So on the day after St. Patrick’s day I got to thinking. This “CV-19 Pandemic” will conceptually get worse before it gets better. What things have you found in your “Emergency “Zombie” Load Out” that were lacking or need to be revisited? Here is what I have found so far.
TP: Who would have thunk it? - Need a big bundle in the attic.
Water: I’m good and have a well.
Ground Beef: None to be had. Need 20 lbs in the freezer.
Cash: Have 6 mos. Can’t pay bills with green backs. Need to consider an electronic cash vault.
Local Inventory of canned goods: I have sauces and mixtures for a 1,000 recipes but I am lacking stuff that will actually make a meal.
Frozen foods: An asset and a liability. I have three freezers full of “food” but not so much that will make a meal and if power and gas are lost I have a 10 course meal 3 times per day then I have nothing.
Gas & Propane: Yup, need to stay on top of that. 2 empty propane tanks and one full. Winter: No gas for lawn mowers etc. so no spare gas. Need 5 gal jugs.
Let me know what you discover with this “Pandemic” that has suddenly become important that was always at your fingertips.
@Zavier_D I get you brah. My question is more to the things you have discovered that make your world go easy that with out are suddenly important because they are not there,
Case in Point: Walking though a personal hygiene isle with the wife. Me: “You got enough of those things for 2 months?” referring to her preferred pad/tampon whatever. She looked at me with love in her eyes … and threw 4 boxes of something in the cart.
I thought between the two fridge freezers (one in the house, one in the garage) we’d have enough freezer space for what we want to store, but I really need to look into getting a chest freezer.
Somehow we burned through our charcoal without me re-supplying (normally I keep a couple 40lb bags on hand as backup with the third one being the one I’m pulling out of). Need to fix that.
Storage has been a challenge from the aspect of easy/regular access to stuff vs just taking inventory quarterly. I’m rethinking that also.
Also…this has given me a realistic picture of how people/businesses/government agencies will react when things go south. And if they’re going to these extremes for something like this, imagine an “immediate” event like an EMP or other such disaster that makes things immediately inaccessible. It’s confirmed a lot of things from various books I’ve read.
Well, my health hasn’t been the best, lately. So I was feeling better today and went to check our stores. Wife has been “restocking” and I found alot of the things I had mentioned we were very short on. So I went shopping today. Got stores back to where they were supposed to be. Had to cash a bond. But thems the breaks. I explained to my wife that there has been talk of this going into July or August. So I was a bit worried but I caught early restock and fixed it.
She had been shopping but just buying stuff that required electrical. We have our own water and sewer. But still.
I will, go through my books find the guy who wrote it but he wrote one as a “white paper” for the war college, then got permission to write it and fictionalized some things and describes how fast an EMP event would take down any country. I have thousands of books to read so no worries about EMP for that part at least.
I think we as a nation have forgotten problems in the past. One of the houses I grew up in had a large pantry. At another house we had a vegetable garden. I was told a few years ago that at the very least, we should be able to sustain two weeks of whatever, which makes it easier if a problem arises and gives you a little extra even if you want to grab a few extra cans of beans when you see the tornado racing through your state (not literally). I wont even get into generators for things like in-home medical equipment (e.g. a loved one that is bedridden), sump pumps, or refrigerators.
I want to say that I hope people thank those workers at the places that make. produce, stock, service, and deliver the goods we are using. They have to put up with the craziness all day long.
This could be a good topic to read what other folks are doing or have done.
We (the wife has always been on board) have been preppers for over a decade so our stores and preps are fine. We did see the writing on the wall about a month ago and bought stuff to round out the edges so to speak.
The only thing we’re short on that I just ordered a boat load of are paperback books in our favorite genre. I’m staying away from the EOW books for now, why read what you could be living. My second favorite are William Johnstone westerns. Easy, fun, simple, therapy for the mind type reading.
You should have at minimum stores of: #1 Rice #2 Flour #3 Yeast #4 Beans #5 Sugar #6 Pasta #7 Any and all canned goods
I admit, I am lazy. I live .5 miles from my grocery store. So, I don’t really stock up. That will change. Soon I want about 2 weeks of food stocked at all times.
