After putting together a handful of scenarios to help me identify what we might need, I feel like I'm in a better place to start prioritizing. This is what we're going to start with and our goal is complete all of it in the next six months.
- Make sure we have contact information
- Improve first aid kit for house/office
- Resolve storage issues for food and water
- Ensure we have a usable 7-day storage of food and water
- Day pack for myself/wife
- Car Pack for myself/wife
- Address electricity-loss needs
- Bug out Bag for myself/wife
- Ensure we have a usable 14-day storage of food and water
- Address additional water-loss needs
- Ensure we have a usable 30-day storage of food and water
- Address sewer-loss needs
- Ensure we have a usable 90-day storage of food and water
Some Details
1. Make sure we have contact information
My wife and I have contact information for each other and our families in our phones, but I've been prone to jump in the river forgetting my phone is in my pocket. I know my home number and my Dad's home phone number, and might be able to remember my wife's cell phone, but that's kind of shaky and I don't have a clue what my Mom's home, or my brother's or Dad's cell phones are. Or my wife's family's phone numbers. No clue.
If a car broke down or there was another emergency and our phones were dead, we might be in a bit of trouble even if we could get to a pay phone or a passerby stopped.
To address this, I'm going to put all of our immediate family and close friend's contact numbers on a laminated card we can keep in our wallets, day packs, and bug out bags. I'll also include our insurance agent's and a few other numbers on larger cards in our day packs and bug-out bags.
Time: 1 hour including trip to Kinko's or Walgreens to get card laminated
Cost: A couple of bucks for the lamination
Target Completion Date: 10/10/2010 (Week 1)
2. Improve first aid kit for house/office
We have a handful of bandages and first aid supplies scattered around the house, but it's not well organized and I'm sure it can be better-stocked. I also have a store-bought first-aid kit at the office but I'm sure it too can be improved. I'm not sure yet what all I should keep in it, so I'll do some research, come up with a list, and likely build my own kits. I'll do a post just about this.
Time: 4-8 hours for research, shopping, and putting it together.
Cost: My budget is $100 to create kits for Home, Office, Day Bags, and Bug-out Bags
Target Completion Date: 10/17/2010 (Week 1)
3. Resolve Storage Issues for Food and Water
This has actually been a big barrier for us. Right now, our 50-gallon stash of water is sitting in the floor in the basement. We also have some canned and dried food down there that is on a shelf. It is stuff we normally use but we forget about it and just use what's in the pantry or what we buy from the store instead of rotating.
We don't have enough shelf storage to organize a stockpile, so it is difficult to rotate and inventory. I'll spend some time over the couple of weeks building nice built-in shelving in the basement office. I could do this a lot cheaper, but I want to build something nice that we can put doors on and paint if we sell the house.
Time: 1-2 days
Cost: $400. You could do this much easier by buying an $80 shelving unit at Lowes, but I haven't had the opportunity to do any woodworking lately so I'll build some nice built ins. Got to work some fun into this.
Target Completion Date: 10/17/2010 (Week 3)
4. Ensure we have a 7-day supply of food and water
We have this now, but due to our storage issues, we're not really sure what we have. My long term goal will be to replace "going to the store" with "going to the basement" to figure out what we want to put on the meal plan for the week. Going to the store will become restocking the "store" we have in the basement. This obviously won't apply to produce and fresh meat, but most of our meals make some use of the items in our stockpile, and we could transition 100% to our stockpile if needed, substituting canned meats, vegetables and fruit.
As part of this exercise, I'll create a 7-day meal plan and make sure what we have in our stockpile will suffice. If we have any gaps, I'll fill them.
We also need to rotate our water stored in store-bought 1 gallon jugs with something that will last longer. I've ordered 10 5-gallon mylar bags/boxes that I will transition our water into, and take the gallon jugs to the office where I will use it. I'm also going to put a couple of 30-gallon trash cans in the basement next to the water heater that I will fill with water. We can use this as gray water to flush the toilets since I don't want to waste our stockpile on that. Long term, I would like to replace the trash cans with containers that can store potable water, but the money for that can be spent elsewhere right now, and I'm just trying to get us through a 7-day outage at this point. My scenario showed we'd use half our water just to flush toilets and this gray water will be fine for that.
