Because we live in a hurricane-prone region, we maintain a pretty good stock of non-perishables, but we saw this coming a few weeks ago and increased our supplies. We have enough for several weeks. We’ll be putting the garden in as soon as the pecan trees start budding, and IF it gets real bad, there will be several deer, squirrels, rabbits etc. that will be going “missing” around here. Any emergency water is from a nasty old well, but it’s good enough to survive on. Boiling and adding just a taint of bleach cleans it up pretty good. We have enough fuel & generator capacity to go for quite awhile if need be. We went almost six weeks without commercial power after Hurricane Rita and still had some reserve left...and we’re way better prepared now from that experience than we were back then.
FWIW, we went by a local rural supermarket three days ago because we forgot to buy additional butter. First problem: finding a parking spot! Once inside, it was packed and what I’d call “calm chaos”. I could see the fear in peoples’ eyes. People were nervous, and it probably wouldn’t have taken much to start a “stampede”. No TP, no paper towels, no bleach, no household cleaning products, no meat, no milk, no eggs, a few can goods, some frozen foods, snacks, chips, soft drinks were plentiful. There were a couple of employees trying to restock shelves as fast as customers were picking them clean. I talked to the manager for just a minute, and he told me that they were putting out the third truckload of product for the day and they were all dead tired!! He came right out and offered me a job stocking shelves which I didn’t take...and that kinda surprised me. We found two packs of real butter stuck way up in the back in the cooler out of sight. We grabbed those, some additional snacks, a frozen pizza and some can goods then got ta heck outta there. I can’t imagine what large urban areas are like.
I can’t imagine what large urban areas are like.
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What you described....only on steroids.
I can’t believe folks aren’t prepared for - at the very LEAST - several months. Food/supplies/meds.