You Europeans can’t appreciate the “culture of fear” of that permeates American thinking.
Every night on the news, it’s something in the food, in the medicine, on the roads. Or a new way that people are preying on children. Or a new disease coming over from Asia. Or some natural disaster. And, it’s never about the stuff that is actually killing people by the hundreds of thousand here. . .gluttonous, sedentary lifestyles.
Even though people live in a place that their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents have lived in for a hundred years and NOTHING has ever happened that has precipitated the need for emergency preparation. . .people still do it.
It’s ridiculous, and that mindset leads to so many other ills. . .like George Bush getting reelected here.
In addition to all of the above, our dollar is teetering on worthlessness. Some of us have also been in areas of the world where people struggle to survive, and realize that our society and wealth are relatively fragile.
Although I’ve always been pretty independant (as are most Americans), Y2K was what prompted me to start thinking about what ifs. I wasn’t too concerned about the actual computer issues, I was concened that too many people would pull out of the stock market and crash the economy. I knew it was not likely, but it would be stupid not to be prepared. Living in an appartment at the time, I had little I could do but stock food. Now that I own land, I’ve planted an orchard with a huge variety of fruits, I raise a garden and can my own food, make my own syrup, and I’m raising hogs and chickens this year. Most of this is just to save money, but it also keeps me prepared for anything.
I’m a father, and I have a responsibility to protect my family, no matter what comes at me. Whether that is an ice storm that keeps us isolated for a week, or a total colapse of society, I’m ready, and it takes little more preparation for the latter.
My background as a farm boy, soldier, gun collecter, and outdoorsman provides much of the protection I need. The rest is just stocking a few candles and a little more food than most.
I have no interest in debating the stability of our society, and it’s pointless to do so. Societies colapse, even when they’ve been robust for hundreds of years. All it will take for the US to colapse is a major stock market crash or the epidemic we’re asking for by pissing away our antibiotic’s usefullness on healthy cows.
I don’t get the whole “culture of fear” thing you were talking about, which is why I didn’t respond to it. Yes, the media hypes up minor shit, but anyone who takes it seriously is an idiot.
Your statement that “NOTHING has ever happened that has precipitated the need for emergency preparation” is complete bullshit. Remember Katrina? Yes, I live in a geologically stable area where nothing worse than an ice storm is likely, but those ice storms make emergency preparedness a necessity. Besides, it’s cheap and easy, and makes life a hell of a lot more comfortable when the lights go out.
I didn’t say that “NOTHING has ever happened that has precipitated the need for emergency preparation”.
I said “Even though people live in a place that their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents have lived in for a hundred years and NOTHING has ever happened that has precipitated the need for emergency preparation. . .people still do it.”
Living in a hurricane zone is NOT what I was talking about.
This entire thread is comprised of people who take that stuff seriously.
Go back a couple years, and check out some of the “bird flu” threads. People saying things like, “my brother in law is a doctor, and he has gas masks, and is ready to seal up his windows, and he’s not a guy who just flies off the handle. He’s really worried.”
Furthermore, stock market crashes, and pandemics do not destroy society. See early 20th century America. They do not precipitate the need for storing water and food. No one survived the 1917 influenza outbreak because they holed up in an underground shelter with water and food.
Keep waiting for it though. I’m sure those thoughts of imminent disaster will serve you well right until you die from old age. Don’t forget to pass those lessons on from your death bed.
I’ll suggest some potential problems for Elgin: ice storms and severe thunderstorms are both pretty likely and can do amazing damage. Less likely perhaps, but still possible are tornadoes and earthquakes. Nobody’s immune to tornadoes in the Midwest; just ask Oklahoma City. And Elgin is close enough to the New Madrid Fault that if it lets loose with another massive earthquake, they could have problems.
I’m fairly well prepared for weather emergencies, with all the normal stuff: battery-backup weather radio (“with alert!”), prescriptions, first aid, flashlights, candles, batteries, lighters, matches, firewood, outdoor cookers, charcoal (I had to turn off my propane tank when a leak developed after a tornado), food, water, wind-up radio, chainsaw, hoist, jacks, axes, pry bars, etc. I could use a generator, but they’re rather pricey. We’ve only had 3 power and phone outages for a total of 20 days in the last 4 years (tornado, massive thunderstorm and an ice storm). I’m fine for that kind of stuff. But if it’s a zombie invasion, I’ll have to band together with my neighbor; he’s heavily armed.
Hold on - if you checked my earlier posts, you’ll see I specifically excluded hurricanes and blizzards from my enquiry. I’m talking about people in the safe and settled burbs preparing for disasater. (And as for losing the sense of security, I suspect you might be forgetting the absolute shattering of security that the whole of Europe endured twice during the last century, not to mention the 40-something years of terrorism that plagued the UK and other countries following WWII. And yet we’re the complacent ones.)
ETA: thanks 3acresandatruck for giving me something concrete to think about! So is it that the US is generally more prone to natural disaster?
I guess I don’t get what you’re talking about then. I know of no place on earth where nothing has ever happened that has precipitated the need for emergency preparation.
Fine. I should have said disrupt instead of destroy. Whatever. I don’t see anywhere in this thread where anyone says that they have an underground shelter. I see lots of rational people who keep extra supplies on hand in case something happens. You seem to see militant survivalist nutjobs who cower in the corner worrying about the end of the world.
Right - I don’t keep supplies around for the apocolypse, but I do know that stuff happens. A few years ago we had an ice storm and we didn’t have power for a week. We were able to stay in the house because we had a wood burning fireplace and still had running water (not on a well system.) Granted that was before children, we could have left but we basically just camped in the house to see if we could do it. We have quite a bit of camping gear but a lot of it is stored a few miles away during the winter.
