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Dave2 wrote:

FishInTx wrote:

Dave2 wrote:Sorry for the thread necro...

Between all the political unrest and storm season approaching, I'm thinking that it might be wise to should start stocking up on food a bit. Does anyone know a good place to get a large variety of canned soups? Kroger's selection is a bit too "narrow and deep", so to speak.

We don't eat much soup. Cream of mushroom to use in other recipes and a couple cans of chicken noodle for when someone gets sick. We do love clam chowda and have a case.... or so, of it. Not canned, Ramen noodle soups? Boxes and boxes of ramen noodles are stacked everywhere and stuffed under the bed. We shop at the regular grocery stores, Brookshires, HEB, wal-mart, Sam's and buy a couple extra cans/boxes every time we shop.

Ramen can be quite delicious, but you've gotta add water to it. All the stuff I've found at Kroger is ready to eat. Hmm... they might require heating... I'll have to check the label.

Eh, I suppose there's nothing wrong with stocking up on food that requires me to add water as long as I increase my water supply accordingly.

I believe your last statement to be correct. If you do not have enough water to be able to add to food to cook it, you have a much bigger problem than just the food.

Some of us are going this route.
http://lowestprices.shelfreliance.com/home
I'm not affiliated with this company in any way but I did attend a "tasting" that they put on. The hostess brought a great assortment of their products and prepared dishes with many of them The advantage is the shelf life. Chicken (unopened) is good for 25 years and will hold for 1 year after it is opened. I bought a bunch of samples for our family and we did things like red beans and rice, oatmeal, etc. Almost of the freeze dried fruit is so good, you'd think you were eating fresh. And the prices are in line with comparable amounts of similar food items.

Although Shelf Reliance stuff needs to be maintained at a normal inside temperature (i.e. in cannot be stored in an unheated garage and retain its flavor and longevity), it is very compact. You can store a lot of tasty meals in very little space.

Sufficient stocks of water or the ability to make large quantities potable water remains one of the biggest challenges for preppers who are trying to expand planning horizons beyond 30 days. We have an RV with a 60 gallon fresh water tank. It will last my wife and I quite a while. After that, things get more difficult, assuming that the faucets don't work.

OldCannon wrote: My experience during that event taught me a lot what kind of "humanity" to expect in bad situations, and I only sampled the tip of the iceberg. I even got the joy of having my water supply to my home burst from freezing about 3 days into that ordeal. I was as completely unprepared as you could be and I swore "never again." My lesson about the criminal elements, however, was akin to what Selco was saying in a link bnc offered (http://www.tacticalintelligence.net/blo ... ccount.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;). If you think you can hunker down in your home with just you and the family, you are either a) sorely underestimating the determination of criminal elements, b) sorely overestimating your ability to single-handedly defend your home, or (more likely) c) a and b. You have to think larger, communal scale and "squad up" for longer-term scenarios. I'm grateful that the power was partially restored after 5 days, but I'm even more grateful that the crime in my neighborhood didn't rise above generator theft. I imagine it would have gotten much worse had we been without power a few more days longer.

Some of us are trying to make our respective neighborhoods aware of these situations. Every account of a prolonged emergency has stories just like yours yet when you try to show those stories to most people, they just smile and give you the teen-age mentality "that cannot happen here" response. We seem to be a society of ostriches.

We're fortunate. All but one of my immediate neighbors are gun owners and avid shooters and we have routinely worked together, helping each other in non-emergency situations. When each of us needs help, all that is necessary is to ask. I can only hope in a true emergency that we could band together and work out a mutual protection arrangement. Beyond them, there doesn't seem to be much appetite for this sort of discussion. I suspect that would change rapidly if the stuff runs into the fan.

george wrote: for "TAM"
I had a large generator in Louisiana (rental house), that was set up to run on natural gas. If conversions are possible, possibly an alternative to keeping gasoline around (still scared).

There are a number of trade-offs for generators. Natural gas ones are great but you are still at the mercy of an outside supplier to keep them running. Depending on the nature of the disasters, there may or may not be pumping capability. Diesel generators are the most solid and in widespread use in RVs. The fuel must be recycled periodically, however, and isn't as available as gas.

