Preparedness for when

katep23

Another one who has watched blackout with OH and he is now on board

He is now investigating emergency radio broadcasts and we've realised we only have an electric can opener so will be buying a manual one asap

GreyQueen

Tiglath wrote: »

Grey Queen - this link will take you to the episode on catch-up TV:)

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/blackout/4od#3573954

Many thanks, just watched it.

Whoo, but aren't adverts bliddy irritating............lots of useful things in there.

The first rule of Prep Club is that you don't talk about Prep Club. Nor do you tell your young children about your preps.

maryb

Opsec and teenagers just don't mix - you can't really keep them from knowing about your stores and you can't keep them from sharing with their friends how hilarious it is that Mum's got an Armageddon cupboard.

GreyQueen

We need to normalise Armageddon Cupboards (how I love that moniker) for two reasons:

1. It becomes the new normal, therefore not worth gossiping about.

2. So households could stand alone without outside inputs for a few days, preferably weeks. And hopefully lol around indoors eating chocolate and reading books.

Looking at the cobbled-together shots of real life riots, I bethought me that out on the streets would be the very last place I would want to be at such a time.

Keep low, keep your preps in several hidey-holes and be prepared to sacrifice the most obvious stash to looters. The last thing you'd want in a crisis is to be injured yourself.

A man known to me, friend of a friend, got lippy with some louts outside his flat one night. They were behaving like total arrises and commiting petty vandalism and rowdiness. They gave him verbal back. He chose to go down there and get physical and he got his face smashed and sliced. He also chose not to seek medical attention for a couple of days and now sports a nice Action Man scar where a timely suture would have healed the wound more cleanly.

Moral of the story; keep out of it. The goal in such an event is to come through it in the best shape possible. If personal ego and personal belongings have to be sacrificed, so be it.

The blogger FerFAL, having been through the collapse of Argentina, is always very scathing about preppers who imagine that a SHTF situation will allow them to Rambo about the place with their guns and ignoring the rule of law. It won't; temporary losses of control by the authorities won't mean that you can get away with murder and you're daft to imagine that you can.

Oh, and one of my Spies and Informants, of whom I have many, tells me that the black market price for an AK47 in Marseilles atm is 500 euro.

Just in case you might need to know that..........:p

paidinchickens

Morning


Dipped a toe out of lurkdom as I struggled to sleep after watching blackout last night (catch up)

My brain's been whirling round thinking about what we'd do.

We have a generator but as the film pointed out we would not be able to use it without people knowing we had it so it would be share or have it stolen.

The disposable BBQ stash I have been collecting from the sales for the past few years would draw the same attention.

Any veg grown in the garden or allotments would be stolen so how do you get around that apart from having a patch in the middle of know where but then how would you get there without people seeing you ???

Tins of food stuff and mass weaponage I finks :rotfl:

PiC x

GreyQueen

paidinchickens wrote: »

Morning


Dipped a toe out of lurkdom as I struggled to sleep after watching blackout last night (catch up)

My brain's been whirling round thinking about what we'd do.

We have a generator but as the film pointed out we would not be able to use it without people knowing we had it so it would be share or have it stolen.

The disposable BBQ stash I have been collecting from the sales for the past few years would draw the same attention.

Any veg grown in the garden or allotments would be stolen so how do you get around that apart from having a patch in the middle of know where but then how would you get there without people seeing you ???

Tins of food stuff and mass weaponage I finks :rotfl:

PiC x

Morning PiC, nice to "see" you again.

Depending on the time of year, there may be little or nothing to steal off allotments or veggie patches.

Due to the dryness causing the season to finish early, I've had my broad beans in the freezer, my tatties in the bike shed at the block and my onion harvest lifted for weeks already. The only food crops producing now are a few runner beans, and there is a small amount of beetroot and carrot still in the soil.

Since I'm not prepared to create a Colditz-cage strong enough to defy woodpigeons and fine enough to thwart the cabbage whites, I don't even grow brassicas and the only overwintering crops are random self-set chard. A lot of people wouldn't recognise chard as a vegetable, esp if it's dotted around like mine, not in neat rows. I've even had gardeners ask what it is before now. You could even hide it in a flower bed.

There really are only a few months over the summer where looting the veggie patch would be a prospect. Chicken and other fowls could be rustled, though. It's happened on my lottie site before now.

