Ask Slashdot: How Prepared Are You For a Major Emergency? 562
The northern US has been buried under snow several times this winter, and flooding has struck quite a few places in the southwest. Those pale, though, beside the recent disasters in Haiti, New Zealand, and Japan, and the seemingly inevitable arrival of a serious earthquake on the West Coast of the US. All of which has me thinking about my (meager) preparedness for a major disaster. Despite plans to stock up in case of a major storm or other emergency, right now I'd be down mostly to canned beans, sardines and Nutella. How prepared are you to do deal with a disaster affecting your region? Is your data safe? What about your family? Do you have escape, regrouping, or survival plans in the event of an earthquake, tsunami, hurricane, industrial accident, or whatever hazards are most relevant where you live? It would be helpful if in comments you disclose your region and environment (urban? rural? exurbs?) and the emergencies you consider worth preparing for, as well as talking about any steps you've taken or plan to take.
talking about data how safe are the data centers / (Score:5, Interesting)
talking about data how safe are the data centers / cables that link them? How long does the on site fuel last? (with out refill?) even if they have refill plans that fuel may get pulled and sent to other places that need it and the data center may have no say in that.
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Your experience is limited. Of course there are generators large enough to run even the largest of datacenters indefinitely--provided fuel source and modulo generator reliability. But their power output is not a problem.
http://www.manliftgroup.com/manlift_News_PG.php [manliftgroup.com]
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Data center not too far from my house has the capabilities to run their entire center off diesel generators. They test it once a month. http://www.liquidweb.com/datacenter/datacenter3.html [liquidweb.com]
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Hurricane Electric ran their Fremont datacenter on generator power for about one week during power equipment maintenance by the local electric company (evidently power was going to be unreliable for that week, so they opted to run full-time on the generator rather than switch on and off frequently), according to a rep I met with several years ago. He claims they burned through about 5,000 gallons of diesel during that time.
Their generator is big [he.net].
Are you armed? (Score:5, Funny)
Mod me troll. I don't care.
I've got a M1 rifle, a 12 gauge pump and a Colt Python as personal weapons.
That and a backpack full of gear I can live out of and a 4x4 that's already been up the Rubicon trail many times.
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<sarcasm>Yeah guns are really important, just look at all the japanese right now, without their guns they are really screwed.
I see them respectfully/calmly queing for food and water, it would be much easier if they were all just shooting each other.</sarcasm>
dumb fucks... :-/
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Re:Are you armed? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ever cleaned game? Wildlife around urban areas tend to be freaking nasty. Mangy, diseased, bony... Not a lot of deer around my city. Not a lot of wild boar either. So you may end up eating rats and bugs. Make sure that you don't puncture the rat intestine and spill rat feces all over that delectable rat meat when you're cleaning that rat. And rats, though they may grow to be large, are still rats and not much more meat than a single drumstick.
Say all you want about a can of pork and beans or tuna, but I'd much rather eat that than a squirrel. And yes, I've eaten rabbit, deer, wild hog, and snake before... I've never eaten rat though.
Re:Are you armed? (Score:4, Insightful)
Ahh, thank goodness for the simple pleasures of a vegetable garden.
Re:Are you armed? (Score:4, Insightful)
In a situation where radiation is a factor, and could be concentrated by the food chain, queueing up sounds better and better. Let's assume you are a decent marksman and the disaster you are dealing with hasn't hit during really cold weather when everything lairs up as much as possible, and you know enough to spot Tularaemia in rabbits and so on. We'll also assume you have some non-meat food sources too and won't get a protein overdose related psychosis.Those assumptions mean you know more than many legendary mountain men, let alone many modern hunters.Do you really know radiation well enough to make the smart decisions there too?
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Sure. Because guns and ammunition aren't manufactured goods that depend on a complex supply chain that will break down along with the rest of society.
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Guns? Hunting?
Bah.
The US is a pretty large country. I'd just move to the opposite coast. If California was hit by a tsunami, I'd dump as much stuff in my trunk as possible, and move to the East. Or vice-versa. Or maybe the middle part where the farmers have tons of food, and lots of generosity.
With such a large area, there's plenty of other places to move to, which are unaffected by the tragedy.
Re:Are you armed? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you are waiting until the tragedy happens to be getting out of dodge, then you are a victim waiting to happen. Ever see a full scale evacuation of an urbanized area? Gridlock is an outcome of panicked people trying to leave an area. Good luck with that strategy.
