Sure. I rotate the food out every six months (after my family rebelled at another Spam and tuna fest, local charities got the goodies).
No. But I have plenty of stuff I can metabolize, and maybe I’d find myself in a position to need money other than paper money.
Correct.
But you can improve your odds. If there’s a meteor strike my house may be incinerated instantly, and my gold coins melted into slag. Nothing I can do about that.
If there’s a meteor strike in the North Atlantic, though, and the effect here is a huge flood and three-week rainstorm, I can survive longer than someone who stocked nothing at all.
It’s about guaranteeing survival. It’s about reasonably preparing, stacking the odds in your favor to the extent that you can without seriously disrupting your life.
I check my spare tire’s air every time I gas the car. It’s sometimes a bother. But I never seem to get stranded with a flat spare. Of course, I could get broadsided by a cement hauler and die instantly. The spare won’t have helped me then.
So all I’m doing is improving the number I have to roll on the “Bad Event” die.
I suspect quite a few of these “all men, all over forty” guys have fantasies of being the leader of a merry little band of survivors and never dream of the possibility that through injury, illness, or incompetence they might wind up being the weak link. In other words, they’re quite full of themselves.
I’ve read some accounts of genuine survivors in genuinely desperate circumstances - teenage rugby players managing to survive a plane wreck on a mountaintop for weeks with no food source (other than the dead), a teen age girl surviving a plane crash and walking out of the Amazon rain forest several weeks later having not only survived but figuring out how to get back to civilization, people stranded at sea for weeks or months at a time… it’s not always the alpha males that win the contest.
Yeah, geez, I mean, if you’re hooked on coffee at least slip some No-Doz into your pack to get you through the initial withdrawal.
I think the notion that it will be every man for himself is in error, for two reasons:
When we do see mass disasters people usually band together, help their neighbors, and self-organize. While it does not always happen, alliances even between strangers caught in the same disaster is a COMMON human response and anyone who isn’t ready to take advantage of that is a fool because…
Being in a group instantly increases your chances of survival. Even in starvation situations. Analysis of the Donner Party disaster indicates that those with family as opposed to being merely lone individuals along with the group had a much higher chance of survival. Even among singletons, those that survived tended to have some sort of relationship/alliance with others. In every other situation being a member of a group makes you safer vs. threats from other people or animals, almost always means a larger pool of skills, allows for division of labor and the man power to undertake projects that for a single person would be much more difficult, and pooling of resources (I’ll trade my extra cans of creamed corn for that jug of water since you need food and I need fluids).
Of course, you have to use some discretion - there will be groups of Nice People and groups of Very Bad Indeed People - the latter being all the more reason to try to find and join the former.
Your fireman/EMT skill set would be enormously valuable… enough so that it might be worth taking care of that diabetes. There was a group of lay people in WWII that managed to produced sufficient insulin under, well, WWII conditions to keep dozens of insulin-dependent diabetics alive through the end of the war. The hitch is that this needs a certain size of group/supply of animals to pull it off. If you, in particular, want to survive (assuming you do - you might opt for making your end as comfortable as possible and not prolonging your own life) you HAVE TO get hooked up with a large enough group for that to be possible.
During one of the many few-day-long power outages we dealt with a few summers ago, I discovered to my dismay that we only had an electric coffee grinder. :eek: Yes, we were within walking distance of places that were open and could provide caffeinated beverages, but that was a simple storms + ComEd’s crappy infrastructure situation, not a full-on disaster.
My response was to buy a small hand grinder, and to stash packets of Starbucks Via instant coffee and Crystal Light Energy caffeinated drink powder in with our emergency supplies. (Give up caffeine? That’s crazy talk!)
Our kit resemble Bricker’s. Since I can see the San Andreas fault from the kitchen window, not being prepared for a couple of weeks off-grid would be foolish. Between a well-stocked and rotated pantry and the MREs for camping, we have about 3-4 weeks of calories that can be prepared on the grill or camp stoves. Plenty of water and pet food stashed as well (that just comes from shopping at Costco). I have emergency training and the wife’s a medical professional, so we’re covered there. But as RickJay noted above, anything more than that can get you locked in to a response than may be sub-optimal. If the Big One hits and we survive, then I go looking for all my Mormon students and hope they think kindly of me.
Being prepared for some sort of common natural disaster or disruption of some kind is prudent.
Being prepared for some sort of doomsday/fall of civilization scenario is like buying really expensive insurance for something that’s really unlikely to happen. Great to have if it does, but the premiums are ridiculous.
Amen to the strength in numbers thing, Broomstick. I’m reminded of one of the survivors in Niven/Pournell’s Footfall, who survived by organizing stone soup parties: Plenty of his friends and neighbors had a lot of something, but nobody had everything they needed. By all getting together and sharing, they all managed to get what they needed.
