Preppers is the term given to those who plan for disasters – for some, like us, this means the ordinary situation like power outages, while for others, it is preparing for Armageddon, stocking up on food, water, ammo, bomb shelters and perhaps a bit carried away with it all.
This legal blogger says he’s now begun to prep – in light of, especially, more power outages. This issue afflicts the west coast where power is now shut off during summer/fall storms, as a preventative measure to stop forest fires, and in some places because the U.S. infrastructure is no longer able to supply peak demand.
But even minor disasters can happen at any time.
Loss of Water
Yesterday we woke up to our neighborhood water supply being empty. Overnight, there had been a well pump failure and the reservoir, which holds just hours of water, was empty by the time morning came around.
We had no water in our water taps.
This is the 2nd time in a month this has happened. Last time, there was a power outage and apparently the power surge, when power was restored, blew out the well pump. Again. (I was ready for that one, as I had just topped off my deep cycle batteries prior to the outage.)
Fortunately, they were able to get the pump working – after a few hours the reservoir was refilled and the system re-pressurizes. We are on a boil water notice until at least tonight and maybe tomorrow night. Due to how water systems work, when they lose pressure, they can suffer ingress of contaminated water – so until the water tests come back clean, we cannot drink the water.
Fortunately, we learned to keep stored water on hand – ranging from always full water bottles, to 5 gallon storage containers filled with water. It’s enough for drinking but not enough for say, toilet flushing. If we’d known about the pump failure overnight, we could have filled a bathtub (from the reservoir storage) – and then fill a bucket from the bathtub to manually flush the toilet.
Running Low on Food During Covid Hysterics
At the start of Covid hysterics in March of 2020, we did not stock up on food supplies, other than what we typically bought in large quantities from CostCo or similar.
We were good little children who obeyed the authorities who told us not to go to the store and stock up – they assured us there were plenty of supplies. A few weeks later, the CDC experts reversed course and then said people our age should stock up to avoid spending much time in stores!
Thus, after abiding by wrong expert guidance for weeks, I finally went to the store to find about one-third of the shelves were empty. I have photos to prove that. I should never have listened to the experts and have learned my lesson well.
I felt like an idiot for having been a good Boy Scout who listened to “Experts”, who we would later learn, were wrong about everything for years to come. The one thing we did have a stock of was toilet paper! But a family member 100 miles away had been unable to buy any toilet paper for weeks – we finally shipped them a box of toilet paper from our private stock. This was crazy.
Shortly after these food shortages, a local food distributor that supplied food to restaurants and school cafeterias – and was now flush with food in their warehouse since restaurants and cafeterias were closed – opened up a curbside food pick up service (thank you Aloha Produce – you rock!) We finally had food again.
Today, we have at least six months of food stored – especially dry goods like beans and rice, canned goods, dried potatoes, oil, jams, dried crackers and more. Everything is dated and we cycle through our storage.
An Unexpected Disaster in April
Our panty was helpful last April. My wife left to visit her Mom for a couple of weeks and about a day later, I developed a severe abdominal infection. I learned after it was over I should have gone to a hospital ER. Upper right quadrant pain and a 102.5 degree fever. Took a week before I turned the corner – but being a bit of an idiot, I waited past a week of this before I contacted my doctor. Blood tests found inflammation of the bile ducts (and gall bladder and pancreas). Whatever the cause, it healed on its own, fortunately.
For 2 weeks, I was too sick to leave the house for a couple of weeks. While I ate little, at least I had a large pantry to draw upon – even had powdered milk on hand.
Future Plans
We will continue with our food storage.
We will increase the amount of stored water on hand. This weekend was complicated since we had guests visiting.
We are considering enhanced energy storage. Our home has a grid-intertied solar PV system that produces more than the total power we use (we seem to use about 1/2 to 1/3 the electricity of our neighbors, due to our efficiency measures). We are considering whether we want to add a whole house battery backup or a less expensive small generator to have on hand. No decisions on that yet.
The main message is that even small disasters can be disruptive – and it is wise to, at a minimum, have weeks to months of food storage available, plus several days worth of water. In spite of infrastructure that works most of the time, Covid taught us that things can fall apart in a hurry. Frequent power outages and recently, frequent water outages have confirmed we should all be prepared to go on our own for up to a few weeks, at least.
We can usually live without power for a while.