I work emergency management and can tell you from personal experience, the US will be rode hard and put away wet if a catastrophic incident happens today. We don't have the financial capabilities to deal with it and the "something for nothing" crowd we got for politicians these days will cut it even further.
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To expand on this (and living in Christchurch through the earthquakes), it took my wife 6 hours to drive home from work on the 22nd Feb when the last one hit. It's usually a 40 min drive in rush hour traffic.
Gridlock doesn't just happen if there is an evacuation. For the next several weeks going anywhere in the car took easily 3 times as long as expected simply because of the state of the roads and the increased need to travel to survive. Hell, it's been a month and we still don't have working sewers.
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Which is why my emergency preparedness involves boxes outside my house with food, clothing, tents, camping stoves, and water purification systems. Also in the boxes are a crank-powered radio and a large crow
Re:Are you armed? (Score:4, Interesting)
2 Lifted Trucks (well, one's an xj cherokee but it's mostly plate steel nowdays) - Check
Generators, Gas pumps - Check
Guns - Check (M1, M1A, AR15 (magpul bling and an acog), and an STI Edge in 40sw)
But something i'm really most proud of is my server, If human society stopped existing, I've got a backup of books, wikipedia (text only), obligatory media backups etc etc on a 10tb array in a seismic rack [2tb wd blacks and a 3ware 9550 in raid 6 fyi]. And that's relieving to know, that if a guy like me has atleast SOME of humanity's knowledge on backup, there's bound to be hundreds more just like me if the worst DOES happen.
Sorry, Rant off. TL;DR -- I just like being a little prepared, everything else are my hobbies anyway. 4x4'ing, camping and shooting.
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It's sad that there's so much hate on /.
Since you have admitted to possessing firearms, a good percentage of the population has written you off as a dangerous kook who should be watched for signs of gearing up to snap and go on a homicidal rampage. It's like they can't believe a sane, well-adjusted person can actually pragmatically look at a firearm and decide there are many situations a private citizen could potentially find themselves in where such a tool would be useful or essential.
What's really astound
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Re:Are you armed? (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course, it couldn't have anything to do with culture, could it?
Sadly, saying this is like shouting into a hurricane. Even more so, because it's the real root of the issue and most people are incapable of analyzing people and cultures to find the real cause to problems; they'd rather just demonize those they disagree with.
Owning firearms makes one more likely to be a criminal in exactly the same way being black makes one more likely to be a criminal. It's too bad the real meaning of the preceding sentence will be lost on so many, a great deal of whom will decide it means I think blacks are criminals because they're black. It's that old /. maxim "correlation does not equal causation," but let's not apply it to everything, just the things we like, but which have bad things that correlate to them. Anything else might as well be "correlation equals causation" for the average person trying to defend a strongly-held opinion.
Re:Are you armed? (Score:4, Funny)
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If I was surrounded by Americans I would want to be armed too.
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If I were surrounded by N. Americans, S. Americans, Europeans, Asians, Australians or Africans I would definitely be armed. The Antarcticans are the only ones with a remotely peaceful history.
History, learn it.
Re:Are you armed? (Score:5, Insightful)
Bit of a silly response, don't you think?
OP talks about preparing for a natural disaster
What you going to do, shoot the water as it swirls round your feet
Re:Are you armed? (Score:4, Funny)
Why not or are you some kind of save the water freak.
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I am.. whenever I see it wash up on the beach, I throw it back...
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Bit of a silly response, don't you think?
OP talks about preparing for a natural disaster What you going to do, shoot the water as it swirls round your feet
While people are lining up outside relief tents to get their MREs or Spam, we can be out hunting deer, turkey, dove, quail, etc. While you're eating rehydrated bread, we can be dining on some roast duck or deer tenderloin steak. You think during a flood you'll be able to drive down to the local McDonald's and order up a burger?
Re:Are you armed? (Score:5, Insightful)
How many ducks and deer do you think there *are*? If there was an actual disaster, the deer, duck, quail, and lizard populations would plummet as a teaming horde of well-armed people suddenly ravage the landscape.
We moved to an agricultural society so that we wouldn't have to try to eke out our existence on the little tidbits provided by nature. Wanna prepare? Fine. But don't think for a minute that there will be lots of game waiting for your bullets.
