Are You Ready?
Well….I am. At least I am ready to start writing this blog (I hope).
First things first….I am not what you would call an expert. But then again…who really is? An expert to some is just someone with more knowledge than them. So I guess then to some, I am an expert. What I am is someone who got in to being prepare for their family. I live in Southern California. And for how great that is for the weather, it is really bad for earthquakes. It is only a matter of time before “The Big One” hits. How big and when remain a mystery…even to the “experts”. But for the benefit of my family (wife, 2 boys and 2 dogs), I wanted to be sure I was doing what I could to alleviate some fears that go along with earthquakes. Now I cannot stop the earthquakes from happening (no matter how much my boys think or thought I could do anything), but what I can do it to have us be prepared in the event of an earthquake.
I do 98% of the cooking and grocery shopping in our house. When I was growing up during my late teens and in to my 20’s when I still lived at home, my mom worked full time and it was our responsibility as kids to help out around the house a bit. Now the rule was in our house that if you cooked you didn’t have to do the dishes. I HATE DOING DISHES!!! So, I learned how to cook. And I actually really enjoy that. Since I am the one who cooks and goes grocery shopping, it was really very simple to get started with our prepping. I got a large clear plastic tub with the lock down handles and started buy a little bit of extra food. I bought things I was already buying anyway so I knew we would eat it if we needed it. Things like pasta and sauce, canned peaches, peanut butter etc. This was several years ago and out emergency pantry has much much more in it now but that is a really simple way to get started.
Next thing to think about was water. In a large earthquake, water lines could easily be damaged limited or even stopping the water flowing to your house or apartment. It is well documented that in an emergency, water flies off the shelves at any store that has it. The best thing we can do to be prepared is have out own water supply. Now in Southern California having a well for water is almost impossible. The next best thing is to store your own water. Many of the “experts” say that you should have a minimum of 1 gallon per person per day. Let’s say you have a family of 4 people. That is a minimum 4 gallons per day and 28 gallons per week. If an earthquake really breaks water lines in or around where you live, how long do you think it will take the government to fix all of the water lines that have broken. You could be talking weeks or months before the water is back flowing again. In some situations, maybe longer. In warmer areas, you will need more water than that. Young kids and pregnant or nursing mothers also will need more. Remember, 1 gallon per person per day in the MINIMUM amount you need. How in the world do you store that much water. I started simply again, just like the food. I knew I couldn’t get everything I needed overnight….I had to build up to it. We already drink mostly water in our house. Instead of buying 1 flat of bottled water a week, I bought 2 every week. Each flat of 24 bottles of water is an extra 3 gallons of water. Now that wasn’t so hard was it. Throw in one of those 2.5 gallon jugs every few weeks and you will build your supply pretty fast. The nice thing about the flats of water is that they stack nicely on top of each other, so you can have a tall tower of water and it won’t take up much room. Just remember to rotate the water when you buy new water, take to oldest and drink it next. That way you always have the freshest water in storage. When you are ready to start storing water in bulk, you can look in to a water barrel or water boxes or water cubes.
Any way you look at it, you are likely not ready for something to happen. But the good news is, it won’t take much for you to get started.
So, Are You Ready?
Preps of a Simple Guy 