Lightweight prepping

A little while back, a bunch of folk in the phlogosphere wrote about their

emergency prepardness efforts [1,2,3 - probably more, apologies if I didn't find

your post in my quick search]. I didn't join in at the time for whatever

reason, but not because this kind of stuff doesn't interest me, so here's my

belated contribution.

I've entitled this post "lightweight prepping". I like the word "prepping"

because it's shorter and nicer sounding than various combinations of

"emergency", "disaster", "prepardenss", "readiness", "resilience", etc. But I

don't really self identify as a "prepper" because that term for whatever reason

has ended up tied to an extremist, somewhat delusional instantiation of the

whole concept. This gives the term a pejorative sense, which I think is a

shame. Yeah, it's true that a lot of preppers have a tenuous grip on reality

and are arguably "over-prepared". But it's just as true that most "normal

people" are rather "under-prepared". I wish there was a nice, inoffensive term

for people trying to walk the middle path between these two extremes.

I haven't yet actually got at all set back up after moving to Finland, but back

in Auckland I got myself in a position where I was comfortable with the prospect

of facing 72 hours of no water, electricity, gas, internet, telephone or postal

service, during which time I could not leave my house - I was focussed more on

"bugging in" than "bugging out". I certainly believe that tougher "threat

models" than this are within the realm of plausibility, but 72 hours of

self-reliance in one's own home seems a nice goal. It's not that hard to

attain, and should be enough to get through a lot of plausible scenarios. And

if you can comfortably get through 72 hours, you can probably survive

getting through a week.

The weather in Auckland is never bad enough that being inside your home without

the ability to heat it or cool it using external energy sources is a serious

risk to your health, so my preparations basically boiled down to:

• Stockpiling some water and food. Our prepping supplies and camping supplies

overlapped a lot and so were stored in the same cupboard. This meant I had a

pile of gas canisters and a small stove that could be used to heat any of this

food/water.

• Having a basic first aid kit and a stockpile of basic medicines and personal

hygiene supplies.

• Having some good flashlights and a stockpile of batteries, so we could see in

the dark without external electricity.

• Having some portable radios, a stockpile of batteries, and notes on which

stations had arrangements with the city's Civil Defence team to repeat

emergency information, so that we could have some idea of what was going on

without phone or internet.

• Being prepared for a little bit of general purpose MacGuyvering, by keeping a

shoulder bag near all this stuff which contained some duct tape, knives, rope,

etc. You know, the fun stuff.

• Making sure we had somewhere to poop. Yep, really! This is not at all a

glamorous part of prepping and often overlooked, but it's of quite some

practical importance. If the external water supply to your house is cut-off,

your toilet's cistern is not going to refill after each flush. That means

before the first day of this scenario is out, it's probably going to be empty

and your toilet probably isn't going to flush at all. If you keep using it as

a toilet, it won't be long before it smells pretty unpleasant and eventually

it will become a health hazard. You could, of course, go outside and dig a

hole, but if the reason for this scenario is, say, extreme weather, then this

might not be an option. You could manually refill your cistern, but this

drastically increases the amount of water you need to stockpile. Thankfully,

this is not actually a difficult problem. It's easy to find large plastic

buckets with tightly-sealing lids designed for parents of infants to store

used cotton nappies/diapers in before doing the laundry. These buckets are

designed to store human waste for a couple of days without being unpleasant.

Add a few garbage bags to use as liners and you're good to go. As a bonus,

the bucket is big enough to hold quite a lot of the above supplies when it's

not being used as a make-shift toilet, so you can easily keep all your

prepping stuff neatly stored in one container, which has a carry handle so you

can move it to where you need it.

I should really get off my ass and get set up for 72 hours temporarily off-grid

here in our new place.

[1] gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/hobbsc/phlog/20170927.org

[2] gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/yargo/glog/./t17553.txt

[3] gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/tomasino/phlog/20170924-go-bag.txt