Guns are for self-defense.
Re:Are you armed? (Score:4, Interesting)
obligatory xkcd [xkcd.org] that points out the basic problem: It works for 1 guy, it doesn't work for everybody.
Re:Are you armed? (Score:5, Interesting)
And there really wouldn't be a horde of people would there? On the scale of event you seem to be talking about, the city-dwellers likely wouldn't make it out of the concrete jungle, and they wouldn't know where to start in terms of hunting strategy, food prep and storage. The only people who think hunting is "easy" are people who haven't done it. Guns are tools used for more than just self-defense.
I'll Tell You (Score:4, Informative)
How many ducks and deer do you think there *are*? If there was an actual disaster, the deer, duck, quail, and lizard populations would plummet as a teaming horde of well-armed people suddenly ravage the landscape.
Cornell University Cooperative Extension [wildlifecontrol.info]: "Today there are over 20 million deer in the United States and numbers are rising. [...] Densitites may exceed 40 deer per square mile in some rural areas, and over 100 deer/square mile have been documented near many eastern metropolitan areas. [...] As long as adequate food resources are available, deer populations can double in size every 2-3 years. Eventually some form of population management is needed to control herd growth and maintain deer numbers within the social carrying capacity."
There are plenty of deer.
Re:I'll Tell You (Score:4, Funny)
Thank god there have always been humans with guns around to control the deer population, or there'd be infinity deers by now.
Re:I'll Tell You (Score:4, Insightful)
There are 300 million people in the US. How long do you think 20 million deer will feed them? Of course, short of an incredibly major disaster, all 300 million of them won't simultaneously be needing the deer, but by the same token not all 20 million deer are going to available to the subset who do. "Oh, but my area has a low population density!" Great, that just means that statistically you're even more likely to get competition. Most like a much larger percentage of your neighbors have guns and no how to hunt.
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Bit of a silly response, don't you think?
OP talks about preparing for a natural disaster What you going to do, shoot the water as it swirls round your feet
While people are lining up outside relief tents to get their MREs or Spam, we can be out hunting deer, turkey, dove, quail, etc. While you're eating rehydrated bread, we can be dining on some roast duck or deer tenderloin steak. You think during a flood you'll be able to drive down to the local McDonald's and order up a burger?
While you're out, could you gun down a 140-count box of Pampers for me, please? Size 4, but 5 will do in a pinch.You can have some peanut butter . . .
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All completely true. Unfortunately, it seems that any time firearms are mentioned anywhere as a useful tool, the hordes descend to focus on all the multitude of ways a person is not able to do anything useful with them, ever. So the conversation gets bogged down in semantic arguments, and can't move on to discussion of all the other important aspects of disaster preparedness. The "You can't do that" or "That won't work" statements usually rely on assuming specific conditions, which is absurd when talking ab
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Sometimes it's not the disaster you have to prepare for, it's the aftermath.
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Really on a per capita basis there wasn't much looting in New Orleans either. Most of what there was was for food, and probably people would have paid had their been anyone in the shops to pay. What looting of luxury goods there was (and it's been to shown to have been exaggerated in the early media coverage) was almost entirely looted out of empty shops, and covered by insurance. There were no armed gangs wandering around stealing from survivors. There were a few assholes breaking windows of empty stor
Re:Are you armed? (Score:4, Interesting)
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I don't think the lack of violence was caused by the lack of weaponry. I think the lack of violence was caused by the Japanese culture. They're all in this together, basically, instead of it being every man and woman for themselves.
Contrast to Katrina, where it was all about 'me' and there were various criminals running around. People still helped people, but things fell apart instead of coming together like the Japanese did. It wasn't 'oh they're out of food today guess we're out of luck' it was 'oh th
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People lived off the land for millennia without guns. Or do you think bows, slings and spears were only invented because the cavemen ran out of bullets?
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The snowflakes are coming!!! SHOOT TO KILL!!!
Re:Are you armed? (Score:4, Insightful)
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1. Zombie attack.
2. Taliban paratroopers.
3. Annexation by DPRK.
4. FEMA death camps!
5. [many more]
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Mod me troll. I don't care.
I've got a M1 rifle, a 12 gauge pump and a Colt Python as personal weapons.
That and a backpack full of gear I can live out of and a 4x4 that's already been up the Rubicon trail many times.
