It’s a good idea to make sure your generator is running.  You do have a generator, right?  Make sure that you have enough fuel stored on site to run the generator for a few hours a day for several days.  You never know how long your power will be out.  Don’t forget to change the oil and verify that your big heavy duty extension cords are in the right spot!

Owning a chainsaw is also worth considering if you live in an area with lots of trees.  It gets pretty darn windy here and trees blowing over is inevitable.  It’s nice to be able to cut those up and get rid of them or put them up for firewood if you have a wood stove.  Being able to help out a neighbor in need is valuable too.

Winter time is the time to be prepared for interruptions to your natural life.  At least in our area it is!  We aren’t faced with being cut off from civilization for months at a time but for us it’s reasonable to expect to be house bound for several days.  Don’t let your fresh food stocks get too low, make sure your vehicular maintenance is up to date, and be jealous of your old high school buddy who lives in Arizona.

I mentioned up above that now is also the time to get a head start on next summer.  At the end of summer retailers are trying to dump summer items cheap.  Now is the time to take advantage of those sales, get the things you need for next year or things you’ve been procrastinating on.  Craigslist and other sites will often have summer centric items for cheap once fall and winter hit, so keep an eye out there too.

You sit down to watch the 6 o’clock news, and catch the weather man telling everyone in a lead story that a severe arctic storm is bearing down on your area, and you can expect to get several feet of snow over the next three days, with potential ice storms to follow. You immediately move into panic mode because you know you’ve been procrastinating on going grocery shopping and you’re almost out of milk.

You and hundreds of your best neighbors converge on the local grocery store, which rapidly begins to resemble a Kansas wheat field after the locusts have been through. You’re lucky enough to pick up a cart load of groceries and whatnot, but you really don’t have any sense of assurance that you have what it takes to get through the next couple of days. But hey, worst case scenario you can come back to the store in a day or two after they stock the shelves again. You make it home as the snow begins to fall, feeling a bit better about the whole situation.

Later that night, the power goes out and since your home only has electrical heat, things start to get a little chilly. You head to the garage to get your box of camping gear and pull out your sleeping bag to use for extra warmth. Unfortunately a little furry rodent seems to have needed a nest, and has torn the sleeping bag half to shreds. It’s usable, but good grief is it gross. Later that night you and your family are huddled in a little blob trying to keep warm. You’re not used to not having your furnace running.

The next day you realize you need to find a new solution for the whole heat problem. You head out to the car, fire it up, and drive towards the main road. As you get towards the entrance to your subdivision, you see half a dozen of your neighbor’s cars piled up at the bottom of the relatively gentle slope. Apparently it’s too darn slick to get up that hill. So much for heading to the store.

Four days later, cold, hungry as all get-out, the power goes on and your life begins to return to normal. The food in your refrigerator and freezer has spoiled, and the roads aren’t quite passable yet, but by afternoon the City has cleared them up. You head to the store and find the shelves still bare because the trucks haven’t been running for days. You manage to pick up a few weird looking boxes of some noodle soup and head home. The next day the stores get their regular shipments in and you finally manage to get your groceries.

All in all, it’s been a pretty miserable few days. Making matters worse, the stress of the situation and the induced stress from being cooped up with little food and water and less heat has gotten to you and your family. Right now you and your wife are barely talking and you know it’ll be days before you two are back to normal.

Sounds like fun, doesn’t it.

Not to me. This is a scenario that is far too common, and far too likely.

Same situation, different circumstances.

Instead of moving into panic mode when you hear about the storm, you kick back and finish watching the news. After the news is over, you go and fill up a spare 5 gallon gas tank to add to the four you already have previously filled. This one was empty because you never filled it up after mowing the lawn at the end of summer.

You pull your generator out of the garage and put it outside in a small lean-to shed you built to keep it out of the elements when you need to use it. The shed is prewired with electrical connections into the garage and a few strategically placed outlets in your home. You get the generator fueled up and tested, and turn it back off, knowing it’s ready to go just in case. Then you head out to the back yard to make sure you have enough firewood put up nearby.

While you were getting the generator set up, your wife used up some of the more spoilable things in your fridge, making some cookies and preparing a casserole that can be frozen and reheated on your propane grill. Most of your frozen items are in a chest freezer in the garage as opposed to the small freezer that is part of the fridge. You planned this because you knew that a chest freezer will stay cold FAR longer than a standup freezer or the one on the fridge. As it turns out, just running it for an hour or so a day will keep it cold indefinitely during winter time. Shouldn’t be a problem at all.

When the power goes out, you bring in some extra firewood and fire up the wood stove fireplace insert you put in for the romantic atmosphere (and for emergency situations) and get some extra heat built up in the house. Your wife pulls out a few extra comforters for each bedroom and everyone heads to bed. After damping the fire, you head up to bed too.

For the next several days, you and your family eat from your well stocked pantry, barely dipping into your food storage room. Running the generator for a few hours a couple times a day you keep all the perishables cold, and you have no need to leave the house at all. You do check in on your neighbors a few times, bringing the retired couple next door some warm food at dinner time.

