I am glad I do not live in a metropolitan area for many reasons. If the U.S. were to suffer a serious financial collapse or attack, I feel much safer here, than I would in a city. My neighbors and I are like family and we would take care of one another. Also, we have our own food supply and the means to protect ourselves. What are your thoughts?
Nice thoughts, unfortunately so very far from reality. In case of a serious "melt down" you will be in serious trouble. Take for example a disruption in food supply/distribution... Do you think the hoards of city dwellers faced with starvation are going to respect your property rights? Be realistic. There could be thousands of starving city (and ghetto) dwellers for each rural person. There would be roving armed gangs visiting/invading the rural countryside looking for food. Your animals will be shot, fields raided, stored supplies stolen at gunpoint if need be. It will be like a plague of locusts. A few armed rural residents will not turn a tide of thousands of starving city folk who will likely also be armed with whatever they have looted from the city's gun and sporting goods stores. You would be lucky to survive, much less retain any food, clothing, or shelter in the face of the massive exodus from the cities.
The third movie version of H.G. Wells "War of the Worlds" (this time staring Tom Cruise) has been recently airing on satellite TV. Maybe you should tune in or rent it. There are some mob scenes that are extremely realistic and serve to graphically communicate the enormity of the problem that you so blissfully gloss over. It is disingenuous to suppose that civilization as we know it which is a thin fragile veneer layered over our primal instincts for survival will break down just a little so as to create minor hardship for the cities that will not hit the rural areas because of our "preparedness and loving neighbors.) Neighborhood cohesiveness may be sorely tested or dissolved after the first wave of marauders wreaks havoc in the countryside. Some of your friends and neighbors might switch into survival mode and NOT be quite so altruistic as you like to believe.
Happy thoughts and wishful but unrealistic thinking are NOT disaster preparations. They are delusional and self defeating sops that divert you from making realistic preparations such as emergency food and water caches, hidden from EVERYONE outside your immediate trustworthy adult family and hardened against discovery and physical compromise. If you have ponds then stock up on water purification devices and chemicals. If you have no ponds then bury suitable plastic water barrels. Water is life. You must have an absolutely guaranteed supply. Do not count on wells that require electric pumps as there will be no electricity and your generators will likely be stolen. Canned, dried, dehydrated, freeze dried, and otherwise preserved food in hardened hidden multiple caches will feed you for a while, hopefully until some sort of survivable status quo is established that will permit you to have and harvest the benefits of a garden. An interim measure may include doing your own sprouts to augment a diet of the previous listed preserved foods.
It is entirely short sighted to trust that civilization as we know it will basically prevail in the face of mass starvation as would rapidly follow the disruption of the flow of food via rail and highway into the cities. It is also short sighted and dangerously naive to believe that city dwellers will just stoically starve in place and not cast an envious eye toward the agricultural hinterlands.
Sorry to so rudely inundate you with a dash of ice water but... my intent is not to be mean but to give you pause... to motivate you to consider hard realities. A few rural folk who in good times support one another like a neighborhood watch association and who harbor ill formed scenarios about armed protection of themselves and their neighbors are just not considering the enormity of the threat to their survival. It won't be a couple bozos on Harleys stealing a chicken it will eventually be a mob which will not listen to reason or negotiate. How long can you successfully sustain a serious firefight when outnumbered and out-gunned several hundred to one?
If the flow of food into cities is interrupted on a wide scale things will be very different from the mild case of New Orleans in the wake of Katrina where most of the country was intact and maintained good order and could mount support and relief missions. If all or even most of our major cities were suffering then FEMA et al would be spread way too thin to be effective and likewise all emergency services. The various state National Guard units would be hard pressed to maintain any sort of order in the face of wide spread looting/food foraging.
Again, my purpose is not to be mean but to offer some reality that you might consider when assessing your preparedness for extreme circumstances.
Pat
"I'm not from your planet, monkey boy!"
I don't think everyone can be fully prepared, but you can be partially prepared. It is just not realistic to be 100% prepared for anything. At least knowing what you would need to do if the time came that is.
Wow Pat, well thought out post. I have thought of these issues too. Those of us in the country will be inundated with "townies" who are fleeing the bleakness and lack of supplies in the city. I really think we would have a hard time keeping anything that we do not consume at once.
Great post Pat, and this is definitely a topic that everyone needs to be mindful of. To be quite honest, if things got to the point that you mentioned, I really don't believe my efforts would amount to a hill of beans. How much time would it buy me and my family? In a situation like that, it would be in the Lord's hands, as it always is anyway. You did not offend me in anyway at all, by the way.
Thanks for the compliments about my "well thought out post" but I wrote it "stream of consciousness" with no reflection or pondering, just poured out what came to mind while writing. Actually if you stop and think about it, my assertions regarding what would happen are probably pretty accurate and obvious really if you think the problem through step by step. It probably didn't hurt that I had just seen the Tom Cruise "War of the Worlds" movie remake with its EXTREMELY REALISTIC mob scenes. Tom's character started out armed but that didn't last (view the flick, consider it a "training" session. Of course in that Hollywood production food, water, and toilet needs were NOT stressed.
As a systems engineering approach to disaster preparedness you must consider any single point of failure (aka, putting all of one's eggs in a single basket) to avoid catastrophic failure. A personal example: I have two one thousand gallon propane tanks in parallel. I only have both valves turned on after the first tank being used is nearly empty. In case of a leak you don't lose both tanks of fuel. I have a two stage regulator system with the first stage at the tanks and the second stages at the points of entry into the house. Since in an emergency if a second stage regulator should fail I can cannibalize from a less important second stage use, say a decorative parlor stove gas log in the sun room, to keep the furnace and stove top operating. However, if the first stage regulator fails then all the gas system is kaput... so I have an extra first stage regulator on the shelf for just in case.