Pretty typical answer... Just talked with someone who was in Japan last week and in the US during a major storm couple years ago (Virginia I think, with long power outage and plenty of damage). She said the people behaved very differently, in the US everybody elbowing each others to get anything and everything from the stores as fast as possible. Very orderly in jp in comparison.
Squid! (Score:5, Funny)
There are about a dozen cans of squid, that I have no idea where they came from.
Re:Squid! (Score:5, Insightful)
Cthulhu waits.
In the cans.
In your cupboard.
I'm Prepared (Score:2)
OK, so I'm living on the outskirts of an Eastern European city but I've still made some preparations:
Backups of all data held off-site
Fully charged laptop battery always available (I rotate them)
Passport and all essential documents all kept in one safe place
Working torch where I can find it
Box of tinned food and 25 Liters of water in the basement along with a torch and tent
Cellphone always kept charged and a spare SIM in case our local carrier goes titsup
Five minutes warning of the big one and I can be out
Meh (Score:2)
Fairly well prepared. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Go bags are good start (Score:5, Interesting)
Jump kits (Go bags)
You put 'em by the door for when you have to rock'n'roll.
http://www.sff.net/people/doylemacdonald/emerg_kit.htm [sff.net]
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When Katrina was still in the southern Gulf, I knew that it was going to hit N.O., and so we started preparing. At the last practical minute we headed north.
Gas stove and water heater are also darned useful if you
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Be wary of Backpack Fever [duncanlong.com]
Much better to shelter in place and be prepared to live where you are. The notion of fleeing to the hills is common, but foolish.
Preparation is in the mind (Score:5, Insightful)
The best preparations are knowledge and experience.
Learn to camp. Join the Boy Scouts or similar when growing up. Learn to fish. Learn to hunt. Go on hikes. Take a first aid course.
Learn to be calm in the face of a completely unfamiliar situation.
You can't really plan for an unexpected event, but you can train yourself to react rationally in unfamiliar circumstances. Having a tendency to improvise a solution will get you much further in an emergency than any preparation for a specific circumstance.
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Staged transportation.
For me that's a capable 4x4 truck with a bicycle in the back and a pair of comfortable hiking boots. Camping kits that gracefully degrade. All the real important stuff is in the backpack.
Like you say I'm in the Sierra Nevada every chance I get anyhow.
As a pet owner... (Score:2)
I do believe my cat would make a fine hat for warmth and I have plenty of nutritious (if fishy) wet and dry food available. Fortunately, just about the only thing I face would be a burly earthquake and hordes of dumbshit Seattleites panicking if the last 3-4 inches of snow we had is any indication.
Re:As a pet owner... (Score:5, Funny)
"my cat would make a fine hat for warmth"
your cat can knit?
Have someplace to go (Score:3, Interesting)
Bug out bags are nice but having a place to wait out a dangerous situation is ideal. BOBs aren't a panacea to surviving a disaster.
Backpack Fever [duncanlong.com] addresses this concern and encourages people to be realistic before grabbing their SKS and going innawoods.
Zombies (Score:2)
I'm well prepared for the zombie apocalypse.
Prepared (Score:2)
Some initial disclosure: My hobbies are hunting and mountaineering. Both of my parents are also retired Army.
I have a pretty well prepared plan actually.
We have two weeks of food and water which I check regularly, and being a hunter I have about 500 rounds of dry sealed hunting grade ammunition stored (locked) in the survival bag. I've also had several forms of bush survival classes and I'm extremely familiar with what is safe to eat and natural remedies for various issues. I also have several forms of lo
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FYI you can make a decent air filter out of toilet paper rolls.
You plug the center holes well then draw the air through them lengthwise, in series. Make a bellows out of boxes, duct tape and plastic sheeting.
Always make sure you have plenty of duct tape on hand.
Avoid fire fights with other reasonably prepared people. I'd hate to have to shoot you (or vice versa.) Manners will be important.
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Dominos (Score:5, Funny)
The only thing we probably have to seriously worry about, is the disaster after the disaster.
If there is some cataclysmic quake/tsunami on the West Coast, I can imagine plenty of people showing up here shortly afterwards. We are not prepared to deal with a mass influx of Californians.
I guess my survival pack would include:
My primary emergency is financial. (Score:2)
I am in the fortunate position of owning my own house, and the unfortunate position of having a low income that may be interrupted.