Time: 4-6 hours
Cost: $125 for the mylar bags/boxes, trash cans for non-potable water storage, and any food we need to fill holes in the stockpile.
Target Completion Date: 10/24/2010 (Week 3)
5. Day Pack for Myself/Wife
A good day pack with things that would be helpful in an emergency situation will be my next priority. Short term we may not take as much of a survival approach as many recommend, but we want something with us that will provide for some basic needs if we find ourselves away from our normal daily lives due to an emergency. We'll keep survival items like a knife and multitool, fire starting supplies, food, water, flashlight, para cord, etc., as well as some hygiene items like a toothbrush, hand sanitizer and sanitization wipes. Exactly what we'll keep in each pack I'm not sure. We'll have some discussions and figure that in time. I ordered a Kodiak GearSlinger Backpack that will replace my laptop bag. I'm not sure what my wife will do. I'll post more on our day packs once we put those together.
Time: 1 day to research, buy, and organize packs
Cost: $100 budget but I'm not really sure at this point, and that does not include the packs as my wife may want to use something she already has. I was about to go buy a new laptop bag anyway, just bought something slightly different than I would have.
Target Completion Date: 11/7/2010 (Week 5)
6. Car Pack for Myself/Wife
My guess is my Day Pack will be more extensive, and my Car Pack smaller, and my Wife's Day Pack will be smaller and her Car Pack larger. We'll have to figure that out. For the car, I want to make sure we have some additional emergency supplies including water, additional food, emergency blankets, road flares, jumper cables, etc. Where I might go a bit light on traditional survival gear in the Day Packs – especially for my wife – I'll go heavier with survival gear in the car, especially my wife's.
Time: 1 day to research, buy, and organize
Cost: $100 budget but I'm not really sure at this point
Target Completion Date: 11/7/2010 (Week 5)
7. Address electricity-loss needs
I originally had Bug Out Bags prioritized above this, but as we're in November I think it would be smart to take care of how we would survive a loss of electricity in the winter. This will likely be our most expensive preparation but also one of our most important. We were lucky over the past few years that we didn't have power outages for more than a few hours when many people in our city lost power for up to a week. I can tell you though, it's a terrible feeling to be standing in your kitchen with a foot of snow on the ground and your power goes out. We got lucky. By the time we gathered up some essentials and were preparing to leave, the power came back on. Next time I want to be prepared.
Our initial thought is we will need to acquire the following:
- A generator capable of running two portable radiator heaters we already own, as well as the microwave, coffee maker, TV, and some lighting. Powering the refrigerator may be nice but is not a requirement as we don't stockpile a lot of frozen goods.
- Enough fuel to power the generator 16 hours a day for seven days
- Six 50-foot extension cords
- A hot plate that will work on propane for the grill
- We already keep one full propane spare on hand at all times, we'll bump that up to two
- Lockable outdoor storage for the generator fuel and extra propane
- Additional plastic sheeting and tarps to help seal off the family room/kitchen from the rest of the house
Time: 1-2 days
Cost: $1,500 budget, but it may be less if we don't need a very large generator
Target Completion Date: 11/28/2010 (week 8)
8. Bug-out Bags for Myself/Wife
The idea for a bug-out bag is it's something you can grab and run out the door if you need to escape your home in a hurry. As with the Day Pack, I'll likely take a less survival approach short term and just try to ensure we have a few day's clothes, some basic protection from inclement weather, and any important documents. Basically, I'll try to address what we might need if the house is on fire and we throw these bags out the window before we climb down the ladder, or if there is a chemical spill close by that requires and immediate evacuation. I'll deal with some of the other hard-core scenarios down the road.