After the storm is over and the city has things cleaned up, you feel great. You had wonderful family time playing board games and other activities that you don’t need power for. The whole situation was actually less stressful than you might think, because you were prepared for the situation and you didn’t incur any emergency related stress. Your wife deserves major kudos for keeping all of those board games around in the day and age of the XBox though, that’s for sure!

Who would you rather be?

This scenario can really be applied for many different types of inclement weather. Work through what might be relevant for you and think about it!

I know you’ve been dying to know.  Two rolls, per person, per month.  Don’t forget Rudy’s Principle of Extras:  Add 50%!  So for my family I’m looking at 24 rolls a month.  No problem!  Except I have quite a few women folk in the family, I’d personally add a bit more of a buffer.  The stuff can be had pretty cheaply, and it stores easy, so why not stock up?

Enough about toilet paper, what else do I need to store?

Here’s a list of things to think about…

• Paper Towels
• Feminine Products
• Diapers
• Baby Wipes (great for quick cleanup of more than just baby’s behind)
• Kleenex
• Paper Plates/bowls and Plastic Utensils (Stock lots of these so you don’t have to use stored water to wash dishes)
• Laundry Detergent
• Dish Washing Detergent (not dishwasher detergent!)
• Bleach
• 409, Windex, etc
• Garbage Bags (stock various sizes!)
• Toothpaste, toothbrushes, mouth wash
• Deoderant
• Body soap, shampoo

Some of these items aren’t really things you think about as ‘Survival Items’ but I believe that one major goal is to be able to maintain a higher quality of life, including many modern conveniences, for as long as possible in an emergency situation.

Don’t get me wrong.  Wheat, rice, and other bulk stored items have a place you your expanded pantry.  But far too many people just throw it in the garage and call it good.  Then the zombies show up and you’re stuck figuring out what on earth to do to make this hard red wheat edible.

Unfortunately this is a path rife with peril yet far to commonly traveled.  Wheat and other grains are undeniably critical to proper nutrition.  Wheat is hard to digest if your system isn’t used to it.  If you aren’t used to eating wheat in more natural forms you’ll get sick, and you can easily develop gluten allergies.  Not a good thing.  It’s actually frightfully likely that you’d die as a result of that.  More on that later!  The flour and whatnot that you get at the store isn’t a very good substitute, and 90% of the bread you buy doesn’t help either.  You have to use the real stuff.

Great, so what do I do for short to mid term food storage?

Read on, loyal readers!  All shall be answered below!

Rule one!  Store what you eat!

You have to know what to do with your food storage when you dip into it.  This means that unless you have whole wheat as a key part of your diet already, you shouldn’t depend on it.  It has a place, for sure, but not to depend on.

Figure out what the staples are for your family.  What are those recipes that are the ‘old standby’ for you?  What do you cook when you don’t have much time?  If you’re like most families, you have a relatively low number of meals that you have on a regular basis.  Focus on those first.

The goal here is to have the fixings for these meals in storage.  And again, you HAVE to look at things with a certain level of abstraction.  So plan out a sample month worth of meals, repeating the things you have often appropriately.  Make it look like an average month in your household would look like in ‘normal times.’  Then figure out what ingredients you need for that month.  Voila, there’s your monthly baseline.  If you want six months of food storage, multiply it by six.

I know you guys don’t need me to tell you this, but for the common sense impaired out there, be sure to be appropriate with what you get here … if something you need has a three month shelf life, you don’t want to keep six months worth of it around.

Rule two!  Eat what you store!

Now you have a couple months or so of your families food needs stored, a couple interesting things happen.  First, you’ve got a bunch of food in the basement, so if you run out in the kitchen, you just go down to the basement (or wherever) and go shopping there instead of the store.  Then, when things go on sale, replenish your basement food storage room.  It’s cheaper, easier, and vastly more convenient!

Be sure to keep track of what you have in your storage room.  Use a spreadsheet, label boxes, etc.  Practice FIFO (First In First Out) for proper rotation.  Be sure to keep track of shelf lives of different foods.  The last thing you want is to get food poisoning.

The beauty of these two rules is pretty simple.  You won’t have a drastic dietary change if something happens and you have to dip into storage, as you’ve already been eating from your storage.  Food storage is no longer some foreign concept that Mormons and Camouflaged Survivalist Freakazoids do, but is just a method of getting a deeper pantry to be prepared and be more economically smart.  Camouflage fatigues are optional.

What else do I need to know?

Well, I’ll have some posts about longer term food storage (back to the 50lb bags of rice and beans) and food preservation methods such as canning and drying.  Need to write those first though!

The rule is simple:

• You can survive for three minutes without oxygen.
• You can survive for three hours in severe environments without shelter.
• You can survive for three days without water.
• You can survive for three weeks without food.

As you go about preparing yourself and your family, you should use this rule to help guide your preparation triage.  Sure, these are obviously rough estimates.  But as far as a rule of thumb goes, they’re great.  It puts things in perspective.  Yeah, you might be hungry enough to eat a horse, but if you don’t have water, you’re screwed.  Should you work on water purification or go off looking for lizards to eat?

Some things are more relevant than others.  For example, you probably don’t have to worry TOO much about oxygen if you’re in your house during a survival situation.  But if you were in New York during the 9/11 attack, having an air mask to keep out all that dust would have been critical to your overall health.