Entering Your Prepper Era
Doublethink
Admin, 8th Day Host
I think I have somewhat spooked myself by trying to plan for 72hr outage / disruption and/or temporary evacuation.
I am now trying to prep:
This is complicated by having three cats, one of which needs meds that are usually kept in the fridge. Food seems the easiest for 72hrs x4 mocha fortisps, sealed cheese for lunches, x3 Huel meal replacement shakes and a bag of kibble for the pride.
Floodwise, I have discovered that floodputty tape is recommended over sandbags - way cheaper and takes up as much space of as a roll of gaffer tape - plus need a “toilet plug” - i.e. an inflatable bulbs on a tube you put down the bend of a downstairs toilet and then blow up to stop it backing up. And flood cover for air bricks or other ventilation holes below 60cm frame ground - still looking for one the right size for the ventilation grill in my front wall.
What are you all doing about the government advice ?
I am now trying to prep:
- shelter in place with or without flood
- winter essentials / evacuation for car
- evacuation on foot
This is complicated by having three cats, one of which needs meds that are usually kept in the fridge. Food seems the easiest for 72hrs x4 mocha fortisps, sealed cheese for lunches, x3 Huel meal replacement shakes and a bag of kibble for the pride.
Floodwise, I have discovered that floodputty tape is recommended over sandbags - way cheaper and takes up as much space of as a roll of gaffer tape - plus need a “toilet plug” - i.e. an inflatable bulbs on a tube you put down the bend of a downstairs toilet and then blow up to stop it backing up. And flood cover for air bricks or other ventilation holes below 60cm frame ground - still looking for one the right size for the ventilation grill in my front wall.
What are you all doing about the government advice ?
Comments
It came in very handy when the pandemic hit.
So already I have -
Wind up radio
Solar panel and light
Solar/battery torches
A wood burning stove and a winter's worth of wood
Six chargers for phones etc which are always kept charged
A camping gas burner and spare gas
Many candles
Two water butts, not for the garden
20l of fresh water which we rotate
Ever since we had a gas leak I've had a 'grab bag' in case of evacuation. It includes essentials like knickers, pyjamas, passports and important documents.
Now that we are in a tiny cottage we don't really have space for food prepping, do I'm not sure what to do about that. 🤔
We're mostly ignoring it as we dont live in a rural or flood prone area and dont have space to stockpile things. We do however take the powercut stuff seriously- and have our radios and big powerbanks and various small led flashlights and I have a stock of small handwarmers ( the kind that work on a chemical reaction). It gave other half the excuse to buy a rather impressive powerbank though!
Mind you I usually have a spare pack of bottled water or two so maybe we're not doing too badly.
We don’t have much bottled water but there is enough beer and wine to tide us over
In the even of a *really* extended disruption I imagine we'll be eating more scrag end mutton than anyone would like.
Curry, Lancashire hotpot, and Scotch broth aplenty!
The UK government has formally advised all households to be ready for upto 72hours disruptions to supply chains or power outages. They are trying to make it sound very normal, what everybody does - and it’s true many countries have done this for donkey’s years - but it is somewhat concerning they are choosing to say this now.
I have a small cupboard in which I keep tinned food - sardines, beans, soup, potatoes, mushy peas, meat puddings etc. etc., and I have enough coal to keep the Dragon (a Rayburn range) going for some weeks.
I have a supply of candles, and also a wind-up torch, but an ordinary torch with batteries might be useful, too, along with a wind-up radio and some sort of charger for my mobile phone. A trip to Mr eBay's Emporium is called for, I think.
Yes, planning for that kind of disruption has been advised here for a long time, primarily in connection with hurricanes. To be honest, I suspect many people tune it out now.
We have hydrosnakes, which function as sandbags - they store flat but are filled with the same stuff as disposable nappies, tarpaulins, elbow length rubber gloves, torches and battery-operated lights. We also have a stack of plastic boxes which would let us pack up books etc rapidly, to move upstairs. We did get one of the inflatable toilet things, but it doesn't fit our toilet. Not that it was needed, but in 2016 we put a folded teatowel over the plug in our bath, and a Le Creuset casserole on top of that - I'm fairly confident that would have prevented water coming up through the bath. We haven't been able to find a cover to fit our ventilation bricks
Most importantly, I think, we have A Plan. When any flood water reaches Tree X, we start packing the boxes, move our car to higher ground, and put a battery light in each room. When it reaches our road we put a tarpaulin over our garage door, with a line of hydrosnakes in front. If it rises to cover the pavement we hydrosnake our back and front doors and the ventilation bricks.
So far this the only shape I have found, or double ups of the same. But my ventilation brick is square, I was thinking of cutting a board the right shape and securing it with flood tape - it’s the only thing I can think of for the external cat flap.
The hydrosnakes do look like a good option and I will consider getting some for the external doors.
Generally we would have enough to get by on food for three days, though the diet might be a bit odd at the end of the shopping cycle. The most likely problem would be potable water, but we could cope if we had, say, half an hour’s notice.
This is all assuming our building is habitable. I used to keep some supplies in my car in case my apartment was completely destroyed, but now we have a garage, so if the building is a wreck, my car could be too.
An unspecified threat.
Problem being over 80% of he population live in the cities, and interruption to the power supply also interrupts the water supply.
You can’t store more than 30l of petrol on your property without a licence - and then there are strict rules re safety, it can’t be stored in a living area etc. So back-up conventional fuel based generators are not a thing for most people. Solar generation is not ideal in our climate. In cities burning solids fuel is restricted in most places to protect air quality - which means most people do not have log burners etc.
