I’ve plenty of supplies in the home, a winter bag in the car, a bug out bag in the hall closet, a Red Dawn pack in the upstairs guest bedroom and enough firepower to conquer anything that gets in my way.
Ammo is freaking heavy though, so my bug out bag only has enough .45 ACP for me to get going and be safe along the way (40 rounds). The Red Dawn pack has a bit more…
I have an Elder Sign. This should last me through the only danger I care to worry about.
My car:
Condo:
I have:
Sorta. Like whistlepig we have our camping gear including our wilderness emergency kit. (As well as fire extinguishers and a radio that you can power with a hand crank and that doubles as a flashlight). So we have tons of wilderness food rations, cooking fuel, flashlights, lanterns batteries, water purifier, and basic emergency medial supplies. We could probably live comfortably in the back yard for a few weeks.
I also have a baseball bat under the bed in case of zombies.
Let’s see…
Camping gear (including gear for cold weather) in the camp box in the truck. This includes battery lanterns, propane cylinders, tent, camp stove, propane lantern, tent, fishing gear, mess kit and a few MREs. Battery lantern, fire extinguisher, matches, lighter, 4 litres of water, spare hiking boots, jumper cables, wool and space blankets, thermal jacket, extra socks, undies and first aid kit in the cab.
A couple of months of shelf stable foodstuff, fire extinguisher, 3 months of prescriptions, spare eyeglasses, extra cell phone battery, fire box with legal stuff, handguns, tool box, knives, candles, about ten gallons of jugged water, purifier for other water sources, battery radio and battery lanterns in my home.
I usually keep at least half a tank of gas and some cash around.
I also have a knowledge of wild plants, butchering, first aid and basic carpentry to get me through. My access to the hot water heater as an auxillary water source is limited (it’s shared throughout the building) but there is a creek about 200 yards away with water that would likely be usable (after boiling) in most emergencies.
I live in tornado country within 150 miles of the New Madrid fault.
Nope. I am temporarily a lazy European, and so I got nothing, despite the fact that earthquakes have levelled cities to my west and my east. Oh yeah, and I live in a house that was probably built by someone with no formal training in their spare time, so I’d probably be SOL if we actually had a large quake.
I grew up in California, too, so you’d think I’d be more proactive, but hey, Peace Corps’ favorite phrase is “integrating with the community”, so I’m just doing what my neighbors would do for preparation: nothing. Viva Bulgaria!
Well, we have a generator and bottled water and always camping gear. This isn’t out of OMFGSOMETHINGBADJUST HAPPENED!!! It is out of the fact that a) we camp on occassion and b) we lose power here a couple times a year and the bottled water is kinda a necessity.
Living in an area that doesn’t have much disaster risk, it’s never been a priority for us. We have enough food to last us a few weeks, large hot water heater for emergency water, and a wood burning fireplace, but other than that, no.
I’m fascinated that (apart from people in the real danger zones - earthquake, hurricane, blizzard) so many people seem to be pre-empting some kind of apocalypse. What causes this kind of thinking?
Hurricanes, blizzards, blackouts, and 9/11.
I forgot to mention I keep several ice packs in my freezer and don’t open it when the electricity goes out.
It never hurts to be prepaired and there’s nothing in any of my kits that I don’t have generally anyway and truth be told I raid them from time to time if I’m low on something and am feeling too lazy to go buy more. It’s just a good idea to have provisions on hand.
Prepared for what though? I mean, we both live in first-world countries. Things are calm and safe by design. You’re in less danger of being invaded than us lacksadaisical Euro-types. What’s the danger you’re preparing for?
Just prepared. I’m prepared to have unexpected guests show up at the house, I have plenty of booze and snacks on hand, I’m prepared for a funeral because I always keep a suit pressed and a clean shirt and tie on hand, I’m prepared for the upcoming fishing season because I stocked up during the winter.
And I’m prepared for a worse case scenario because I have water and food and firearms on hand. Things are calm and safe by design, I take advantage of that fact on a daily basis, but I’m also prepared for a disaster if emergency services are tied up somewhere else for an extended period of time and I have to expect to fend for myself. Granted I’d expect to pass the time playing Scrabble by candle light, but just in case I do need to protect my life and the lives of my loved ones I’m prepared. I call one of my packs the Red Dawn pack just because it’s funny, not because I expect Russian paras to come landing in Elgin Illinois at any minute.
Careful attention to the news over the last few years illustrates that the veneer of civilization has become thin indeed. Attention to infrastructure and long-term planning has waned; we’ve all become extremely lazy, and take for granted exactly what you’re suggesting.
I participate in first-aid and emergency-planning training on a regular basis, and the refrain from professionals has gone from a gentle warning to a steady and insistent drumbeat: Don’t expect official assistance from anyone for days if not weeks. For example, there’s a fire station in my neighborhood that is expected to be knocked entirely out of commission in an earthquake. It’s not that the building will fall down; it’s that the structure will shift just enough that the big doors in front will jam closed, so they can’t get the trucks out. And nobody’s willing to bite the bullet and find the half-million dollars necessary to retrofit the building.
