A Family's Realistic Prep: Water, Power, and a Deep Pantry
An overview of how our family is prepared
Michael Harley shares his family's practical approach to emergency preparedness, focusing on likely scenarios like water and power outages rather than doomsday events. They stock 35 gallons of drinking water, a camp toilet, a portable power station for his CPAP, and a month's worth of food and supplies in a rotating deep pantry. Based in Richmond, VA, he highlights recent water advisories and infrastructure failures as real threats.
Two is one, and one is none.
- bryanlarsen
After having lived through a couple of natural disasters, I think the most important preparation you can make is to get to know your neighbors. Exchange phone numbers, give them a key. Help them out, ask for favors. (Asking for small favors is a good trick to establish trust: ask for the proverbial cup of sugar to make them feel comfortable asking you for favors. And then when they ask, be reliable).
The other is to make sure you have a good insurance company. Go to a neighborhood that has experienced a tornado or similar. Ask around -- people will know which insurance companies were helpful and which were penny pinching obstructionists.
- throw0101d
September is (US) National Preparedness Month:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Preparedness_Month
General guidelines to have a decent pantry, someway to cook things, some spare water, a way to heat your home if you're in a place that has winter, a source of emergency lighting:
Zombie apocalypses are a fun meme, but a broken city water main or an ice storm can be quite disruptive.
- qrush
I barely am able to plan groceries for a few days to a week ahead, especially with two middle schoolers eating everything in sight. While I would agree with the sentiment (definitely something will disrupt heat/water/food access), I struggle with actually executing on doing anything other than having some real basics around. 30 days of spare food feels like such an enormous amount of space and material.
- infecto
This is a sensible type of prepping. Prep for the things you will most likely face and some outliers within your geography. I myself could never understand the years worth of food types of folks. If things breakdown that much I don’t know much that food is going to matter.
- bluGill
The most important preparation: be friendly enough with your neighbors that you look out for each other. You can hate each other in general: so long as you won't allow looters in the neighborhood, and you can force yourself to get along enough to share/divide labor (in whatever way it turns out you need).
In the worst disasters preppers prepare for - odds are they die, so make sure your neighbors know what plans you have, if you die (or just you are out of town on vacation) your preparation can save someone else's life.