All generators, in a real emergency, become theft magnets. The cheaper the generator, the more noise that it makes and the more apparent its location. The blogs after the Alabama tornados provided details about the high theft rates and how communities had to quickly band together without the help of law enforcement to prevent widespread generator looting. Even heavy chains and locks were apparently not enough by themselves.

Tallinthesaddle wrote: Thanks for presenting this concern AM.
This is a big factor for me. After losing 60 lbs. over the years, I am now on maintenance medications and stomach medicine. Two days without
the HD antiacid medicine I take means the survival food I can put back I might not to be able to stomach. That is what you call a vicious circle.
So, put back all the meds I can and tough it out. Until I run out.

How about the women and the anti-depressents they take? What happens when they run out? I know four female family members nearby who would be either heck on wheels or closed up in a corner crying. How bad can that get? Too bad for sure.

Pray for sure for the right answer.

If the predictions are correct, an EMP would have a significant detrimental effect on most of the population of the countries where it reaches. There is work that has been going on for years to try to insulate electronics or to create circuits which are immune to EMP type explosions. Only the scientists involved in some of those experiments would know about the results.

"One Second After" presents a very sobering view of possibilities of life after regular medication supplies are gone. The main character in that story has a daughter who is a type 1 diabetic. It that type of scenario, divine intervention may be the only hope. Such stories underscore the need for leaders of the world to come together to avert mutual destruction. It is unlikely that those who feel that they could perpetrate such a disaster would be immune from its results.

george wrote: The one huge problem I have, is gasoline storage. My generator won't go long when the gas is gone, and I refuse to keep more than a couple of gallons around. I don't mind keeping reloading stuff, but my impression is that gasoline is much more dangerous. Also, it goes stale.

Are you guys just planning on going without gasoline, or am I missing something? Diesel? Propane? Solar panels?

Glad I am no longer living a couple of miles of millions of crazy people (present company excepted, of course) if things do continue to degrade.

Most of the answer to your question about gasoline revolves around how long you are planning for and what kind of a replenishment cycle you are thinking about. I make a practice of keeping both vehicle gas tanks full or as close to full as possible. I have 20 gallons of gas in containers, use Sta-bil in those containers and rotate them for use in my many engines. I cut a fair amount of wood with a chainsaw during the Fall and winter and also run a chipper/shredder. During the summer, our 60" cut tractor goes through a fair amount gas. I run the generator itself monthly because generators will last longer if they are exercised regularly. In addition to the engine, the coils build up moisture through lack of use. The gas containers don't sit unused for too long. If it looked like I was getting close to 6 months of the gas being in the containers, I'd dump them back into a vehicle and go refresh them. In an emergency, I'd divert all of that to the generator and have a plan to use that power even in the winter to run the furnace blower. My goal is to be able to generate enough electricity to last a week without resupply.

There are safe-store gas cans along with cabinets to put them in to deal with the safety issue.

Edit: to correct clumsy wording.

TAM, I appreciate your thinking on this subject. We share thoughts in some areas and differ in others. It would be great to have a time to sit down in person and share some of the material that I've collected on this subject with you. I have at least two presentations and my overall personal plan that I would willingly share.

Overall, I think of prepping in much the way that I do self defense.
- I've resigned myself to the fact that I will never be able to respond to some situations. I lack the training and experience in SD and will be at the wrong place at the wrong time from a prepping situation.
- that said, there are many small things that I can do to improve my odds in both topics. I have created similar analysis (types of threats, possible responses and what it would take to get to the point of being able to respond in each case.)
- I think of improvement in "layers" For prepping, handling the more common situations better is my first goal. Longer term survival and options is a second layer. For SD, the layers revolve around specific types of skills. For example, I'm not a good weak shooter so that layer would contain drills and practice for incapacitation of my strong hand.
- Like several others in the emergency planning group that I've met with, I'm reaching out to my immediate neighborhood. I have a strategy for trying to get my neighbors more involved. However misguided my thought process might seem, I think of it as a Renaissance toward both self-sufficiency at a personal level and greater involvement with my immediate community for mutual benefit. I mean to at least give it a try.