In 23/24 we had a flooded garden three times from the October to the January and our neighbour ended up with a garage full of sewage. Since then the water company have sorted out the drains, I have trained as a flood warden and I've badgered the town council to lay in a stock of sand bags. We've had a bit of garden flooding most years since. . We live on what is an island between two arms of our local river and for many years it was basically marsh before being drained for farm land. Building a load of houses on it probably wasn't a good idea. I do worry if we do have another winter of bad storms the house could flood as it used to back in the mid-20th century before they put in some flood defences that seem to work up to a point. That tape sounds inteteresting so I'll check that out
The real problem is water. Who has the space to store 18 litres of water for every member of the household?
These have been amazing, for my mum who is bed bound and supported by two carers for personal care. The key point being, you wet them, they lather, you can then was with them and just dry off without rinsing - they contain skin conditioners/moisturisers which seem to be really effective. The upshot being it drastically reduces the amount of water needed to wash.
I do actually have a fire place in house, like many older builds, I have an electric fire in it - the chimney has been properly cleaned and blocked off by a chimney sweep. People used to die in the city smogs, in the 20th century - my parents are the last generation to personally remember the so called “pea-soupers” where you apparently couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. The regulations sound restrictive - but it was a massively effective public health intervention. Likewise the ulez zone in London - recently introduced - has had a massive impact on children’s lung development.
This is part of the worry; in an emergency, some people will totally forget why various rules and regs exist - causing an immediate and longer term problem cascade. For example, people deciding to use camping stoves indoors, and using candles because they are cheap - then having fire and carbon monoxide issues. I note the gov advice was very big on getting torches (flashlights) not candles.
Time of year would matter a great deal. When the power went out, the temperature was sub-zero, so the food in the fridge-freezer was OK, but we were struggling to stay warm. Mild weather, things would spoil more rapidly. As long as the gas supply was uninterrupted and I could cook, we could probably make a week to 10 days living out of tins and packets (lot of flatbreads).
I buy bottled water regularly, so usually have about 8-10 litres on hand. Only other supply would be the rain butt in the garden.
But we are both old, and Mr F is infirm, and still receiving treatment, so I don't rate our chances too highly in any protracted emergency.
Yet.
I mostly buy fresh food and don't have many tins in stock.
I am thinking of investing in a clockwork radio and more power-pack things.
I have a water butt for the garden and could filter that but otherwise I'm not at all prepared.
I will rectify that.
In the event of a Calamity, potable water might be a problem. All our moorings in Arkland have individual stand-pipes, from which water can be fed to the Arks by various means - I have a large tank on deck, which feeds the domestic water system (taps/WC) by means of a 12v pump. If we get a bit of notice of a Calamity, I could fill up the tank, make sure the battery working the pump is charged up, and also fill up my two portable water carriers...I suppose I ought also to make sure of stocks of non-alcoholic BEER or CIDER as an alternative to H2O for drinking purposes...
It might be. We have no way of knowing because they haven't given any details of possible threats and kept things frustratingly vague. So in the absence of any information it rather sounds like post factor rationalisation. The answer to issues like the one above is to fund the governments various cyber security bodies and make large enterprises get their shit together.
Together with things like this, it suggests rather a strategy of keeping the public anxious and possibly bunging large amounts of money to defence companies:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/uk-war-russia-government-stockpile-wes-streeting-b3072811.html
Governments in other countries have long had guidance on stockpiling food for emergencies, e.g:
https://www.ernaehrungsvorsorge.de/english
But crucially they couple it with reserves at the local and national level (see the section headed "Civic Emergency Reserve") in the link above. Meanwhile:
https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/1993-03-09/debates/c9d15a28-ac6b-44d3-8b54-d0545a6c569d/StrategicFoodStockpile
The reality is that people in the UK are far more likely to have to deal with things like flooding (due to the increased number of houses built on flood plains) and in those cases the utility of a personal food/water supply (even assuming people can afford to keep them) is somewhat mixed.
If it's your own house that's flooded, absolutely. If it's the electrical substation for the whole city, as happened in Lancaster in 2015, the supplies may come in handy. One hopes, of course, that the powers that be have improved resilience since then.
Out here Storm Amy last year took out our fibre connection to the mainland and it was over a month until it could be repaired, and even restoring basic mobile services took a couple of days. A lot of modern infrastructure is extremely brittle and interdependent - 4G masts rely on the fibre backbone, household fibre connections and digital phone lines require power (and the official backup "solutions" assume outages of less than an hour), so there are multiple potential failure points and cascading consequences.
Yes. One interesting issue here is that the local airport means there's a mobile signal hole at this end of town. Our phones are hooked to the house wifi so that we can use them indoors. If the wifi goes down, and the power is out (so no landline), that means either hope that the signal in the garden is still there, or 2-3 minutes walk to somewhere which normally has enough signal to make calls.
Food-wise, we're probably OK, although there might be some interesting meals. I need to buy batteries for my office radio next time I'm passing the hardware shop, now that I know what type it needs. The real problem, as has been mentioned upthread, is water, as there's not really anywhere to store it!
Aren't we getting a bit too clever for our own good?
I keep a fair number of water bottles as I get thirsty and always take a bottle when I go out, and there's plenty of tins of soup and food. Got 2 torches in case one makes me bad and a radio with a battery in it!
The commercial fridges in question can be connected to a network (for centralised reporting of things like temperature compliance, defrosting and so on), you could have these functions controlled locally in store and then push up reports/stats, but presumably to simplify setup a lot of these are just networked to a centralised point which hasn't been secured particularly well.
Essentials here were boostrapped to Starlink within a few days, which is ok for natural disasters but if there's a political dimension you're immediately subject to Musk's whims.