Welcome to DK Preppers: A place to discuss practical ways to get through emergencies, both short term and long. Topics may include skills for growing, storing and sharing food, lost and historical skill sets, sustainability issues, living and leaving safely, and growing community. Everyone is welcome, and the comments are open. We have open threads on Saturday (noon eastern time) and Tuesday evenings (7 eastern time).
My family and I have been getting prepared for emergencies (“Prepping”). We’ve studied ready.gov and some other websites. We have about a months worth of food on hand, and some water stored, along with other items to get us through local natural emergencies. We are also thinking about political unrest, global warming, and economic turmoil, and working to prepare for that, as much as any regular person can. We wanted to try to practice, and test out our supplies.
So, last weekend I turned off the power. My family knew about it ahead of time (we agreed to try it out) , and I gave them an hours notice on Friday night. I turned off the power at 11 pm on Friday night. I have two adult disabled daughters and two granddaughters that live with me, aged 2 and 8.
I had turned on my electric mattress pad, so my bed was toasty warm when I got in, but in the night I had to get up and get more blankets. Then I got woken up again when everyone else got up to look for more blankets. My cell phone was fully charged, so my alarm went off as usual on Saturday morning.
I lit the kerosene heater in the hall outside the bathroom (we have one bathroom, and it and the kitchen share a wet wall. Welcome to old farmhouse living.) The temps outside were low 40's during the day, and dipped into the mid to low 30’s at night, which wasn't terrible. I put on two pairs of long johns under my jeans, and several layers under my sweater. Our well has an electric pump and it fills a 50 gallon tank for pressure, but I didn't want to use that clean 50 gallons up right away. I had filled the tub with water the night before, and I showed everyone how to flush the toilet with a bucket of water, and we also used the tub water to water the animals.
While outside, I pulled the grill into the garage, and put some wood in it, ready to light and heat up lunch later. For breakfast, we had hot cereal. I had put it in the electric pressure cooker the night before, in jars. They were still really warm. I grabbed milk from the fridge, and then put a note on the small freezer to "keep it shut, dammit." I told the kids that anything in the fridge was OK to eat, but not to open any freezer, and to limit their time with the fridge open. So, hot cereal (irish oats and quinoa with fruit) for breakfast. One meal down, five more to go.
After chores, I gathered eggs (the chickens lay after eating). Then we talked about the rest of the day's plans. I heated up lunch (some of the instant meals I've canned) in a pan on the grill --some pork stew with potatoes, carrots, corn and onions. We ate it with crackers, and some dill pickled green beans and apples from storage in the basement.
In the afternoon we practiced leaving the house as surreptitious as possible. We talked about different scenarios, like where to meet up if the house was on fire, what to do if a stranger was in the house, and where to meet up if we wanted to hide. We talked about how to get help from neighbors, and how to get to the neighbors houses without being seen, including the neighbors on the other side of our tiny woods. Our field slants down from our house, and we have a strip of woods about 30 feet thick at the bottom of our property. If we follow the fence line down to the woods, it is unlikely anyone would see us. We are out of view of the road, and the scrub bushes block the view from the other way. We tried to make it as playful and adventureful as we could, since there were the young grandchildren, and one of my daughters is somewhat child-like. I put some granola bars in a bag, and grabbed water bottles to have as we tromped around the whole property and in our little rural village. We walked the one road that leads through our unincorporated settlement, trying to remember the names of every household.
Back at our property, we searched for a place in the woods to hide a cache. If something bad was happening at the house, there is a good place to hide in the woods, and a little container with a wind up flashlight, a couple of granola bars and maybe some chalk to write a note or mark a path would be helpful.
Our woods end in a stream that sometimes floods, so we didn't want to bury it our cache. We found a clever spot that I don't think anyone would find. Then we hiked along the property lines of our neighbors in either direction, still in the woods, to figure out paths away. We found that we could stay under cover of little woods for nearly two miles, and then we hit a bike path that does not parallel a road, and the bike path eventually ends up at one of the Great Lakes. That could be an option to ‘bug out’, if some huge emergency were to happen, or we could go the other way and keep in the woods for a while that way too.
