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How prepared are you for a disaster?


zelticgar

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Gun sounds horrible because it sounds selfish and like you'e out for yourself. If in a few weeks everything starts to rebuild your neighbours will hate you for it - I'd rather communties help each other and in rural areas they're more like to...I don' low about London but my nan knows everyone in her street and Welsh have lots of respect for Mam's

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To answer the original question, I think the average suburbanite should try to prepare for 3 weeks to a month of disaster. More than that you are probably in way more shit than you can likely handle on your own.

Some easy things to address, that cover a lot of bases are:

One:

A small generator - say around 2.5kw. That uses maybe a litre of fuel per hour, meaning that if you run it for only say 4 hours per night, you don't need to store an insane amount of fuel to last you a month or so. I have a generator that size, and as long as I stagger the activation of indivdiual devices, I can run three fridges, an LED television, my computer, and pretty much every light in my house on it. And if I turn off one or two of the former, I can even run my microwave, which is a great help in warming some quick meals.

If you have a reasonably modern chest freezer with decent insulation, you can keep the contents frozen pretty much indefinitely with 2-3 hours of power per day. So that was step 1, the small, cheap generator.

Two:

Get a 5000 litre  rainwater tank next to your house and collect rainwater off your roof. Better yet, get two. 5000l would last you a month if you only used it for drinking water and minimal utility use. A  4 person family probably uses around 15-20k litres a month, but for emergency use 5000 litres will go a long way. In addition, if you have a pool that's a lot of extra emergency water ready for use too. You just need some filters for both of the above.

Three: Have some gas bottles, a gas stove and some gas lamps handy. That covers your cooking and lighting bases, as well as the option of boiling water if you are unsure whether it is fit to drink.

Four: Obviously you can easily, and should, stock up on some canned food and the like.

Five: My preparation is completed with some firearms, but that will obviously depend on where you live and what the local laws are like.

Obviously things like first aid kits, flashlights (with plenty of batteries)  and medication should be in your house in any case, and are not covered by the above. But that basically covers what I have done. Most scenarios like massive power outages, storm damage and the like would be over in a week or two, with three to four weeks being the extreme in situations of social unrest or the like. If it goes beyond that, you better hope someone is coming to restore order, because I don't think you can realistically prepare for something like that as an individual. Then it is militia time, and at that point its all gone to hell in any case.

So to me, a few weeks is the scenario one should be able to deal with in your preparedness plan.

 

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1 hour ago, Theda Baratheon said:

Gun sounds horrible because it sounds selfish and like you'e out for yourself. If in a few weeks everything starts to rebuild your neighbours will hate you for it - I'd rather communties help each other and in rural areas they're more like to...I don' low about London but my nan knows everyone in her street and Welsh have lots of respect for Mam's

In America, the only reason I would want a gun during a disaster event would be to protect myself from gun nuts.  Even then it would probably only be minimally useful and may even cause more harm than good so at the end of the day probably no gun.

 

 

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Meh. My grandparents own a lake house about 40 miles from here. As long as the fish are biting we wouldn't starve. And it's up on 10 foot poles in case of floods. So if there are zombies we could just destroy the stairs and use a ladder to get up and down. Good luck getting us then zombies. 

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3 hours ago, Theda Baratheon said:

Gun sounds horrible because it sounds selfish and like you'e out for yourself. If in a few weeks everything starts to rebuild your neighbours will hate you for it - I'd rather communties help each other and in rural areas they're more like to...I don' low about London but my nan knows everyone in her street and Welsh have lots of respect for Mam's

I have to agree. If needed I can protect my friends and neighbours and I can also help feed and build for them. 

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My extended family tend to be really obsessed with thinking and talking about the apocalypse.  Some religious mumbo jumbo.  Mostly they focus on the world ending with North Korea marching through our streets or zombies rising.  They spend a lot of time on social media in serious discussion about how they are preparing for the end of the world.  I've tried really hard to encourage their survivalist prepping by letting them know that climate change driven disasters will likely be the cause of their world ending fantasy and point to the massive flooding in South Asia as well as the busy hurricane season the Americas experienced this year.  They get really upset and tell me I'm being brainwashed by left wing conspiracies and give me links about how the government is going to cause a zombie crisis just like they caused AIDS.

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I live on a dairy right now so the place will likely become a disease haven in the event of catastrophe.  But I also have a bunch of no perishables and water because the water here sucks.  I also have a few different water filtration systems from backpacking.  My neighbors are friendly but definitely gun nuts so id try to be inconspicuous and probably take all my shit out to one of the islands nearby and hide out there with a couple friends.