Exactly. Dylan had a song, which can be found on one of the bootleg releases “Let me Die in my Footsteps” about not wanting to hide like a mole.
The people who owned our house before us were Mormons, and had a special room with survival stuff. The first thing we did was tear down the wall and make a decent sized office/guest room. I have enjoyed it every day for 17 years.
Being in earthquake country, we do have emergency food and water and batteries stores in our garage. But that is for a reasonable threat.
Beyond 3-6 months worth of supplies is,IMO, pointless.
Why?
[ol]
[li]Any disaster on the scale of one which would impair your society for longer than that time would likely spell the end of your civilization - While you could survive that, the question why would you want to?[/li][li]There are too many variables beyond your control that would render your preparation irrelevant - Assuming that the disaster happens in the spring/summer by winter you might be faced with feet of snow and bitterly cold temps. WIthout a supply of fuel to keep your dwelling heted (as the supply chain is now been severed) you’ll freeze to death. Conversely, if it occurred in the fall/winter and you survived until the spring/summer, you’d be find yourself to weather systems which are no longer being tracked any weather service.[/li][li]Civil unrest - After about a month or six weeks without grocery stores and restaurants being restocked, most people would become antsy. Many would run out of food in their homes by that time and they would begin to loot homes and business in search of it. Also, it’s likely that prisoners held in local jails and nearby prisons would free themselves. Without law enforcement around, they would begin to predate upon the public,especially those who they believed had stockpiles of food and water.[/li][li]Medical conditions - A disaster large enough to last for months would strain the already overloaded health care. Since almost all pharmacies would be looted within hours or days and since hospitals would simply close due to a lack of staff,medicine and no longer having power, hundreds or thousands of people who weren’t killed in the disaster would begin to grow ill and die. If you require daily medications or weekly treatments (dialysis, for example) you are going to die withn days to weeks. The elderly and children would be the hardest hit and eventually the numbers of the dead would exceed the abilities of the living to bury or cremate the bodies.[/li][/ol]
If things look like they are going to last beyond 6 months at the longest, I would have to make some hard decisions.
#1 - Because some of us aren’t the type to just roll over and die?
#3 - Month or 6 weeks? Try a day or two. Grocery shelves would be stripped within 48 hours. My guess is fewer than 10% of the general population has sufficient food for a week on hand and accessible. The looting would also begin almost immediately. Once it became obvious that outside aid would not be arriving, there would be bloodbaths everywhere as well-armed gangs of marauders tried to loot well-armed bands of Mormons.
Back in the bad old days of the Cold War, when Doomsday would come with a 15-minute warning on Conelrad, there was a popular line attributed to Nikita Kruschev.
The living will envy the dead.
Just how much Doomsday do you want to prepare for, and where’s the point where you’d rather be dead?
I’d like to mention Katrina. I went down to help out and I noticed alot of problems could have been avoided. Ex. trees that could fall over and smash into a house. The wrong kind of roof that can get easily blown off. Flooring that cannot stand getting wet for long periods of time.
Quite frankly, if I was to live down there again I’d make my house was all concrete and tile. No drywall or wood. Be able to seal up doors and windows. Anything valuable like tvs keep at least 4 foot off the floor.
Most important - have an emergency plan for evacuation. Keep a small trailer handy and alot of stuff pre-boxed so it can be loaded and you can get away quickly.
That sounds way too pessimistic, to me. I only go grocery shopping every couple of weeks or so, not because I’m trying to hoard, but just because I’m too lazy to do it more often. And even if I had to put off one of those fortnightly grocery trips, I’m going to be out of milk or something, not starving. Honestly, I find it hard to see how someone could not typically have a week’s supply of food in the house, unless they’re the sort who eat restaurant food for every meal.
It’s an interesting concept and it might, in some ways, be more viable than the single-family bunker due to safety/strength in numbers, pooling of resources, and variety/redundancy of skills and knowledge. Based on the layouts I’ve seen, though, I’m not sure they’re allocating sufficient space for a long-term stay in confined quarters, there’s the issue of what to do with people having mental breakdowns due to the circumstances, and that entertainment issue I mentioned previously.
Also, if it turns out to be a scam or rip-off you might not know until the crap hits the fan and you’re down in the bunker - NOT the time you want to find out some contractor cut corners or the builders/planners took the money and skipped town.
The Mormons would definitely shoot back … I knew a well-to-do professional Mormon who had not only a big roomful of preserved food and supplies, but a secret walk-in closet that opened with a hidden catch full of guns and ammo. I was quite impressed, like something out of a spy movie.
(Give up caffeine? That’s crazy talk!)