Im no prepper but i have lots of tp canned goods a few guns lots of ammo i need to work on the water thing next
It is your choice you can prep or you can stand around on a bridge waiting for FEMA to bring you a bottle of water, a MRE, a warm blanket and a kiss for your boo-boo and maybe you can even get your picture as you stand there on the national news.
The world is dry tinder just awaiting the right spark. Baltimore has shown us that. It also shows us that if you have a ‘Blue’ City. County or State government in place they are going to take any action to protect you until it is far to late.
So listen to what the bible says: A prudent man sees danger and takes refuge, but the simple keep going and suffer for it. NIV Proverbs 22:3
Selco covers this in this article many times people just can not except that a breakdown is occurring even as they watch it happening before their eyes. Why don’t they realize it? It’s caused by a condition called ‘Normalcy Bias’ a mental state people enter when facing a disaster.
It causes people to underestimate both the possibility of a disaster occurring and its possible effects. This often results in situations where people fail to adequately prepare for a disaster, and on a larger scale, the failure of governments to include the populace in its disaster preparations. The assumption that is made in the case of the normalcy bias is that since a disaster never has occurred then it never will occur. It also results in the inability of people to cope with a disaster once it occurs. People with a normalcy bias have difficulties reacting to something they have not experienced before. People also tend to interpret warnings in the most optimistic way possible, seizing on any ambiguities to infer a less serious situation.
A good article on ‘Normalcy Bias’ is on our own ChocChipCookies Blog The Survival Mom:
http://thesurvivalmom.com/2010/12/29/normalcy-bias/
You either prepare and stand on your own beholden to no one or you become dependent on others to provide your basic needs and become their ‘serf’. Me I don’t want to be beholden to anyone for providing what is needed for me and mine. I certainly don’t want to have to kiss some ‘gubberment’ third class bureaucratic to try and coax some help from them, I don’t want some ‘jack booted’ thug herding me in line and telling me where to stand, sit, eat or sleep. And last but not least I don’t want to be shut up in with a bunch of ‘zombies’ and have to worry about not only trying to get basic necessities but having to fight to keep what I manage to get.
Just getting started or an old hand you might find my Preparedness Manual helpful. You can download the manual at:
http://tomeaker.com/kart/Preparedness1j.pdf NOTE! THIS IS A FREE DOWNLOAD. I DO NOT MAKE ONE CENT OFF MY PREPAREDNESS MANUAL!
For those of you who haven’t started already it’s time to prepare almost past time maybe. You needed to be stocking up on food guns, ammo, basic household supplies like soap, papergoods, cleaning supplies, good sturdy clothes including extra socks, underwear and extra shoes and boots, cash (I myself have been putting up change for the past few years both for the metal content and the fact that using change places to make what purchases you can will move you down the the list of possible marks during shtf), tools, things you buy everyday start buying two and put one up.
As the LDS say “When the emergency is upon us the time for preparedness has past.”
Again I like to recomend FReeper’s ChocoChipCookie Blog The Survival Mom (Please Blog Police let this one slide!) Where you can get lots of useful information like:
http://thesurvivalmom.com/2011/11/20/8-morale-boosters-for-any-worst-case-scenario/
http://thesurvivalmom.com/2010/02/02/survival-priorities-the-rule-of-three/
And More
Also there is Ferfal’s Blog a survivor of Argentina’s first collapse:
And there is Selco’s Blog a Bosnian War survivor at:
“There is no greater disaster than to underestimate danger. Underestimation can be fatal.”
You are so screwed.
Me too! Though I do have my own well and a whole house generator.....
I’m not prepper either, but I do believe in being ready for emergencies, especially power outages, tornadoes, and earth quakes. I have food storage to save money and also control the content of ingredients that are in my canned foods.
In the winter, a person can only go about 3 hours without shelter and heat. You can only go about 3 days without water. You can go about 3 weeks without food. Course you can only go 3 minutes - maybe less without oxygen.
I have the oxygen covered. Several tanks and an O2 conserver. Oxygen concentrator and a generator for backup electricity. On my wish list is a battery pack for the concentrator.
Our house is shelter, but we also have several tents for back up shelter, and mattresses that can be used in the van as an additional option.
With two fireplaces, and enough wood stacked for two winters, wood is one source of backup heat. There’s also the generator to use with plug in heaters.
We have about 25 gallons of bottled water, a well, and a swimming pool of 4000 gallons of water. Plenty of bleach and water filters. Water comes before food, and we are fortunate in Missouri to have a nice rainy season and we are able to harvest the rain water.
Hubby will rewire the pump, if we have long term electrical outage, so that the generator can be used to run the pump for short period to fill up buckets with water from the well to replenished the empty bottles, five gallon buckets for cooking and brushing teeth etc.
On my wish list is an automatic switch or a switch that I can just flip to switch from the grid to the generator. I feel we need to work on additional ways to get water from the well, but I am satisfied that we will have plenty of water with what we have. Worst case we have to hike to our 22 acre site and get water from the creek.
Rather than buying expensive “emergency food”, We stock up on stuff we eat anyway, when it goes on sale. If there’s a good price on chicken, we buy about 25 lbs. Some is to eat now, some goes to the freezer, and the rest gets canned in our pressure cooker. It can be eaten straight from the jar, heated briefly, or used to make casseroles or soup.
We do this with chicken, turkey, ground beef, beef roast cuts in cubes, pork loins, and pork ribs, and pork roasts.
We also have canned ham, chili dog sauce, tamales, and cheese in jars. The tamales, chili, and cheese are ingredients to make a casserole we like.
We try to keep a case of 12 of each of these. That’s one meal a month from each category(2 meat sources per week). The ham and chili casserole give us a third meat dish every other week.
We have fish once a week. We have one case each of tuna and salmon. Two cases of canned clams. That gives us tuna and salmon once a month and clam chowder twice a month. The salmon will give us two meals, so usually that’s salmon salad of some sort, and freeze the rest to use for salmon cakes two weeks later.
I don’t discuss the ammo and gun situation since that all of what little we had was lost in the river on a canoe trip.
The freezer is full right now. We just bought a side of beef and split it. So we have about 1/4 of a beef in the freezer. We have several boxes of various types of fish such as tilapia, halibut, cod etc. The rest of the space is filled with veggies we grew last summer and some butter and cream cheese, and home made tv dinners.
We are gradually moving from buying canned vegetables to canning, freezing or dehydrating them at home where we can control the ingredients, as well as zero pesticides for the food we eat. Grow your own organic produce it’s cheaper than the non-organic factory produced food that is nutritionally deficient.
As we use stuff from our immediate use shelf, we move a replacement from the oldest long term stock, and write down what we used. Next time that goes on sale, we buy enough to replace what we used.
Anyway. Survival is time is short without water, so definitely get going on it. Sorry for the long post. Just kinda got going like the energizer bunny.