Time: 1 day
Cost: $200 budget. We'll likely need to buy some packs for this, but we should have most everything else we'll need except maybe some good rip-stop nylon ponchos/pants.
Target Completion Date: 12/12/2010 (Week 10)
9. Ensure we have a usable 14-storage of food and water
Now that we've addressed most of the realistic short-term emergencies, we'll start to build up our food and water stockpile. At this point, I may try to replace the trash cans in the basement with potable water, look into water filtration systems although we will have to travel one mile to the nearest stream, and build out the food supply. I'll do a lot more sample menus during this time so I can ensure we have some variety to our meals.
Time: 1 day
Cost: $250 budget but as I get into the planning, it might need to be adjusted.
Target Completion Date: 12/30/2010 (Week 12)
10. Address additional water-loss needs
By this point, we will have some basic provisions in place to deal with a loss of water for up to 14 days. When running through the scenarios, there were some additional items I noted might be helpful if we do not have potable tap water for an extended period of time. These included various vessels that could make living without tap water easier, as well as possibly some ways to help capture and process rain water. Many of these will not be expensive preparations, but since other scenarios have a higher probability, we have prioritized this to here.
Time: 1 day
Cost: $250 budget but I'm really not sure yet. Some basic stuff would cost less than $50.
Target Completion Date: 1/16/2011 (Week 14)
11. Ensure we have a usable 30 day storage of food and water, or the ability to process water after day 14
Now we're getting into some serious stockpiling of food and water. The likelihood we will need these kinds of resources is very small, but we will be happy to have them for ourselves and possibly to help others in time of a major disruption of services. This will take some solid planning of menus to ensure we are stockpiling things we actually use in our day-to-day lives so we don't acquire a bunch of things that just go to waste. I'll have more thoughts on this down the road.
Cost: Not sure yet.
Target Completion Date: 1/30/2011 (week 16)
12. Address sewer-loss needs
Given our house sits on top of a hill in one of the highest areas of our county, I'm very hopeful we won't have any sewer issues. It's more likely a tree in our yard will break our sewer line than we'll lose sewer service due to some other emergency. There are a few things I identified that would make living without sewers more sanitary. Again, these are not very expensive preps but given the likelihood that we'll need them, it's a lower priority.
Cost: $100
Target Completion Date: 2/13/2011 (week 18)
13. Ensure we have a usable 90-day storage of food and water, or the ability to process water after day 14
Again, the likelihood that food supply will be interrupted for this long is slim, but we want to be prepared and have the ability to help others during shorter emergencies. My goal is for our basement storeroom to become our grocery store, and we go to the grocery mostly for produce and fresh meat and to restock our "store". I think we could probably get our "store" up to a one-year supply, but we've got to weigh if it's more likely we will abandon our home after 90 days, or if we think we'll homestead in our current location should food shortages get this limited.
Cost: Don't know yet
Target Completion Date: 3/27/2011 (week 24)
My guess is once we get to this point, we'll have invested a handful of weekends and about $4,000. We could definitely do things cheaper but I think we'd feel more comfortable with $4,000 in good supplies and food we'll eat anyway instead of an extra $4,000 in the bank. We don't make that much money, but we don't have any debt other than our mortgage and are frugal which allows us the freedom to use our resources as we see fit. My advice to anyone in debt is to get out! You'll be surprised how much you make and how much freedom you have when you aren't a slave to the banks!
Once we get to this point, we'll have likely identified some other scenarios we believe it is important to prepare for. We'll start thinking more about security and an enjoyable life instead of just basic survival. Next spring we'll likely plant a garden and begin to develop some other skills that we'll need if we were to ever end up in a homesteading situation. But we've got to get though the list above first!
I'll keep you posted.
We had a few goals over the past two weeks and made a bit of progress.
I did order two of the 25 Gallon Boxed Water Kits from Emergency Essentials. The order went fine and was shipped quickly. I have not had a chance to fill these up and replace our current water in storage but I'll get to it in the next couple of weeks.