I have around 3 months stock of 'normal' food, partially in a very large freezer.
I have maybe another 6 months of 'meh - pancakes again' type food.
I do have a generator, but I've chosen to keep a surplus of 6 months electricity paid with my electricity supplier.
Natural disasters are fortunately rare in Scotland.
This year I'm insulating the house, from its largely uninsulated pri
Emergency by Neil Strauss (Score:2)
Neil Strauss, the guy who wrote the book "The Game", also wrote a survival book of sorts for the modern age [amazon.com]. There's an outline in there somewhere that describes how you should be prepared to GTFO if your country is screwed (either politically or environmentally). You'll need a second passport, some wildlife skills and a way to run your business on auto-pilot for passive income. It's an interesting read, but not a manual for us geeks.
Survival is not the only option. (Score:3)
Do I need to be? (Score:2)
How creative are you? (Score:2)
My wife and I talked about emergency preparedness the other day. She wanted to buy a kit from Costco, and I pointed out that with a little creativity we already have a lot of what we need.
Water: first off, our R.O. unit has a 2 gallon tank. Each of our toilets has 1.6 gallons in the tank. We have a propane BBQ and at least one tank of propane on hand so we could start boiling water the stored water runs out. If the muni water system isn't delivering anything at all, there's a creek nearby. And we have
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Being that I live in Canada, and we occasionally get weather here that knocks out power to a few hundred thousand people occasionally. For 2-3 months at a time, most of what you have won't let you survive as long as you think. Back during the last major ice storm up northern ontario/quebec way there were parts of both provinces without hydro(which means no water among other stuff), for nearly 4 months. No real way to get around, military drop offs, etc. Which means that we were lucky.
A ceramic style wat
Family Disaster Plan (Score:2)
Blatant karma whoring here...
Make a Family Disaster Plan, from the National Severe Storms Laboratory: http://www.nssl.noaa.gov/edu/safety/disasterplan.html [noaa.gov]
Note: plans described by this site cannot help you mediate disasters in your professional and personal lives.
No (Score:5, Informative)
I am not prepared.
Moderately Prepared (Score:5, Interesting)
My wife and I like to stay fairly well prepared.
First, our home. We live in a very rural area, on the side of a treed mountain. We built our home last year, and it's passive solar, sited to take maximum advantage of the sun, built very tightly (LEED gold-ish, but we didn't bother to get certified). We maintain the forest, have large piles of wood in rotation being seasoned, and keep a large stockpile of planked wood on hand (milled from the trees on our land). Our neighbors have cows, goats, and sheep, from which they produce milk and meat—handy to have When The Shit Comes Down®. (I use that phrase facetiously—it's a generic term that my wife and I use to refer to anything that may or may not happen in our lifetimes that would disrupt supply chains, limit movement, or otherwise require short or long-term independence.) We paid a few thousand bucks to have an enormous propane tank buried next to our house, in which we maintain a two-year supply of propane. Soon enough we'll have a propane generator, a few solar panels, and a small windmill, which should allow us to maintain ~1.5 kWh of power during about half of the day, but make it possible to peak to 5 kWh when demand requires (until the propane runs out, and then we top out at 1.5 kWh).
Second, food and water. We always keep about ten pounds of oats, twenty pounds of flour, ten pounds of sugar, ten pounds of rice, and ten pounds of dried beans on hand. We always have 20 gallons of fresh drinking water stored, 55 gallons of rainwater, and we maintain a spring. Also, we have a stream. We have a small flock of chickens, a horse, and we're about to get ducks. Six months out of the year we have what's either a large garden or a small farm, and we put up a lot of food in the fall. Not enough to get us through a winter, but we do alright, and feel confident that we could ramp up production significantly, if need be. We save our seed, so the notion of increasing the size of our garden by tenfold with four months of lead time (seasonally depending, of course) isn't totally unreasonable.
Third, medical. We've got potassium iodide on hand (there's a nuclear power plant ~35 miles from us), a dose of Tamiflu for each of us, two very complete medical kits, moderate training in first aid (with more coming soon—see below), and we generally maintain a three-month supply of our medications.