If you do not have a reliable source of water during an emergency you are dead. Stockpiling bottled water is not the best solution. If you have a reliable pond then you can get a hand pump with a bio-filter and make your own safe drinking water. There are also gravity operated filtration systems that require no pumping just manually filling of the input reservoir. Having a well with an electric pump is only a viable water source if you can absolutely guarantee you can power it. This assumes you have a generator or other power source and a fuel supply that will outlast the emergency and that the fuel and generator for whatever reason can't be removed or harmed by unauthorized persons. Side note: many of the water "purification" methodologies result in water that is biologically safe but not good tasting. Wyler's fruit drink powders, especially lemon or lemon-lime made such water much more desirable in my backpacking expeditions were the first step in water purification was to strain out the larger swimming things.
Plastic water barrels nearly buried completely in the ground and covered over such as to avoid discovery or compromise are a prudent thing to have if you have no pond(s). Some of the chlorine bleach containers give the directions for water purification on the label. Water purified this way can be stored safely quite a while in barrels. If you have activated charcoal filters like Britta and so forth you can remove the excess chlorine and improve the taste of the stored water just prior to consumption. When using charcoal filtration you can "super chlorinate" the stored water for long term storage but you don't drink it without filtering out chlorine.
Various foods can be safely stored for different periods of time. Note the best if used by dates. Canned goods are a poor choice for long term storage. Freeze dried foods in air tight sealed packets are pretty good and the reconstituted quality is about as good as it gets. Dehydrated food does not store as long or as well as freeze dried and often has too high of a moisture content. Long term storage of staples such as rice, oatmeal, corn meal, and the like invites disaster via weevils and their cousins. Air (oxygen) is not a friend to flour and ground grains. Not everyone has or wants a grain mill for grinding the easily stored whole grains into flour or meal so how do you store flours and meals? Take a tip from the Mormons who have been into preparedness for a long time. Place your food product in a seal-able container (can be plastic bag lined) with a chunk of dry ice at the bottom. Twist the bag closed at the top, lightly or use a fairly loose fitting elastic (rubber) band. The dry ice will sublimate into carbon dioxide gas and being heavier than air will fill the container from the bottom up forcing out all the oxygenated air.
This does two good things for you: 1. any insect larvae hatching will immediately suffocate and not disturb the foodstuff, and 2. by eliminating the oxygen you preserve freshness, reducing degradation.
Nothing stores forever and only in certain instances does storage (aging) improve a product (think whiskey, wine, cheese...) So you need to plan on rotating fresh stock into your emergency supplies. To be economical you need to use the supplies being rotated out of storage. MRE's are one alternative but are expensive and do not store forever so you had better like them if you go that route.
Actual real deal, not hypothetical... Someone I know very well in SOCAL temporarily got motivated for emergency preparedness and bought a bunch of gold and dehydrated food stocks. The gold went way down below the price where they bought in and they took a beating when they needed to sell most of it. I had told them it was just plain unlikely that our economy would collapse just the right amount so that gold would buy a lot of stuff and cash would be useless. More likely it would collapse farther and a man with a few bushels of potatoes and a sack of beans to spare could trade for all the gold he wanted. You can't eat gold and it is only valuable if civilization DOES NOT flounder much.
Now as to their garage full of dehydrated food...They did not rotate it because it tasted like c--p and no one in the family would to eat it. It went way beyond its useful storage life and got tossed in the trash. What do we learn from this? Unless you have the $ to waste throwing away and replacing your emergency food supply you better get stuff that not only stores well but that you will actually eat on a regular basis so you can economically rotate your stock.
As to other needs in emergency situations: Everyone should know the basics of first aid AND have a realistic first aid kit NOT one of the little plastic boxes with a couple bandaids, anti-bacterial ointment, and a couple aspirin tablets. Red cross first aid courses are GOOD THINGS. Do you take prescription drugs? Can you do OK without them for an extended period of time? Maybe you should stock extras (I store ours in the refrigerator which is on a circuit backed up by the standby generator run on propane (remember... 2 each 1000 gal tanks) Can you see acceptably long term without glasses? If not you need a backup pair.
Remember the Aesop's fable about the grasshopper and the aunts? Which do you want to be?
I don't want to try to persuade anyone against there will that my religious views are RIGHT or superior but to just "leave it to God" is an insult to the god that saw fit to equip you with a functional intelligence and a free will to use it. You might as well "leave it to God when you cross a street and not waste time looking both ways and judging whether or not it is safe to cross. Leave it to God and not wast time reading the best if used by dates. Why learn to ID poisonous snakes when you can just leave it to God? Don't get vaccinations when it is easier to just leave it to God.
Just leaving it to God is a terrifically lazy cop out, the last bastion of defense for someone who lacks the initiative to use their God given talents as intended when given. //SOAP BOX MODE = OFF//
OK, excuse me while I relax...
Pat
"I'm not from your planet, monkey boy!"
Did you know it's illegal to stockpile foodstuffs? During times of emergency,that food and all animals belong to FEMA. The best you can do is the best you can do. People living in the country have a little more time to enact a preparedness plan. Don't be fooled, your stockpile of food has already been counted.
I love the country home we are in now and its amazing but I do love older homes that have real fall out shelters made. I have no idea the cost of one which is why I am hoping our next home has one, I would hate to foot the bill for a new one.
I live out in a rural area but we don't grow our own food or anything. I think people would be more apt to help one another out here though. I would love to be able to have some kind of shelter made but just don't have the money.
We have made a lot of "in case" plans and many variations on those plans. We have lots of items stored some of it in different locations. Maybe we are parnoid maybe not but you know what they say...it's better to have and not need than need and not have.
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