Equipping yourself to survive need not be a very costly exercise. In fact, taking a few simple steps can vastly improve your ability to survive a number of manmade and natural disasters. Best of all, many of the products that you will need to produce a simple emergency kit are easily found in the supermarket. You may even have quite a few of them at home. So here is where you should start:
A Home Emergency Preparedness Kit
The first thing you should do at home is make sure you are able to survive for a few days without external power, water or food. I’m not talking about building a shelter here, but just giving yourself and your family a bit of slack should something happen. What you need is water, food, light and heat.
For water, I just make sure that we always have several large jugs of clean bottled water in the back of the pantry. There is nothing fancy about these. They are ordinary bottles of water with a shelf-life of a couple of years. If they start getting towards their use-by date I bring them out into the kitchen and replace them with a few more. This give me and my family enough drinking water for about 4 days. Its not enough to survive a nuclear war, but means that we are good for most simple emergencies.
Just having a few bottles of water can make a big difference
For food I’ve made sure we have some extra of what we eat normally. Once again this is not fancy stuff. A few bags of rice, pasta some bottles of pasta sauce and a few cans of beans. Once again I’m not talking expensive MREs or other items that are hard to find. This is just a bit from our usual shopping that is tucked away. For light we have candles, a few LED headlamps with fresh batteries and two small generator flashlamps. I keep one near my bed, another down in the kitchen, a third next to the fusebox.
For heat I have two little camping stoves. One is a MSR Pocket Rocket, the other is a MSR DragonFly multifuel stove. I use these for camping anyhow so have not spent a cent more than I would have. All I do is make sure that I have fuel for both. Finally I have a camping water filter and bottle of iodine drops. If needed I can hike down to the nearest lake or river, top up with water and clean it when I get back. In short, without going to any effort I have prepared my family to survive for at least a week, and probably about three without any external assistance. And all this at virtually no cost.
In another post I’ll talk about expanding this very basic kit by adding things such as a bug-out-bag, survival knife and car emergency kit. But if you do nothing else other than what I’ve just outlined above on your next shopping trip, you will have gone a long way to improving your resilience to disasters.
No comments yet.