Fourth, general supplies. We have an oil lamp (and, of course, lamp oil), a bunch of candles, several fire extinguishers, a NOAA radio, a hand-cranked AM/FM/shortwave radio, matches, lighters, a flotilla of batteries of all sorts, headlamps, and flashlights. We keep a couple of canisters of propane on hand (rotated through annually, thanks to grilling season) and have a propane heater that can heat our entire house for a couple of days with one of those plugged in.
Fifth, evacuation preparedness. We keep a 72-hour pack by the front door, ready to go, with a couple of hundred bucks in cash, a few days food, tinned water, flashlights, blankets, tarps, matches, fire starters, and so on. We've got sleeping bags and internal frame packs on hand for each of us. The idea is to make sure that if sheltering in place isn't safe, that we can leave without delay.
Finally, a flotilla of books (not all of which we've read, I admit) on wilderness medicine. This Tuesday we're starting an eight-week Community Emergency Response Team training course (held just once a week). This is available in most areas—google around to see if you can take it in your area. That's where you can learn to be helpful in an emergency, rather than somebody who needs help—learn to use a chainsaw, direct traffic, suture a wound, lead a panicked group of people to safety, etc. Recommended highly.
I've come to relish when we lose power in good weather. It's a chance to test out our plans. There are a lot of basic aspects to preparedness that would just never cross your mind until you actually need to carry out that plan. You know how, without power, you keep flipping light switches every time you walk into a room, or thinking "well, I'll just google that...*DOH*"? The same applies to all kinds of things, like having candles...but no matches. :)
I live in Ireland (Score:3)
I live in Ireland. We don't have major national emergencies. Just irritations.
Barring a meteorite, nothing bad will ever happen here. Nothing bad ever happens here. No hurricanes. No earthquakes. No volcanoes. No tornadoes. No wars. No terrorism(not anymore anyway). Small floods that only annoy at worst. Most peaceful and safe country on the planet. So why prepare for an emergency that isn't going to happen?
Is your data safe? (Score:3)
When the world is melting down around you that should be the least of your concerns. Food, water, shelter, etc is a bit more important.
Just remember (Score:5, Funny)
When in danger,
or in doubt,
run in circles,
scream and shout.
-- Xavier Onassis, Director of Emergency Preparedness
Rural Canada (Score:4, Informative)
I've found the best emergency preparedness is being on good terms with the neighbors. If you know everyone within an hour's walking distance you tend to benefit from a larger skill set than what you have on your own. One guy's a hunter/trapper, I have access to a pile of radio equipment, the nice old lady about a mile down is a hardcore homesteader (I think she only buys milk), so we're all set up to help each other out.
Here is my list (Score:5, Informative)
Home:
40 cu ft Pantry full of food
5 gal jug filled with dried beans
5 gal jug filled with rice
8000 sqft backyard garden (mostly root crops this time of year)
5 x 5 gal jug filled with drinking water
half a cord of Firewood + ax and bow saw for collecting more
Several sacks of charcoal
Spare tank of propane
Box of candles
Large first aid kit
Iodine tablets
Fire extinguisher
Deep cycle battery + trickle charger + inverter
Large toolbox full of tools
Rechargable flashlights in every bathroom
A fireproof safe, bolted to a concrete floor, containing:
Original copies of important documents
Several USB drives with backups
Cash, other valuables
AR-15 assault rifle + 500 rounds of ammo + cleaning kit
pockets:
cellphone (the lcd screen can be used as a flashlight)
fine tip sharpie pen
on keychain:
4GB USB thumb drive
mini leatherman (scissors, knife, tweezers, screwdriver)
screw top tube containing:
needle+thread, safety pins, waterproof matches,
asprin, antibiotic pills
trunk of car:
Jumper cables
flares
First aid kit
Water
Breakfast bars
plastic bags
duct tape
epoxy glue
needles / thread
parachute cord
pliers
screwdrivers
scissors
$200 in twenty dollar bills
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Re:Ah. Survival. (Score:4, Insightful)
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It doesn't hurt to be prepared for these kinds of things. In my case, I have three days worth of food stored as non-perishable MREs. If you live in a cold climate, you should have blankets and thing
Re:Ah. Survival. (Score:4, Insightful)
You know, I call my emergency plan "The Apocalypse Plan" or "The End of the World Plan"
The plan is distributed throughout my group of "survivors". Three meeting points, with the plan for the final destination are included.
Supplies include weapons and plenty of ammunition, food (MREs, water, water treatment, etc), clothing, personal supplies (toothpaste, toilet paper, feminine needs), medical supplies (basic first responder kit), and vehicle supplies (extra gas, spare parts, etc).
