulk order arrives we have roughly 2 weeks of shelf stable food in downstairs storage for 5 people at 1500 calories a day. If we factor in perishables and the upstairs cabinets we could probably go 3 weeks. For calorie calculation purposes I don’t count dried/canned fruit, veggies, chocolate. They count as “extras” to make things less boring/increase nutrients in my mind. I go by grains/fat/nuts/shelf stable protein only for calories. If I am in the last week before my new bulk order arrives I still have 1 week of shelf stable food.
Cooking. If gas doesn’t go down then we’re set. We’ve lost power for days and even water before but we have yet to lose gas. In a serious crisis chances are we would but haven’t had to deal with that so far. Currently I keep a few fires worth of charcoal and have a grill. I also have enough wood on our brush/old Christmas tree pile for one cooking fire a day for a couple weeks and a little brick fire pit in the backyard. I also have a cast iron dutch oven, griddle and frying pan which I use frequently on the stove but would do well in a fire or on the grill if need be (I’ve even practiced on camping trips). Eventually I hope to add a soapstone fireplace in the house with a cooktop and keep a couple cords of wood in the back. I also would love to get one of these: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0036FK3UI/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_ttl?_encoding=UTF8&colid=31G7C44CWW0A2&coliid=I2G84ISEIH29RX eventually since it can turn a little fuel into a lot of cooking time.
Water. Is our current achilles heel. On a good day we have a few gallons of bottled water. In a SHTF scenario I figure we’ll use the water in the hot water heater (40gal) for cooking/drinking if water gets shut off/contaminated. Whatever is in the kiddie pool (lol)/rainwater for cleaning pots. This is something I want to get along with putting in a rain barrel: http://www.amazon.com/LifeStraw-Family-1-0-Water-Purifier/dp/B00FM9OBQS/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1407962510&sr=8-1&keywords=life+straw+family that should add another 90+ gallons of water storage and make rivers and streams fair game.
Health: Baby wipes and a 5-gallon bucket with old plastic store bags for BM and the yard for pee.
No one in the family currently takes prescription meds but if they did I’d try to have at least one refill extra. Anthony wears contacts but has glasses. I usually have 2-3 months of whatever vitamins we take around.
If I had kids in diapers 2 weeks extra would need to be in storage.
Sanitary supplies for the ladies
First aid kit and some antihistamine (I’m crunchy so there’s natural meds and herbals for stress in there too)
Oh and I also added a 33lb. box of the palm oil shortening that I like to use. Even half empty that represents a week worth of calories. Not that we would just eat spoonfulls of fat but adding a bit extra to the beans/rice to stretch them is quite doable.
Blizzards and hurricanes rarely* occur without any warning at all. Anytime I feel there’s a serious threat that I may lose electricity, that’s when I go to the store and buy a few cans of beef stew and bottled water. And D cell batteries. The advantage to lazy prepping being that you don’t have to keep track of and rotate an inventory of mostly-but-not-totally-nonperishable food items. Even _water_ has to be rotated every couple of years. So far I haven’t lost power for more than 18 hours or so, but one can live on a totally nutritionally deficient diet of canned stew and tuna for a couple of days if one has to. Also: canned tuna and beef stew is very cheap.
Also, fill the bathtubs before an event that may cause you to lose running water. You’ll need it to flush the toilet. If you really did lose running water, you wouldn’t want to waste it on cooking pasta. Eat canned food and save the water for drinking.
If there’s a really serious storm coming, don’t prep. Evacuate.
* Of course, there was once a microburst in my niehgborhood, which did occur with no warning, and I did lose power for 1 day. Lucky for me, I was commuting home when it happened so by the time I reached my house, the trees that were going to fall had already done so.
The down side to lazy prepping, though, is contending with the store crowding caused by Chicken Littles buying French toast ingredients and TP.
If crowding is a problem, I usually go to a drug store rather than the grocery store. For some reason people never think to go there, and they stock canned goods.