We talked about the benefits and difficulties of dragging bikes until we could ride them, or just taking the road to begin with, and the unlikelihood of any sort of emergency of that sort. We talked about the Syrian refugees and how horrible it must be for them to have to walk away from their homes, and to try to get to somewhere safe, and how many of them are still waiting and traveling, hoping to find someplace to be.
When we got home, I heated water on the grill and we washed up in the sink. It was wasn't too cold, since the heater was on in the bathroom. We had been outside for hours anyway, so it felt good to be inside and clean, even if was chilly.
Then time for dinner. This time it was pork chops on the grill, with grilled potatoes and grilled corn from the freezer. We were hungry and it was great to have a substantial meal.
I lit the kerosene lamp, and we played a board game after dinner. Bed time was cold. I still had most of a phone charge. Sunday morning breakfast was just graham crackers and milk, because I overslept, and because I wanted to use up the milk. It was staying cold on the porch, but not as cold as I'd like, so we were using it up. I told the other family members to eat what they could out of the fridge while Grace and I headed out with dozens of eggs to go to church, since we are the local UU church egg connection. I was feeling fusty in a camping-out sort of way. I could have used a shower, I'm sure.
Lunch back home was scrambled eggs and bacon on the grill with green beans and toast and applesauce. (I'm sure glad I can stuff.) The chores had been done with the tub water, and it was almost gone. There was still water in the tank in the basement, so everyone was drinking water like usual. My daughter used some gallons of stored water in the garage to do up dishes with grill-heated water, like she had the day before, while I prepared and heated up chicken, carrots, parsnips and rice in the dutch oven to go into a hay box to cook until suppertime.
That afternoon, we all went for a drive, and mapped out several ways to get into the nearest real town, out of town, back roads to Lake Erie, which is about 13 miles away as the crow flies, and 20 miles away by road. We noted on a local topographical map how far the creek went from our property in either direction, since it is a wooded creek all the way, and discussed how to get to places off the road. It was interesting to look at the land around us in a new way, and how we could possibly get here and there pretty much unnoticed. We talked about emergencies that would make sense to leave the house, and how it was much more likely that in an emergency we would want to stay in our house.
That evening while we ate, we all talked about what had been hard (the cold) and what had been easy (the food). Daughter had purchased extra batteries for her phone, so she was connected to the internet the whole weekend. That was pretty cool. We will want to store more water until we can get a working hand pump for the well. And we decided that rather than a generator, we should actually get a wood burning stove for the kitchen, something that would keep the kitchen and bathroom warm, and something we could cook on inside. The bother wasn't having no electricity, the bother was cooking outside and being cold in the bathroom and in bed. I’ll keep a lookout for good, warm extra blankets at thrift stores. And more long johns for everyone.
We did a lesson on how to drain the water so the pipes wouldn't freeze if we lost power and the weather was below freezing. Then I turned on the electricity again. Everyone rushed to turn on their electric blankets, and we waited for the hot water heater to finish cycling so we could take turns in the shower.
It was an interesting weekend, and we did really well, and learned some things, and now have a focus for moving forward for our preps. We need to practice fire safety and tornado drills with the kids, and ways to get out and when to stay put. We'll get a cache in our woods, and start a savings for a wood stove for the kitchen, and keep canning heat-and-eat meals, with more variety.
In the comments, let us know your plans for being more prepared, and the measures you have taken to get there. Anything about getting yourself to a place where, in an emergency, you can care for yourself, your family, and your community is great to talk about.
If you would like to do a story for DK Preppers, I try to have a discussion on Saturday afternoon and Tuesday evenings. The stories can be about your experiences, or just a topic to discuss. Let me know if you are interested.