And of course, people ask "Why weapons?" Well, since this world is such a kind gentle place, it'd be perfectly safe walking or driving through a group of desperate people with enough supplies to live a few weeks on. Oh ya, you wouldn't be safe. Beyond that, you may (and likely will) need to use them for hunting when the food supplies run out.
If it is a prolonged period of civil unrest, you may find weapons your best friend. Well, I guess the best friend is the person who can use the weapons most efficiently.
The meeting points are staged along a predetermined evacuation route. Multiple routes are provided to each waypoint. Each waypoint was chosen for relative isolation, access to fresh water and wildlife, and access by car, large vehicle (bus/large truck) and aircraft. So you should be able to walk, drive, or fly there (there are a few licensed pilots in the group).
We all know the parties who should be able to arrive, so once the entire party has grouped at one of the waypoints (hopefully the first).
Distance to the waypoints and regrouping times (how long we wait) is based on at least double the walking time. If it takes an hour to drive, or a day to walk, we give 3 days. So waypoint 1 would be 3 days (E+3d). Waypoint 2 would be 2 weeks (E+17d). Waypoint 3 would be another 2 weeks (E+31d).
We plan to add shortwave radio to the plan. Right now, we only have one licensed operator. Not that licenses matter much in a state of emergency. When your region has just been leveled by a natural disaster, having the FAA show up to fine or arrest you would be welcome. "Fine, arrest me. Get me out of here."
Re:Ah. Survival. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Sounds pretty cool, but allow me to play Devil's Advocate for a bit. I promise I'm not trolling, but your post brought up a lot of questions:
What happens when the disaster/antichrist/zombies/alien-invasion/whatever starts killing off members, catches some members on vacation somewheres else entirely, cripples/debilitates members, or similar?
What if the disaster involves something (or occurs during anything) that hinders any kind of transportation for more than a week (e.g. blizzard or ice storm)?
Even when e
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Let's see:
* disaster - local (blizzard) wait it out. global - meteor plunges the Earth in darkness for 100 years - pfft
* antichrist - I take this to mean really bad political change, If you don't literally mean a big-G God intervening... well running to the hills might help, if you think you'll do better as a "freedo
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Wow, lots of questions.. But thank you for asking.
Well, they have the plan, and they know where we're going. It's the unfortunately decision between "save everyone" and "save the ones you can". That's why we set gracious times to get to each waypoint. If one of the party is
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I've got food, basic medical, firewood, and a back up solar and rechargeable battery system to keep flashlights and a small TV or laptop running. I've got a little ammo for the M-16 too, but that's way down on my list. I'm expecting intermittent power failures and an inability to buy some foodstuffs such as Chilean grapes and California oranges at any reasonable price, if the economy gets bad enough. I fill my diabetes related prescriptions 2 months ahead now, for the same reason. Tons of ammo is for the Z
Re:Ah. Survival. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Emergency kit: Food, water, radio, flashlight, batteries, first aid kit, etc.
Apocalypse kit: A Real Doll and enough booze and drugs to forget the "Doll" part.
Gotcha beat (Score:3)
I'm in the SCA. My entire basement is a survival kit.
What you call the end of civilization I call a vacation.
Re:Ah. Survival. (Score:5, Insightful)
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My strategy is to live in Toronto. We never get any snow (according to my standards) or hurricanes. It's geologically stable, so no quakes. No major dams to burst, or rivers to flood. It's bland and boring.
Prepared? Ha! You live in the middle of a multi-million city. When zombie infection comes, good luck getting out through all the hordes on the streets! ~
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The ones in this group imo could not defend themselves if their life depended on it.
Already today you have gun owners defending their life [youtube.com] and property [youtube.com].
However, the fact that your argument is wrong does not invalidate your conclusion: If you live in or near a city, a major disaster hits and people suspect that you have canned food chances are that you will run out of bullets, will to kill or the part of your aiming that depends on luck* before the city runs out of people wanting your canned food.
* training at shooting reduces that fraction but it will still be there
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Re:Tips from the hurricane prone (Score:4, Informative)
Stockpile water and gasoline
Petrol goes stale. Don't stockpile it. Ditch the wheezy underpowered unreliable petrol engines, and get a diesel car and a diesel genny.