Heck, just last night the power was out for about 6 hours, and it goes out a couple times a year usually due to thunderstorms or high winds. I realized then that all our flashlights were in the camper…a few miles away. Oops. So today I am going to go get a few more to keep around. I live in a decent sized city, so it’s not like we are stranded in a rural area, but it’s nice to be able to wait it out. We also have tornado warnings a few times a year, but that is over quickly and again, you can go somewhere else if you survive and the house is destroyed. I don’t have weeks of rations because I don’t know of a situation where we just could not leave at all for days.
I admit that with little kids and a dog, evacuating quickly if we had to would be hard. I don’t know of a situation other than fire or a freak chemical spill or something where we would have just minutes to get out though. In that case I would just get us to safety and survival is not an issue after that - we have family and friends we can go to.
Having things like a first aid kit and fire extinguisher and stuff around makes sense for anyone. But with little kids, I worry about fire probably more than anything else.
I should keep more in the car though. The roads do get bad around here in the winter and getting stuck roadside is probably a more likely scenario.
Besides living in an earthquake zone, we live on the fringes of the Los Angeles megaplex. All it will take is one massive earthquake (or for that matter another OJ trial) to send those ravening hordes our direction. Southern California **cannot ** survive more than 24 hours without incoming supplies. One riot, one tanker truck burning under an overpass and we’re are hurting. Let a couple of them happen at once, and 14 million people are going to start preying on each other. LA has absolutely zero “sense of community.” All others become the enemy very quickly.
Because of the above, I expect no help whatsoever from the authorities should anything happen. They will have much more pressing things to deal with. And, as Katrina showed, relying on the Government for aid is a fool’s game. Be prepared!
Eh…I think it’s just that by and large, the US is larger than most people that live in Europe realize. For instance the entire UK is about 94,526 sq mi (from here), which as that page states, is roughly twice the size of New York State. Which isn’t our largest state by a long shot. Compaired to the US being 3,718,691 sq mi, you can see where the odds of living someplace where some type of disaster is possible are a bit better. Plus the country being so spread out leads to a lot of different types of disasters that are possible. Is there an area the size of the UK someplace in the US where the possibility of an earthquake happening are almost nil? Sure…but then there’s probably something else that is much more likely. Flooding, hurricane, ice storm, fire, tornado and on and on.
As for the OP, not really. We keep a good supply of food in the house, have an emergancy generator wired in to run things if we loose power. We’re on a community well that has a backup generator, so water isn’t a problem. We’d be ok for about a week before we’d start having issues. Which is as long as I’d worry about. In the event of some sort of total collapse of the government or zombie invasion, I have one handgun in the house. But I have a nice list of where to get everything else I need. Society collapses, and all bets are off. I’ll be raiding wal mart pretty quick.
So where the hell do you guys get all these MRE’s that I’m seeing? Can you buy those commercially?
In addition to the size difference Atrael notes above, we also get hit by more severe weather on the east coast (and pretty far inland) because of the Atlantic ocean, and the plains and west coast because of geology. IANA meteorologist or geologist, but the ocean currents bring hurricanes right up the coast. The plains are huge and flat, so tornados have room to build strength. The west coast is on the ring of fire, so earthquakes are pretty serious there. Also, the East coast of continents tends to be colder further south than the West coast because of ocean currents, so Europe is pretty sheltered by meteorology and geology compared to much of the US.
I don’t stock them, because they taste like crap, and you have to rotate your supply or waste your money. It’s simpler just to increase the supply of canned food and rice/fluor/beans/etc. that you normally use, and go through the pantry once or twice a year and see what needs to be eaten up.
In the house, other than flashlights, batteries ,a butane lighter and spare butane and candles . There’s always a little canned food around but I don’t stockpile. I’ve got lots of water coolers I can fill if I get a little advance warning that the water’s being cut off, but bottled water is something else I don’t stockpile.
We usually have about a half-dozen frozen 1/2 gallon milk bottles of water in the chest freezer for camping( We took these to my MIL’s house when fallen trees took out her neighborhood’s electricity and kept her perishables cold for a few days) and a dozen bottles 1/2 filled with Brita-filtered water that we fill up and take with us on outings.
The camp stuff, which stays in my Aztek year-round unless I need to haul something has more flashlights and batteries, spare TP, paper towels, Kleenex, motor oil, antifreeze, steering fluid, lots of spare, warm (though old and in many cases indelibly stained) clothes,wax fire starters, a small propane burner(thefuel is in my detached garage when I’m not camping).
We’re not survivalists, but can last 2-3 days; maybe a week if the weather’s not too warm so the ice’ll last longer.
Bingo. Nobody is coming to save anybody. We knew that thing was headed their way, and still the response and follow up sucked mightily.
When (not if, don’t be stupid) a large earthquake hits SoCal, it’s going to take a while to get things back up and running at something close to “normal.” Plenty of people will be on their own, at least for a few days. I have lived in earthquake country all my life (and am actually thinking of moving to volcano country), and believe me when I tell you that it doesn’t take much to disrupt power, water and supply routes.
I am by no means an alarmist or an idiot sucking at the negative media tit.
Even if everything hadn’t gone to hell in the Superdome, remember how people headed there were told to bring five days of food and water? And nobody did? Because, one assumes, they had no emergency supplies? See?
You can find exactly what you need here. This is the one we have.
I disagree with masterofnone about MREs. The new ones aren’t bad at all, and they are a lot lighter than canned goods. Sure, you have to rotate them out every 5 years or so, but we use them camping, so nothing goes to waste. On top of that, we stock Canadian IMPs for a little variety. A couple are always in the truck, along with heaters and water. Just in case.
Depth of supply is always a good idea. Whatever you use that is storable, stock up on whenever possible.