Chas.

74novaman wrote:Bump.

I'm certainly not ready for the end of the world yet...but I'd be pretty self sufficient in a local disaster.

Wife and I normally go grocery shopping weekly (fruits and veggies have this funny tendency to go bad). This week we've been busy,tired, name your excuse. Had no trouble making meals and being perfectly happy for another week. (and honestly could have gone another month, but there was no reason to do so)

Just a reminder that you don't have to be ready for zombies or the apocalypse for a bit of planning when it comes to food to pay off.

Agreed but any untested plan is likely to have holes in it. For example:

- the person who taught the first emergency planning session that I attended recommended a "flip the breaker weekend." He suggested throwing the main electrical breaker to your house on a Friday night and living through the weekend as you would in an emergency. The good news is that if things don't go well, you can always turn the breaker back on to deal with it but you get a real dry run of what it would be like if you couldn't.

- like you, we buy things ahead as much as we can. I've started monitoring things like fruits and vegetables to see what a "refresh" rate would have to be to keep us eating as we do today through an emergency. My criteria now is to make it 14 days. In parts of our food supply, we could go for 30 days if we could keep our refrigerators working. But right now, we couldn't make it to the 14 target with everything. Fixing that problem will probably show us how to get to 30 days, my next target.

I find the story of the tornado shelter from a previous post interesting. Having read "Last Light" and "One Second After", I have a real dilemma about how to deal with a sudden group of "friends" "Last Light" takes a Christian approach to helping others, even when the means to do so is very limited. "One Second After" chronicles situations where some believe that using force to relieve others of their preparations is the necessary. Both talk about the re-establishment of civil order as the only path to survival in a protracted emergency situation. Given the overall approach tone of our society today, I'm not sure how easy it would be manage a 30 emergency regardless of how well prepared you are. After the Alabama tornado, areas surrounding the actual disaster sites had civil unrest problems within 48 hours. There is obviously more to this topic than simply having enough food.

knotquiteawake wrote:I want to get started on prepping. What are some resources or first steps? We've probably got about 1-2 weeks worth of food usually in the pantry at all times but beyond that we don't have much else. Heck, all i've got for ammo is what I carry plus one reload for the dresser revolver.

I'm not a prepper. Maybe I'm a wanna be. Anyway, Here are a couple of suggestions from a presentation that I attended this summer.

1. Read "One Second After" and "Last Light" which are two different takes on TEOTWAWKI scenarios. While both are fiction, they brought the whole idea of emergency preparedness into a different light for me. Their methods of dealing with the catastrophes are very different.
2. Read some of the blogs about the real disasters. Katrina and the Alabama tornado for starters. Key in on what happens 48 hours to several weeks after the disasters.
3. Decide what what kind of disasters you want to prep for and how you want to handle them. The first decision is stay or go, and it is often dictated by the type of disaster. If go, what do you need to take? The FEMA and other gov websites have some great ideas. If stay, how crippled will your resources be? No electric? No water? No/limited food resupply?
4. A constant theme across the fiction and real life stories is the degree and speed with which society breaks down after a disaster. The solution is neighbors banding together. This would be a great time to get to know your neighbors better and see if anyone else is interested. It only takes a few. A neighborhood watch is a good way to start.

An interesting graphic from the seminar that I attended showed a triangle. One point of the triangle was "stuff" (emergency food, backup generators, etc). One of the other points was mental preparedness. The third point was training. The message was the preparedness is two thirds about thinking and physically being ready and one third about having stuff. No battle plan survives the first few seconds of conflict and no emergency plan is going to do much better. The idea is to develop a detailed plan which gives you a way to structure your thinking. Then, when the disaster actually strikes, you have a better mindset to be able to be adaptive to the circumstances that you and your family are facing. An example: you have less than 5 minutes to get out of your house to flee from a wildfire, etc. What do you need and can you retrieve it in that time?. In most cases, a bug out bag, with a compass and flint and steel is not what you'll want.

