Preparedness for when

GreyQueen wrote: »

My stores are stuff that I use anyway, but in larger quantities and used in rotation. The food cupboards in the kitchen are re-loaded from the stores elsewhere, and these are replenished when there are favourable deals around. A simple paper list keeps track of what is where.

It might help to imagine your water is off, and you only have vague promises of when the water company will get it back on again. Rumours abound and the shops have been stripped of bottled water within the first two hours.

Each adult is going to need about 2 litres of water per 24 hours just for drinking (think a large bottle of pop size). You can currently buy these at 17p each, in date for months, then use them and refill them from fresh. They're compact, portable and easy to store.

In your hypothetical waterless home, your 2 litre ration isn't allowing anything for washing dishes, so sensible preppers will have disposable plates, bowls and cups. You also have little or no water for cooking, so you'll want to have foods which are wet, like soups, beans, rice puddings in tins etc, that can be eaten, cooked or uncooked, without requiring added water.

You won't be able to flush your toilet, so have you thought about how you'd handle pints of urine and several ounces of feces every 24 hours? A large bucket with a lid and sacks of lime is one way. Lime is used to spinkle over the waste to cut odour and reduce attraction for flies. Flies on S and then on food and you have disease very quickly.

Another is to bail most of the water from the WC, line it with heavy duty plastic sacks (rubble sacks?) and fill the bag with cat litter of the absorbant kind. Then you'll need to scoop and dispose. People with outside space may want to improvise a privvy. Or at least did a hole to dispose of solids.

You also need to think about handwashing, after these procedures and around food-handling. Have you got sanitiser gels which are used without water? If the grid is down and everything is already very difficult, you don't want to add the squits or worse to the problem.

Personal hygiene also needs attention. Wet wipes can do the smelly bits where water is scarce. Elite military forces stress the importance of personal grooming, even in the direst situations. Keeping clean, tidy and unwhiffy will be important to you. You may well have to go about your everyday business such as your work, without having all the usual facilities at home. For a modern person used to regular bathing, stinking like a polecat is going to demoralise you fast.

Five days after Sandy struck, I was hearing among the issues raised by those in its way that they were running out of clean clothes/ or had actually run out already. Do you have 2-3 weeks' worth of socks and undies for each person in your household? Outer clothes can go a lot longer between launderings, of course, but you want to look at having enough to go at least a couple of weeks without a working washer, which could happen to any of us, of course.

Clothes are available very cheaply secondhand or even for nothing on Freecycle so even those on modest incomes shouldn't find this an insurmoutable problem. Hopefully, you haven't currently got most of your clothes backed up unwashed in the laundry pile.

Also, consider receptacles for water. I've seen stand-taps in the street in the droughts of the 1970s. If the water company can't get water on to your homes, they may re-appear, as may water bowsers. Have you got receptacles to take to the source and have you means of carrying them back home? 1 litre of water weighs 1 kilo (2.2 lb) so carrying a few 2 litre bottles will cause you to know all about it.

If you have, or plan to acquire, larger water carriers from a camping store, have you checked their weight when full? I've lived for most of a summer among travelling players working the fairs and camping out and carting water about was a major PITA. You need a lot of upper-body strength. Unless you're built like He-Man, have you thought about a sturdy luggage carrier or sack barrow? And bungee cords (2 for 99P in the 99p Store) to hold the carriers in place?

If you can't use your washing machine, you may well end up doing stuff with water such as handwashing or other stuff. Have you buckets and those smaller rubber trugs are great. You can bathe small children in the bigger ones. although you won't be moving them around once even half full of water.

Soo, just a little thought-exercise on one aspect of prepping. They don't call water the critical resource for nothing.