Preparedness for when

jk0

short_bird wrote: »

A little something for the evening...
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/28/uk-interest-rates-savings-spend

Alas, how many tins of chilli con carne can the average household stockpile?

Ha ha!....

nuatha

Perplexed_Pineapple wrote: »

GQ, I'm pretty sure that's a myth, rabbit meat is low fat and low calorie for sure but you don't eat rabbit for those, but for the protein.. You would struggle to get enough calories to survive if you ate nothing but rabbit, but in a starvation scenario you use protein for energy so I think it would all help. It is very, very difficult to get the >2000 kcal/day that most people need from a wild foraging or hunter-gatherer type lifestyle without agriculture. Protein is expensive though, so the odd rabbit would supplement a subsistence diet nicely!

As long as the rabbit is supplementing other foods you should be fine, its when rabbit (or other lean meat) is the main food source that the problems occur. Rabbit is about 4Kcal per g, humans rapidly run into problems trying to deal with 400g+ of lean meat per day as this exceeds what the liver and kidneys can safely process.

mardatha

The thing with rabbit is that you eat rabbit stew. With loads of veg and any other game you can find, thrown into a cooking pot, and use bread to soak up the juices.

bluebag

It would seem the thin coating of civilization is beginning to fray at the edges when the lights go out.

BigMummaF

Goldiegirl wrote: »

Yalding is a well known flooding hot spot in Kent. The geography makes it very prone to flooding, as it's at the confluence of two rivers, and it's in a 'dip' of land.

What has gobsmacked me, is that some of them went ahead with their home purchases with no house insurance, as some of the properties are un insurable.

On the other hand, Yalding was flooded in 2000, and they were told it was a one in a hundred year event, yet 13 years later the same thing has happened. I imagine they feel aggrieved that there has been no improvement in the flood defences since 2000, and it clearly seems to be happening with some regularity now.

It's not Cameron,s fault, but that woman's rant seems to have helped in the short term, as most of the residents are now reconnected to the power network.

I'd like to think that--touching every available wooden surface with lots of body parts as I type!--should such a calamity strike in my locality, I would still be thankful to know that someone was doing something, & not ranting because my house wasn't automatically considered top priority. I'd expect hospitals, care homes & those most vulnerable to be dealt with first & be grateful if the Sally Army brought the tea wagon to our little gathering space!

GreyQueen wrote: »

I'd be a bit suspicious if primeministerial pressure had caused this to happen faster than it would have happened anyway; did they speed up Yalding's reconnection at the expense of some other village/ neighbourhood not under the media spotlight, by diverting resources to them?....

Does make you wonder doesn't it; is the area particularly biased toward the blue, or is the Krafty Kogger on a conversion trip of evangelical proportions...*stoops down, eyes shifting from left to right & sneaky peaks to see whose listening to this conspiracy*

charlies-aunt wrote: »

BMF - completely agree wi' thee!


Ooop North 'ere we are still mopping up and quietly getting on wi' it after the tidal surge of 5th December.

Dozens of people have lost their homes and everything they owned, power was off in some areas for days, a local farmer lost 150 of his rare breed sheep because he couldn't evacuate them in time (not for want of trying), one friend & her OH had to swim out in freezing water to their stranded horses and then swam them back to safety......


Many areas are still flooded and are still being pumped out 24/7 three weeks later.


It's tough going & Christmas has been grim for many families in the aftermath but thankfully no lives lost - and life carries on

As you say CA, a blessing that people survived.


I know we've moaned about the utilities for their bully-boy price hikes, but I guess these are the sorts of occasions that they need those 'profits' for. Someone has to pay for the new power lines & the poles to hold them aloft, likewise the diesel to work the chainsaws chopping the fallen trees to clear a pathway to those cables...& the vans to carry the equipment, come to that.


The older I get, the more I'm convinced I should be living in a commune with other like-minded souls! If X Union dares to call for industrial action, the general populous is enraged & offended by the impact it has on their little bubble, but if the union they belong to does the same, it's justified...why?
OK granted, brain surgeons have to study for years & be prepared to work miracles, but how could they operate if the miners don't go looking for ore to produce the steel for the scalpels? How could the bakers make bread if the farmers had no land to grow grain? How could we expect our children to be healthy if shelf fillers were not around? We all need each others talents to survive & far too many do not see it that way.

[Deleted User]

If you have a set of people in charge of the country who continually tell people how they should live and what they should and should not do,eat,think,grow,wear,buy,take,accept then people have a tendancy to forget how to think for themselves. If you have rigid rules enough in place those same people begin to live in fear of doing something wrong. If you are in that much thrall people begin to accept that 'they' who control all aspects of life as we know it will come along and fix whatever it is that is currently the problem and tell you what to do next. It is a very small step to the expectation that 'they' will prevent these things from happening altogether in the future and when they don't, people begin to get the feeling of being let down and feel dissilusioned very quickly. People today seem to have abnegated all sense of self responsibility and self reliance and have a feeling of entitlement to all thier woes being instantly dealt with and problems solved by some outside agency. It's really no wonder they pop at politicians/utility companies/transport networks etc. if they are used to being nanny stated is it? What most of the
population need is lessons in self reliance, skills to deal with difficult situations that arise and to be given the realisation that you can't stop a flood,a fire, a landslip,a sea surge even if you are Prime Minister. The biggest problem is that people have lost touch with reality isn't it? except those who like us on this thread keep a weather eye out for problems and have contingency plans to deal with them, Lyn xxx.

Hard_Up_Hester

Well said Lyn

mardatha

Good post BMF. I always say the most important people in a bank or hospital are the cleaners.. a few days without toilets being cleaned nothing can function at all

GreyQueen

Had an interesting convo with Mum. She'd seen one of those individual butane gas stoves being used on a TV news report in the past few days, by a flooded householder, and I chipped in that I had one of those.

She then remarked, out of the blue, that she wondered if her little paraffin stove in the shed would still work? It was last deployed in a crisis in the late 1970s. I said I wondered if the paraffin would still be good after all this time, and offered to give a demonstration of my stove when she comes up to visit me mid-month.

She leapt at the chance. I suspect she'll get one of her own once she's seen how good they are.

Now, the parental home is over a mile from the nearest water course and about 400 ft above sea level, so flooding a remote possibility, but their gas stove could die on them, and this was they'd have an alternative cooking method until they could source a new stove.

Baby steps into prepperville.................:rotfl:

ETA, that Guardian article - never thought about adding cans of chili con carne to the preps. Cheers, Lionel Shriver. And as to how much an average household can stockpile; did she but know, lol.

maryb

I also thought that woman was being totally unreasonable. But I do feel a bit sorry for people in Yalding. It said in the Sunday Times today that the Environment Agency decided to open the Leigh sluice on the Medway to prevent the town centre of Tonbridge being flooded and that resulted in a large volume of water surging down the river.

I'm sure they were between a rock and a hard place - someone was going to get flooded - but it does seem as if the people in Yalding were given almost no notice, something like 4 minutes. I think the question needs to be asked as to whether people could have been placed on notice earlier that there was a risk the sluice would have to be opened so that they could have prepared to evacuate and moved stuff out of harm's way.

I think the lesson is - don't assume there will be joined up thinking in a crisis.