Personally, I decided to start with short planning horizons. How could we survive for 75 hours without electric and food supply. Then, I moved it to a week and then a month. Those are for the "stay" situations. For the "go" ones, you have to make some assumptions about the length of time away and the conditions. Anyway, it is an interesting mental exercise.

Just my $.02 worth.

P.S. I'm taking my Amateur Radio Technician test on 11/10. Ham radio appears to be a great asset in a widespread emergency.

RPB wrote:Some guy or gal @_PatJohnson_ explains EMP hardening a little bit, MOVs (Metal Oxide Varistors), Faraday Cages, coiling cords to create capacitance, throwing away cheap powerstrips etc etc https://twitter.com/#!/search/realtime/%23PrepperTalk" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

On Twitter search #Preppertalk

I just did that to see what it's about ... not that I am one or know anything about it... just heard the term the 1st time on this thread

I never thought about EMP effects on car electronics and hardening those, guess I'd be stranded like in the movies when alien space ships fly over and cars die

You might consider reading "One Second After" It is less about the science and more about the effects.

I attended another seminar yesterday. I'm not in any way affiliated with this vendor (I'm not even a customer yet) but I was impressed by what they offer.

http://www.shelfreliance.com/online-catalog#/46/

Their prices seem reasonable and they have chicken that is good for 25 years (unopened, 1 year opened). Their representative opened many of their product cans and made a variety of dishes from them including chicken salad, soup and just plain vegetables. She also served a comparison cup with dehydrated pineapple and their freeze dried pineapple. The difference in taste was amazing. I want to try some of their foods for the RV.

bnc wrote:So with your house full of canned food, MREs, clean water, generators, and crank radios, what do you do when the authorities come by the clear the neighborhood?

Even in New Orleans, many people refused to leave. There were not enough authorities to make them.

The root problem is that the government does not have all the answers and will never have all the answers. People have stupidly stayed in the way of storms and lost their lives because of it. But you only have to see the pictures of the cars stacked along the interstates trying to flee a hurricane to recognize that isn't the solution to the problem either.

I simply refuse to let the governmental authorities make life and death decisions for me. They can tell me what they want, they can threaten me and they can promise not to help me when my own decisions get me into trouble. The decision is still mine. Actually, being away from the coast and hurricanes, governmental decisions are the least of my worries.

One of the first steps in getting prepared is to sit down and think about WHAT you are are going to prepare for (not how to do it.) Thunderstorm? Tornado? Train derailment? Pipeline rupture? For me, it gets down to a game of percentages. You can never prepare for everything but you can get to 80% for a lot of situations that you might be likely to face.

I don't really see a lot of difference in the mental approach behind preparedness and carrying a concealed weapon. I do not think that I can prepare for every situation but the odds are better if I start thinking through the possible circumstances and have a plan to deal with them. Then it becomes a matter of gaining the means to execute the plans.

P.S. MREs are not recommended for most of us. The idea is to have the food that you normally eat. You might be really sorry to get 3 days into an emergency situation and find that your digestive track was not "cooperating."

I attended a preparedness seminar sponsored by, of all things, a political group. The speaker was by his own words an amateur in this field but he provided a lot of good, practical suggestions. I was amazed how far we'd come on his initial list suggestions. As he put it, this isn't a task but a journey. Self sufficiency in this day and age is quite a challenge.

Like others, I view preparedness in layers, with each layer being a more difficult situation to handle. 2 days is pretty easy. 2 Weeks is a little harder. 2 months becomes much more of a challenge. 2 years could be a real test. For me, the problem is the variables and, in particular, just how much society breaks down into a Katrina-like environment. Or course, a lot of handling each of those situations is dependent on the cause for it.

The one thing that our ancestors had that seems to be lacking today is adaptability. Thinking about those that embarked on wagon trains crossing the country, they could not carry everything that they needed to make the journey and literally had to live off of the land. Those that adapted, made the crossing. I'm not sure how many people today are willing to think about climbing back down Maslow's pyramid willingly.

One of the major things that I took away from the seminar was that preparedness is a lot more about thinking than about things. Options is the key.