I still have not figured out what is up with the run on TP… Corona is a respiratory virus.
I need to be better at rotating stock. We did a quick inventory check pre-panic and had to throw out some boxes/cans because they were way expired in the back of the pantry. Pushed some others into the “eat soon” category
I’d like to find a way to keep more protein in mid-term storage (like a freezer)
Major Lessons learned:
Toilet Paper! I never would have thought that would be the thing I can’t get. Unfortunately, the stuff is bulky and takes up room
I have always thought of these emergencies as “no one gets anything for 2-3 weeks”, I’m honestly not sure how to handle “you can randomly get some stuff for the next 2-3 months”
In general, we are doing/have done a pretty decent job of keeping a good small stock of supplies where if the lights go out without warning we wont starve, or at least not immediately. As soon as we figured that things might grind to a halt, we tried to “top off” the supplies to mixed results because some folks figured the panic out before we did and cleaned out stuff like toilet paper. I suppose another lesson learned is to get better at predicting these panics. We live in the suburbs, so no matter what we are dependent on the gubment for things like electricity, running water, heat, etc.
My area (Northern VA near DC) is not total lockdown, but schools are closed and lots of people are staying home/working remotely/laid off. So it just feels weird around here.
I’ve always considered “disaster preparedness” from an angle where no one has access to anything for a few days/weeks. Not something extended like nuclear fallout or EMP or zombie hordes. But more like a hurricane or big snowstorm or flood hits and no one has power/water and all the stores are closed for some short time. So you need enough supplies to bridge until “the lights come back on”.
But this situation is radically different. One is that it may be significantly longer than a few days/weeks. The other is that we’ll have access to some things, but not others and in varying quantities. Like if you go one day, the store has veggies but no meats. The next time you go there is meats but no veggies. Go another time and there is meats and veggies, but NO TOILET PAPER etc etc. It’s hard to predict and therefore hard to manage. It makes me want to make a small garden for fresh veggies, but no way to get fresh meat around here if not from a supermarket. And I have no idea how to make toilet paper
There are alot of things that are cheap like Ramen Noodles that can keep you going a long time as long as you have the vitamins to prevent stuff like scurvy. I have always tried to keep a 6 month supply of food and water on hand.
I know I am going to have to bug in, for awhile. I have plans for that. I have that deadly funnel created in my home. Looks open but it’s not. I can close down only entry in seconds. I have medications that I have to take.
So for me if it is ever a true EOTWAWKI. I’m going to have to get my wife through to someone who will take care of her in exchange for months of prep, guns and ammo. Because I most likely won’t make it.
I have found that we need to secure more,and better cooking alternatives. We have a gas stove which can be used without electricity, but really nothing should natural gas supply be interrupted.(probably don’t want to be cooking outside if others are without food).
We also need to keep up on our canning. We have been saying for months that we needed to can, but never got around to it. Last Saturday we canned 17 quarts of meat. We have a lot of meat in the freezer, but prefer to can it, as electrical disruption is a likelihood in most disaster scenarios.
We have some cash on hand, but realized we need to increase that amount.
All in all we were/are in pretty good shape.
All in all I’m pretty well set. Going to get a little more cash out of the bank. But what I’ve discovered is a lack of mental preparedness. I down played the situation early on and it took conversation with other close preppers to get it to really sink in. I was too focused on THE VIRUS and laughing it off. Was not expecting the reaction/actions that the Gov’t is taking. Funny thing is I’ve been suspicious of the powers most of 30 + years and this has caught me slightly off guard. Not that I’m not prepared but that my move to action was delayed if that makes sense? I think I allowed myself or was conditioned to be more complacent of how fast things could change or be implemented. Eyes wide open for sure now! A good lesson to learn but not what I want to admit.
With the tendency of hurricanes to make landfall here in the SE US, we have gotten very good at preparing for a week’s worth of missing electricity, but we need to prep for longer outages than that. We’re in pretty good shape for now, but if this things does roll on into July or August, I’m concerned that society will unravel…and then Stephen King’s The Stand could look more prescient than he intended.