There’s lots of things like this, lurking failures waiting to manifest, at all levels of our rescue and recovery infrastructure. Some of them are unknown, and will be surprises; some of them are known, but there’s no urgency behind or momentum around addressing the issues. (More examples: September 11 showed what happens when responder radios don’t connect to one another, which is a minor issue with major repercussions; and Hurricane Katrina shows what happens when everything fails, top to bottom.)
And as always, the biggest problem is, inertia makes it difficult to push the public into devoting time and resources to fixing the worrisome failures-in-waiting. It’s the “well, it hasn’t hurt us yet” phenomenon. As our world moves faster and faster, and as our attention span gets shorter and shorter, it becomes easier and easier to procrastinate about things; anything that isn’t a crisis staring us right in the face gets put off for later. And that, obviously, is a vicious cycle.
In my hometown, right now, there is an elevated highway that will fall down the first time there’s an earthquake of any significant magnitude (say, 7.0 or larger). Our city is in the middle of a severe earthquake danger zone. Everybody knows this. It’s not a secret. Also, everybody knows the highway will fall down. That’s not a secret either. And yet we’ve been arguing about what to do for as long as I can remember, which is going on thirty years.
Basically, nothing’s going to happen until we actually have the earthquake, and the highway does fall down, at which point the argument will bifurcate: what to do now, and who’s to blame for not doing anything before. That argument, of course, won’t actually rise until weeks or months after the disaster; in the interim, I, sitting in my house, will be expected to survive on my own for quite some time while officialdom has their hands full dealing with the higher priority of the collapsed highway.
Cynical? Absolutely. But accurate? Yes.
So I am ready to take care of myself, and I’ve taken steps to see that my loved ones are able to protect and feed themselves as well.
Does this represent, on some level, a failure of civilization, and a breach of the social contract? I would argue so. The whole point of banding together into societies and forming governments is to share responsibility and look out for one another, and every time we suffer some catastrophe we are taught, painfully, how badly we are managing this obligation. We can do better, and if we’re going to last, we must do better. But for the moment, we aren’t, so when the safety and support systems collapse, even if temporarily, and we are reduced to neighborhood gangs, we need to be ready to deal with the situation.
I don’t know if you in Europe have it any better than we do, but in the U.S., that’s what things look like right now.
Cervaise, I did say I understand readiness in natural-disaster-prone areas. You know if you live near a fault line or next to weak levees in a hurricane zone.
But for those that aren’t… What is the disaster that’s expected in Elgin, IL (to pick one convenient example, but not meaning to pick on), which appears to be a fairly residential outlying suburb of Chicago? I mean, you can’t pre-empt everything. 9/11 was an extreme example but an isolated one, and (in the grand scheme of things, not meaning to diminish the awfulness of the tragedy) relatively small and contained.
I wonder if it’s a big government/little government thing that makes most of us Europeans complacent, and some Americans feel the need for self-sufficiency.
No, no earthquakes or hurricanes or hoards of sick cats or anything looks to be decending on Elgin IL anytime soon, it’s true. There is no specific example I can give like Cervaise did of something I know to be coming. I appreciate what social services I can avail myself of, but I certanly don’t expect them nor would I want to bet my survival on them. There’s just too many of us spread over too far of a space to logically expect that at the first sign of danger my government will come swooping in to bail me out.
And I expect that after whatever it is that may happen plenty of folks will be standing around wishing that they had done the same.
As I posted above: Hurricanes, blizzards, blackouts, and another 9/11.
Once your sense of security is shattered, it’s impossible to get it back completely.
An invasion of thin-crust pizza?
Dunno, but that’s the point. Wacky stuff can happen anyplace. You can be out in the middle of nowhere, hundreds of miles from fault lines, hurricane coastlines, floodwater flatlands, or anything else, and the next thing you know there’s a freight derailment releasing a massive cloud of hazardous chemical gas a mile from your house. Those who are able to grab a bag and bug out in under two minutes are much more likely to survive, yes?
Many people who do not live in hurricane or earthquake prone areas are quite surprised when, say, the local river floods to their rafters. A little emergency planning (keep candles on hand, buy some extra water every now and then, get a weather radio, make sure you know how to turn off the gas) goes a long way, and it isn’t difficult, time consuming, or expensive. It’s not like we’re huddling in the woods going nuts with supply dumps (although I guess some people do) - we’re just being smart and thinking ahead. I mean, hell, an ice storm could happen any winter and I’d be glad I had the power’s-out-stuff. It doesn’t have to be Katrina to make your emergency stuff worthwhile. I’ve had plenty of occaision to use the expanded first aid kit I put together as emergency supplies - without that list I don’t think I’d have had eye wash when my boyfriend needed it, for example.
ETA - I have a lot of family who were quite surprised by the 500 year flood in Albany, Georgia a decade ago. They lived nowhere near a flood plain. They had no reason to expect any danger from flooding. Those who had put even a tiny bit of thought into evacuating and having some basic supplies around, like clean water, were much more comfortable.