Emergency preparedness

With the storm rolling in, I see people on my facebook posting funnies/comics about fighting over water/supplies at walmart and such. This got me thinking about different storms and natural disasters that occur and how people prepare for their coming.

A very good friend of mine has a nice emergency room in her basement. (we live in tornado zone) She has everything they need for at least a 30 day supply, including generator hooked up to run essentials, MRE's, water, etc. When there are tornadoes spotted in the area, they head down and get comfy. We joke that she's ready for the zombies!

We (sadly) do not have a basement. We do however have a super duper, mega duty constructed stairway with a closet underneath. Seriously, this isn't your average stair way construction. Anyway, we have food and water supplies stored here. We have about a 2 week supply (rationed) should there be an emergency. I'd like to increase this, but can't until we configure better storage shelving and such. That's coming SOON!

I don't think I'd want to be out 'fighting' or searching the town for supplies right before a big storm hits! I shop black fridays......how much MORE scary do people get when it's potentially life or death?

So, do you have emergency stores in your home?

*Poll coming* and I promies, this will be my last poll for the week!

cinnamon toast crunch.

We've had one hurricane here in the 10 years I've been in the US. It was last year. I stocked up some (really, only 3-4 days of stuff), and we ended up sleeping in the basement because there was a tornado warning, because we happen to have mattresses there. We got one inch of water down there though in some places, and I ended up having an asthma attack because of the humidity.

So I guess we're not really prepared lol.

we should have a stock pile , but i really dont have room, most of the time we leave any way.

this time i dont have the finances and the storm is so uncertain , we have decided to saty here unless it gets to a 3 then we are leaving.


i have a trunk that h s 3 days clothes for all 4 little kids and 2 days for chris and i. there are copies of all our important doc scanned onto a thumb drive with regular copies in there as well. list of each kids medical conditions (if any) and some little toys they have never seen.
We carry calebs meds in my purse .

so semi preped.

We tend to keep the house stocked with stuff such that we'd be ok for a couple days without electricity, but not a full week.

Yes, I have enough food to last for a long time...more than a week easily. There are a lot of dry things that last for a long time and canned. I need to find a place to put stuff besides in my pantry and first aid things somewhere else, flashlights somewhere else etc. I even have a generator but it's not hard wired in. I keep meaning to get a bunch of jugs of water because I don't have any of that. If the plumbing were to go out, it is important to have lots of water on hand.

I have most things you'd need, but they're all scattered in various places around the house. I think one place, maybe in the garage would work when I get that organized with shelves etc. But in a disaster, one never knows whether you'd be able to get to the spot where you keep it. What would be cool would be an outside "bunker"...a hole in the yard (away from the house if the house would fall down in an earthquake, for instance) with stairs leading down to a safe space....all concrete reinforced, climate controlled, all set up fo living for a month or so. LOL.

Er no but we have lots of guns And a generator.

Seriously though the basement has spiders in it.

I would love a bunker , but around here it would float out of the ground.


i have always been jealous of peeps with basements . i want one so bad .

The friend that I mentioned has a brother who owns a construction company. The basement emergency room I mentioned?....she paid him to REALLY give it the works. It's partitioned off with steel caging and bars. Complete with locks, and is just as much a panic room as an emergency shelter. VERY COOL and I'd really rather have her room than an outdoor bunker!

Enough for a few days. But i have a grill and a weeks worth of meat. f we go more then a week without electric Im leaving anyway. I dont evac unless its a STRONG 3 or above though. During hurricane season I also keep minimal frozen, cooled food. A weeks amount is about it.

Honestly? We have enough water for a couple weeks and loads of canned food. But we're definitely not prepared for anything. Luckily, we live in a pretty disaster-free area.

