Getting Started

This is some advice to provide a little guidance on getting into preparedness. Whether you are a “seasoned citizen” or a 18 year old  – getting started in prepping is pretty much the same.

Depending on finances and how quickly you want to “get ready” – many preppers stock up on supplies in baby steps. It is surprising how quickly a survival stockpile can grow by just picking up a few items each week. Within a few months a good safety stock of supplies can be accumulated.

Before going out and starting to purchase and acquire supplies you need to determine what your immediate short term goal is. Do you want supplies for a few days? A few weeks? Months? Get out a pen and a notebook and start brainstorming as to what you are preparing for and what you think you will need. Make note of what you already have around the house.

If you are just starting out you may think of different scenarios that could occur such as a power outage or ice storm. Lets look at a few basics:

Food

How may days worth of food is in your pantry right now? Set a short term goal to double it. Adding non-perishable food a little at a time can add up quickly and provide security. Easy to prepare foods such as soups, stews and pasta are good candidates to store in case of an emergency.

Consider how food will be prepared should there be no electricity and no refrigeration. Many homes in the United States have gas or charcoal grills. These would suffice as long as sufficient fuel is stored. An open fire pit can be used as well.

Camping stoves are wonderful methods of cooking. The camp stoves are small and compact for easy storage and run on small propane canisters. These fuel canisters can be purchased locally and stocked up on “just in case”. There are also camp stoves that run on other readily available fuel as well.

Some examples of common foods for increasing your food storage:

• soup
• stews
• SPAM/canned ham
• canned beans
• tuna
• peanut butter
• canned vegetables
• canned fruit
• nutrition bars
• hard candy (nice treat for when the grid is down and stress is high)

The theory behind the typical food storage program is to “store what you eat and eat what you store”.

Water

Depending upon your overall health you can live 2 – 3 weeks without food but only 3 days without water. Water is incredibly essential for the human body to function as it is supposed to.

It is commonly recommended to store 1 gallon or water per person per day. This is an absolute minimum. Consider that the one gallon of water will not only be be used for drinking, but also for washing one self as well as cleaning dishes. On gallon is not a lot.

So – water is necessary and must be stored. One of the least expensive methods is to refill empty 2-liter soft drink containers with water. These should be washed thoroughly of course.

Another inexpensive method is to buy 1 gallon bottles of Spring Water. Many preppers also buy cases of 16 oz bottles of Spring Water. These cases usually contain 24 bottles and are easily stacked.

Decide your method or use all. Just get it done.

Light

Flashlights and lanterns. Make sure you have a few good flashlights and plenty of extra batteries. Always use alkaline batteries rather than normal heavy duty. LED flashlights have advantages over old school flashlights as they are extremely bright and batteries last much longer.

Candles are useful as well to provide a soft low-level light. Remember that candles mean flame and precautions must be taken to ensure that in the middle of a disaster another one is not created when your home burns down.

Summary

• Ready.gov – http://www.ready.gov/
• FEMA – http://www.fema.gov/
• Prepare.org – http://www.prepare.org/home/
• CDC – http://www.bt.cdc.gov/
• American Red Cross – http://www.redcross.org/

I enjoy apocalyptic movies.

This does not mean that I hope for the world to end or I am overly obsesses with preparedness. Some people like comedies. Some like horror flicks. I like disaster movies.

Here are a few of my favorites:

• Day After Tomorrow
• Dante’s Peak
• War of the Worlds
• Signs
• Terminator
• Jericho

One of the reason I like watching some of these movies is motivation. Yes – I know they are movies and not realistic. However when I watch these shows like Jericho I think about what preps would be needed to survive the situations presented in the movie.

Take one of my favorites – Signs. This is certainly a creepy movie. It is about an alien invasion. A father, son, and fathers brother end up getting stuck in a house while the aliens arrive. The movie is quite unlike any alien invasion movie I have every seen.

Anyways, while watching the movie I consider how I would react should little green men surround my house. Hopefully they wouldn’t have ray guns.

As many of you know, I was widowed after 42 years of marriage and although I didn’t consider myself a “prepper” I did always keep a well stocked pantry because my former husband was pretty much housebound from brain tumor surgery for 26 years, and I couldn’t just run to the store…time wise or financially.

When I needed something I always bought two.  I worked a full time job and had an aide to help care for him while I worked and then spent my evenings as his caregiver, so time was not a luxury for me.

My 2nd husband had been a bachelor for over 20 years and loved the outdoor lifestyle, so did a lot of that and had TONS of camping gear and stuff “put aside” in totes etc.