 

Then go see if the dairy has become zombiemania yet.

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I live downtown in a huge city.  My best survival option is to stay put and rely on the city center receiving assistance sooner than the sprawling suburbs.  Density has its benefits.  It's not like I can have a rainwater trap or a vegetable garden or even a power generator.  Zombie movies suggest I shouldn't even attempt to drive out of the city at the same time as millions of others. 

I have thought about keeping a month supply of rations in our storage unit but the real problem is water.  If Chicago municipal water supply stops, no purification tablet in the world will make the Chicago River or Lake Michigan potable. 

And if there is a long lasting break down in civilization as imagined in so many movies, all these people with bug-out bags are kidding themselves.  I hope they enjoy the self-reliant pioneer fantasy while they're all safe and cozy.  If any civilization-ending disasters actually happens, none of them will be able to sustain themselves and their families much beyond the end of their prepackaged rations.  Subsistence farming is much tougher than most realize, especially as stored gasoline degrades within a year.  It's one thing to grow some crops to supplement food supplies, it's another to maintain crops for a sustained period as your sole source of food.  

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All too often, 'preppers' think in individual rather than collective terms - how much they, personally, have in the way of firearms and food and whatnot.  Yet, it is collectiveness that makes the difference.

You cannot do it all on your own.                                                                                                                                                            

 

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1 hour ago, Dr. Pepper said:

This is why you should get your appendix removed now before the apocalypse happens.

It's true, no prepper worth their salt buys a gun before having their appendix removed.  

 

1 hour ago, Iskaral Pust said:

I live downtown in a huge city.  My best survival option is to stay put and rely on the city center receiving assistance sooner than the sprawling suburbs.  Density has its benefits.  It's not like I can have a rainwater trap or a vegetable garden or even a power generator.  Zombie movies suggest I shouldn't even attempt to drive out of the city at the same time as millions of others. 

I have thought about keeping a month supply of rations in our storage unit but the real problem is water.  If Chicago municipal water supply stops, no purification tablet in the world will make the Chicago River or Lake Michigan potable

And if there is a long lasting break down in civilization as imagined in so many movies, all these people with bug-out bags are kidding themselves.  I hope they enjoy the self-reliant pioneer fantasy while they're all safe and cozy.  If any civilization-ending disasters actually happens, none of them will be able to sustain themselves and their families much beyond the end of their prepackaged rations.  Subsistence farming is much tougher than most realize, especially as stored gasoline degrades within a year.  It's one thing to grow some crops to supplement food supplies, it's another to maintain crops for a sustained period as your sole source of food.  

Re: bolded.  A tablet won't, but you could purify the great lakes water pretty easily.  

For the most part I agree with the rest, the subsistence farming is all fun and games in most of the US until all of a sudden you have to figure out how to preserve your harvest until the spring.  Definitely easier to make it through the winter if you have a closet full or three of chef boyardee.  

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We are very unprepared, but we have a buch of great neighbours (one has horses, the other grows wine and the next keeps sheep) and an orchard full of fruit trees, so the idea would be to stick together and help each other.

Of course there are some things on my to-do-list, first is reactivating our well. It's still water-bearing, but we need to install a decent manual pump. Next comes a small water purification system and finally I'd like to install a 8-12m² solar panel on our carport, build up a stock of canned and dried food.

 

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Interestingly there has been research into this (cannot for the life of me find the link) and how people react in the face of disasters.

I recall a study where they looked at how people reacted in Paris during the terrorist attacks a few years ago and found that the vast majority of people actually try to help each other out. You really do not get the ridiculous Hollywood disaster movie style "every man for himself" crap breaking out as soon as disaster hits.

So i suspect that whilst a lot of prepers reckon the world will be full of marauding bands of raiders and zombies the opposite will probably happen. There's always assholes who try to take advantage but even places like PR right now and other Caribbean islands that were almost wiped out people try to come together as communities to survive.

Still a good idea to have some spare clean bottled water around though, and probably the basics close to hand like dried food, wind -up torch & radio, matches, warm clothing, basic tools. It's all well and good having knives and guns but i reckon a decent toolkit and some good basic garden tools for digging & harvesting food would be a major plus point.
I actually wonder how many people these days wouldn't even have a paper map of their local area? I mean everyone uses Google or iPhone maps so when the power goes off you loose access to any map you may need to find supplies or places of importance. Same goes for reference books i guess, how many people could ID plants or build a shelter without access to the internet these days?

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