Hedge Against the Gloom-and-Doomers

How about a basic emergency list. Thanks.

POWER- batteries and flashlights are a must, as well as matches.
-We had a car converter(plug for lighter spot), so we charged all our cell phones and plugged in our TV to watch the national news each night
- everyone got a lot more sleep because we went to bed when it got dark
GAS- keep your tank at least 1/2 full at all times.
-A generator is only as good as the gas you have. Gladly, we live within an hour of TN, and everyone made mad trips up there. However, gas is flammable, and only stores for a certain amount of time, so don’t go overboard on this.

WATER- we were blessed to still have water, but it is advisable to always have some water, I believe it is recommended a gal/person day.
FOOD- my neighbors and I ate out of our refridgerators for as long as it was safe. Freeze dried food would definately have been quicker and easier, but we had things like turkey/ vegetable caccitore, egg (mc)muffins, potato salad (eaten immediately, and leftovers thrown away!), hard boiled eggs, etc.
coffee was boiled water poured over the filter mechanism into a cup. Messy but functional. Again, instant coffee would have been easier.

My freezer stayed cold longer than most because it was quite full, and people kept giving me items out of their freezer, which I put in my refrigerator in place of ice.

You can get basic emergency lists online or from the Red Cross. For food, make sure what you store your family will eat, and rotate everything out, preferably once a year unless it is packaged fro long term storage.

I guess one of the benefits of Living in a Third World country is that small disasters ocurr with enough frequency that it is cost effective to be prepared. Power goes out due to storms, equipment malfunctions, sabotage, car accidents, etc. Water goes out every other day due to rationing. We are in a hurricane area where winds are not a factor but the rains are. We are not in a flood zone but our city could be easily isolated from the rest with bridges and roads giving way (like they did in 98 with Hurricane Mitch). We’ve had political turmnoil in recent years with several nighttime curfews and a couple of 24 hour curfews. As people prepare for a big disaster, I think they should also consider the smaller one day to two weeks one that would be more likely to happen.

At home we have two cooking sources, one is an electric stove & oven. The other is a gas stove. There are no gas pipelines so gas has to be stored in house in 25lb tanks. I have only one but with heavy use it lasts for a month. We use the gas stove for stuff that needs long time to cook and the electric for quick things. Power goes out more than ocassionally but it doesn’t stop my family from cooking the same way as usual, except the gas stove is small.

Water is cut off every other day due to rationing so we have a 500gallon tank that is on a small tower higher than the house so it gravity feeds it without requiring electricity. The pressure is lower than water from the main pipes but it’s usable. If use without care it can last for 5 days for our family. If rationed it lasts for twice that. We’ve used it both ways already so we really know that.

Washing clothes: All houses here have a manual washing area with it’s own water container that holds some 50 gallons. Usually the small & delicate stuff is washed manually and the rest is thrown in the washing machine but if power goes out extendendly we can wash everything manually since we already do that for the delicates, the rest would be simpler. it would just take longer.

Power. The house has pretty good natural light. Like Janice I have a power inverter that I can plug into the cigarrette lighter in the car and charge cellphones. Most of the cellphones now include FM radio funcionality and tiny flashlights so they double and triple duty on that. I have a chinese made one that has a spare battery. It has a flashlight, FM radio and is also an analog TV receiver (we still have analog TV transmission here on the airwaves). It’s a small 2 inch screen but In an emergency it can let you watch news or heard them on the FM receiver. We also charge the laptops and netbooks on the cigarrette lighter but have to turn on the car if using them while being charged, otherwise the inverter complains (plus you don’t want to drain the car’s battery). A 3g wireless modem or tethering your 3g phone to the computer gets you online if you have cellphone signal. Our ipad with 3g service gets VERY used during power outages to keep the kids entertained.

There are small 650 watt generators that I could buy for $150 but so far the power outages haven’t been long enough or frequently enough to require one. That kind of generator would power fluorecent lights on the house and maybe a regular TV, but with all TV’s having no antennas as they are connected to the cable service it would be usesless except for watching movies.

Potable Water: It is KNOWN that water from the tap here is not safe to drink. So we either boil or buy bottled water. For years we have bought bottled water. We’ve done it for so long that we have 4 5-gallon bottles of water in the house. Usually when two go empty we buy more water so there’s always between 10 to 20 gallons of water exclusively for drinking and cooking. This lasts for 2 to 3 weeks with regular use, which would be about the same during an emergency since we already know it to be our main source of potable water. Second source would be to boil water from the large tank.

Refrigeration and cooling. I still don’t have an answer to that, except to keep the fridge closed so stuff stays frozen the longest. A small generator would not power the fridge so if there was a long power outage I suppose we would start using items from the fridge and freezer first and the canned items.

Gas for cars: I hate driving around with a full tank as it’s less efficient than driving with a nearly empty tank (carrying less weight around), but having endured curfews due to political turnmoil and due to hurricanes I’ve learned to refill once I get to 1/4 tank. I have a really old car that I rarely use and don’t plan to sell. It’s kept nearly full and used to drive one or two short errands on weekends. if we had bad car trouble on the other two, this one would be our spare. With it’s old technology it’s easier to repair on our own than the newer electronic ones.

Food: We buy food every 15 days so right now we have a week of good preparedness and one of bad preparedness. I’m hoping to improve on that with more canned and dehidrated goods and tretrapack milk and juice that needs no refrigeration. However as those are already part of our regular food purchases sometimes it’s hard to keep the kids from going thru them I guess the positive of that issue is that I know they like that food.

THE MOST important part of preparedness however is working together and knowing your neighbors. You have to work together and help each other in times of crisis. Probably someone would have power but no water or food, another could have food but no water or power. Helping each other would make surving those disaster much easier. I’ve experienced it before when curfews wouldn’t allow us to go out of our neighborhood. The local mini mart was not raided, but rather was a gathering point for people to help each other. I also looked at Japan’s people after the tsumani hit them some time ago, they didn’t loot and they didn’t fight for food. They stood in line and helped each other. It was very admirable.