I couldn’t really “get into” the prepper mentality.  I just didn’t seem to line up with what I felt was necessary.  I knew enough to know that a family needed to be able to survive for 3 or 4 days but weeks? Months? Years?

My husband just patiently took me to expo’s and let me read camping books etc., until one night I was reading and I heard a tiny little voice that reminded me of the parable of the 10 virgins in the Bible.

When I remembered that parable, I also remembered that only 5 of them were obedient to obtain their lamps, fill them with fuel, trim their wicks, and then wait … and the others were found wanting. When they came to the wise ones and tried to beg for oil, they were turned away.  That was enough to convince me that I needed to listen to my husband.

We didn’t really start at zero in our preparations, but I did start at zero “mentally”.

The first thing I began to do was visit our local Aldi’s store and because I was still supplementing my social security and MrWE2 was making good money, began buying “flats” of canned vegetables, canned fruits and canned meats. We also invested in some can organizers and filled those.

When I used something from the can organizer, I bought two to replace it. We built on that mentality and still do.

We then “advanced” to gardening and learning to dehydrate first and pressure can secondly.  From that point we began to learn more about “buckets with gasket sealed lids” for long term storage.

Not that we feel comfortable with where we are at (who ever will?), but we re-directed some of our energies to finding ways to keep ourselves warm and cook the foods we had set back.

We also have “precious metals” and the things they need… Enough for us to be able to find meat if we needed it.

We also have some antibiotics for our “fish.”

We’re now trying to incorporate adding things to our pantry that we can share with our neighbors in a crisis situation such as my “rice tubes“, ramen noodle soup cups, flavored chewing gums and candles and “community building”.

We won’t be planting this year because we’ll be moving from here to the roost and just won’t have the time necessary to take good care of our raised bed garden, even if it is pretty easy to care for (The Square Foot Gardening System by Mel B) we still need the time.  We’ve got a lot of knowledge being soaked in and hopefully enough provision to get us through to a new planting/harvesting season if something bad should happen.

We have two “likeminded” couples that we stay in pretty close contact with and we all know we’ve got a place to go if we needed to “load up and go”.

I think we’ve watched these past few years where storms have devastated whole cities and how the residents suffered so greatly.  They suffered from the loss of their homes, jobs and vehicles… But they suffered being cold, wet and hungry and having to be “herded” into government provided facilities where they didn’t even know the people sleeping or eating around them.  Children having to sleep in the arms of a parent to stay safe from predators and single women terrified in a dangerous world.

I guess the question isn’t really “where to start”, so much as “when to start“.  The answer in our opinion is NOW! Even if it’s just an extra can of soup, do it NOW.  It just might be the determining factor of where you huddle during a crisis…in your home, in your travel trailer, in your tent…or with strangers.

Hopefully this will encourage some of you who question the “why” of making provision for yourselves in an emergency and help some of you who are hesitant or feel overwhelmed about “where to start.”

Way back in the ‘70s I started my own 3 ring survival binder, which became binders over the years. Well, my house burned two years ago and poof, a lifetime of information collecting gone. Two strokes and my memory leaves something to be desired.  Such is life…

We all have different families, challenges, live in different areas under different circumstances, but we all believe in being prepared or we wouldn’t be here. And we are all preparing for different scenarios. Some of us are preparing for floods, earthquakes, and tornadoes, while others for a nuclear catastrophe or economic collapse.

No matter how extensive your library, no one book will cover this all! And there is so much valuable information out there, but how do you remember where it all is and what if the electricity goes off and the library is not available? A personalized survival binder is the answer.

When I started mine, the personal computer was science fiction! I hand copied information, cut and pasted magazine articles and photocopied from books. Today, most information you need is available on the internet and can be easily printed, or copied and pasted into a document. And there are so many excellent websites and resources available it can be mind boggling!

Three ring binders are inexpensive, especially if you shop at your local Salvation Army or Goodwill. I use a hole punch and just the computer paper I am printing on, or photocopying onto. If I’m handwriting things, I like the pre-punched ruled notebook paper. You can also create a digital survival library, by downloading pdf copies of survival guides and handbooks, which can then be stored on a thumb drive, external hard drive, cloud drive or even emailed to yourself so you always have access from any computer.

I divided mine into categories like: First Aid, Water, Alternative Fuel and Energy, Recipes (beans and rice), Wild Edibles, Natural Remedies, you get the idea. Gardening and Food Preservation are separate binders for me. But you could easily have individual binders for all of your categories.

So, as you are wandering the Net and see good information, consider creating your own Survival Binder!