Emergency Supplies
Emergency Supplies Include Food, Water, Shelter, First Aid and Medicines
Surviving Diasters Often Depends on Preparation and Supplies
One important key to survival is having enough emergency supplies available to take care of you and your family and all other survivors.
Preparation and planning are key too. People must know what to do if and when an emergency happens. They must have practiced it.
Of course, that's the purpose of fire drills. So people know where to go and how to get there. This didn't seem very important to me when I worked in a small, one-story government office. Of course we'd go out the back door -- where else? Unless we were up front interviewing when the fire broke out, and then we'd have to get every out the front door. Those were the only two doors to the building, and they were sufficient for us. There were no elevators, no basement, no upper story, no steps.
Just step outside and run away from the building.
We also practiced going into our "shelter in place." This was the women's rest room, until they decided that we men could have some of the bottles of water and stay in our own rest room. We also had to put up sheets of plastic, taping them outside the entrances to keep out bio-chemical warfare agents.
I'm thankful we never had to use that. I don't believe running outside in the event of fire would have been a problem, but staying in the rest room while hoping a virulent artificially enhanced form of anthrax or smallpox or deadly chemical agent from getting through a simple piece of plastic . . . that would have been hell to go through.
Still, now that I think about it, I have to admit that knowing where to go just in case, was a good thing. Our training also involved knowing what to do just in case we received any mail with a white powder -- not only close the mail room door but shut off the air conditioning so the fans would not blow the powder around or spread it through the rest of the office. We did get a letter with some suspicious powder once, though I'm not sure whether anybody followed any emergency procedures besides alerting management. And fortunately it wasn't anthrax, or so we were told . . .
We had a few bottles of water, but far from enough to keep us going for very long. And no food. Some employees had various snacks stored at their desks, and there was a soda machine and a machine selling chips and candy, but they were in the break room. And of course none of that would have provided any nutrition, just weakened our bodies more, though good to eat on a short term basis, to fight off hunger.
So have 72 hours kits or freeze dried foods or Mountain House meals or MREs or even just simple canned goods with many bottles of water are necessary. It's advisable to have at least one gallon of water per person per day. And of course, you often don't know how many days you'll need that water for, so more is better than less. Unfortunately, water is heavy and difficult to store in quantity.
The fire chief in the video below gives some good suggestions.
And of course, we are at risk of suffering an emergency or disaster that goes far beyond local events such as fires, hurricanes and even terrorist strikes. We face the risk of massive disruptions of society, through nuclear bombs, an enemy destroying our electrical grid and communications by setting off a bomb in the air above us, or massive ecological or social disasters, such as civil war or revolution.
We need emergency supplies to protect ourselves for weeks or months or even years too.