There was once a storm here in Colorado that made it hard for shipments of food and gas to come in, but there were only three days of panic. (Most gas stations ran completely out, shelves were looking a bit empty, whatever.) Of course, we were on the highway coming home from Arizona and got stranded in the car for six hours before the plow truck came by. Thank God my mum had decided to take loads of figs and grapefruits from my grandma's yard... Otherwise, I think my siblings and I would've eaten the seats of the car. lol

If there was ever a natural disaster, the pets are prepared.

I'm planning to stock up for the winter cause i have a feeling we're gonna have a rerun of the ice storms of 98

Oooh, that's a good point! While I do have plenty of dry dog food on hand (there's two bags in the utility closet at the moment) I do not have any stored with OUR emergency items!

Our emergency items are stored in what we *think* will be the safest place in the house in the event of a tornado. I'm not sure the utility closet is a good place to count on the dog food being safe. The hot water heater and furnace are in there! So I'm definitely going to move the unopened bags to the stairwell closet.

And yes to the winter provisions.........another reason we have a stock pile. We've had roads & highways completely shut down by police order in the winter, I feel better knowing we can have a bottle of water and some spaghettios if we need to (and Orson wouldn't mind if he had to eat spaghettios too!)

The worst thing that happens here is a few inches of snow . . . maybe.

If I had to leave in a hurry for some reason, the dogs are easy to handle -- stuff 'em in the truck (sorry, 'Llulah, you have to go in the back in the big knock-down kennel; you're noisy and you'll get excited and fight), throw the featherbeds in the back, shotgun under the seat, shells, computer's kept in it's case when I'm not using it and so is the camera. Grab a few bras, wad up several pairs of yoga pants and a few shirts, socks, boots (the rubber ones are usually in the truck too) jacket, small valuables that can be turned into money if absolutely necessary, workout gloves (handy for a lot of things) are usually already in there. Gas can. Bag of dog food. There are always gallon and 5 gallon bottles of spring water since I go to the spring and bring back drinking water, and I'm good at finding springs anyway.

Las Vegas is boring, once in a blue moon we have flash floods and then an hour later it's sunny again as if nothing happened. I'm cool with that though.

Not much happens here that puts us out of commission for too long but I have a large food stash downstairs. It's not the type of stash where I buy it and just leave it all sit. it's a constant rotation of food. We keep a lot of staples like cereal, granola bars, canned stuff, so on and so forth. I have a buttload of candles. We have two 5 gallon jugs for water plus a bunch of bottled water.

Oh ya, definitely. Same here. I rotate our supplies. I buy/we drink bottled water here anyway, so I buy it when it's on sale and it gets rotated with my 'stash' Same with canned goods.........first in, first out and I keep the supply level at a certain amount as space allows. The biggest difference I guess is that our 'emergency supply' is stored in our 'safe spot' so if a tornado DOES hit us, the food/supplies won't be blown to kingdom come! LOL

Now my friend buys MRE's and things like that and it just sits there in her 'safe room'.

I so wish we had a basement, this is the first HOUSE I've ever lived in without a basement and I hate that fact It's northern Indiana for pete's sake.........TORNADOES WILL HAPPEN! LOL

Yeah we have a basement and thats where my stash is. That is pretty much thr only place we have to go but it is a pretty safe space, plus there is a small windowless bathroom down there so we will usually go hide out in there

But we don't get much in the way of weather. We are way up a hill so flood waters don't reach us, we don't normally get a ton of snow and tornadoes are rare so we are pretty lucky lol

We are not prepared, although it's not like anything ever happens here that would knock us out.
I saw a food emergency kit at Costco that I joked we should buy, but my mom just rolled her eyes at me

We WERE prepared for Y2K though LOL. We were stocked with water, canned food, toilet paper, firewood.... Too bad it never happened.

I have a basement but I don't stock it for emergencies. I do store canned goods down there. In my whole life I have never had and emergency (knock on wood) that I had to depend on that food. In reality if we for some reason lost power and couldn't get to any store, I know I could stretch out the food in my house for weeks. Even during major snow storms during the years, the stores around here always stayed open.