Gennies are problematic. They require fuel and create noise. They also create fumes and have to be carefully handled. Newbies + gennies = some deaths last autumn after SuperStorm Sandy. Plus other people will know you have power and may come to help themselves.

One of my pals lives on a boat and does something creative with a bank of milk float batteries.

I think it's helpful to imagine little or no power and little or no water, and look at what foodstuffs you could eat then, and build your stocks backwards from there.

Yesterday I was in a food farm and noticed they have shrinkwrapped packs of 4 x 2 litre bottles of water for £1. I used to buy Tosspots Basics bottled water for 17p a bottle but that just swooped up to 24p so this is good. Plus the package comes with a carry handle, making it very portable. Waater bottles this size are very useful for those of us with small homes.

It's one thing to expect that the water company will provide bottled water but they may well choose to bring in bowsers and you have to get to them and collect your own. A lot of households I encounter seem to have zero by way of receptacles which could fulfill this purpose; some folks don't even have w.u. bowls or a bucket. If this is you, you will be seriously-stuffed if you have to fetch water.

Carriers aren't hugely expensive new, and I picked up a couple on BH weekend at a bootsale which have been carefully sterilised and filled. You'll also need to bear in mind the weight as l litre = 1 kg or 2.2 lb for those of us on "old money".

This will mean that you can probably only carry a very small amount without a trolley of some description. And there could be neighbours to help out, particularly like my pal SuperGran.

There were some water issues from Blackout in the bits about Prepper Dad.

I thought his belief that the 3/4 pint fluid he'd extracted from his c.h. rads being able to be purified was risible. It has almost certainly be treated with rust inhibitor and I don't think that can be made potable in a domestic environment. I would have been up in the loft (I think they were meant to be in a house) looking at the header tank.

He also said that his daughter had been made ill by water from the bowser. If you are collecting water from a common source like that, you will be relying on the cleanliness of the container it's brought in, and the cleanliness of the other people using the tap/ spigot, and the cleanliness of the receptacle you're using to bring it back home in.

I think it would be reasonable to treat such bowser-supplied water as potentially contaminated and give it the Milton Fluid or bleach treatment, assuming that there was insufficient fuel to boil it., and there probably wouldn't in such a scenario.

Soo, in addition to water, a few other bits and bobs could make life a lot simpler; Milton Fluid or unscented bleach, funnels (several) and perhaps a length of hose and jubilee clips. Disposable gloves and poop bags and an improv bucket loo with clay type cat litter and a pooper scooper. Mucho hand sanitiser gel and wet wipes for maintaining some personal hygiene without using the precious potable water.

If I had a home with a garden, I'd seriously consider building a rough shed (floorless) which could be moved about to become a privy. We lived like that back in the fifties and sixties out in the villages. A supply of lime and also sawdust would be helpful to keep down odour and discourage flies.

It could always be a shed-shed until needed.

Uniscots97

I watched Blackout last night and thought omg they could have done this so much better. The only decent character was the little girl.

I agree with the generator. I have in the past used a UPS to boil a kettle (when there was a power cut). But that means having one of these permanently charged. Depending on the model they either take kettle leads or normal plugs. The latter being preferable. I have thought for many years about getting my parents one as they stay in the middle of nowhere and get power cuts at least once a month.

pineapple

GreyQueen wrote: »

Umm, I'm a technological ignoramus (albeit on broadband). How would I go about watching it, pls?

GQ this isn't strictly catch up TV (even though it calls itself that) but here's a link for watching TV on your computer
TVCatchup - Never Miss A Show Again
I have Sky Freesat which is prone to going haywire in heavy rain - which is when I use this :T.
It's free!

GreyQueen

:T Thank you for that, pineapple, I'll check it out this evening as I'm getting ready for work atm.

Unix, good to "see" you again. What is a UPS in this context, pls? I'm assuming it's not the courier firm........:rotfl:

That little girl was getting on my wick something rotten.

[Deleted User]

A UPS is an uninterruptible power supply.

Essentially a rechargeable battery, which sits between the incoming mains and essential equipment, such as servers, routers, etc.

If the mains supply should fail, the UPS will (depending on its capacity) keep the protected equipment running for a few minutes (to allow time for the equipment to be safely shut down), to many hours.

We have them on our severs at work.

In our case, they don't need to be massive, as we have onsite emergency generators, so the UPS only has to keep thing running, for the few minutes it takes for the generators to run up, and pick up the load.