Being prepared

This last several months there have been several weather disasters around the country, wind storms taking down electric lines, a few instances of flash flooding, and fires lots and lots of fires. All of the above can be devastating. The power goes off and can be off for several days at a time. 

I am a firm believer that people need to be prepared for such disasters. Taking into the different aspects of each disaster can help us all be ready if we need to. 

 I grew up in the earlier years of rural electrification and the power would go out occasionally, Not usually for very long, I will admit, but usually long enough to make me glad that our heat didn’t depend on electricity. Winter storms could stop us from getting to town. Of course we always made it to school, we walked to the bus stop, but quite often Mom couldn’t get out with a car to get into town. So I grew up not depending on a daily or even weekly trip to the grocery store. That kind of prepared I am used to. 

 My question is this; so we have a ton of food stored, we have water stored, we have all of this stuff to get us through the disaster, what about doing without the conveniences that we take for granted every day, electricity, running water and sewer?

Are we all prepared to do without those things. These are the same services that people lose when a hurricane hits, when an earthquake hits, when a tornado hits. Do we have a plan? Could we implement that plan successfully?

My proposal is this. We all need to think about what our plan is. How are we going to handle not having sewer service? What steps need to be taken to make sure our homes stay sanitary and the waste is taken care of in a suitable manner? The same with electricity, and I don’t mean the use of a generator. It might help to have a generator to keep the freezers going for a while, but if services are in that bad of shape would there be gas or diesel available to run a generator? Would we be able to cook without electricity? Is our furnace dependent on electricity? How about water, Are we ready for a time when the water supply may be compromised? 

So this is my plan for our house. In school they have fire drills. It helps the students to prepare for the event of a fire. We need to do disaster drills. More than just the get home and get your family together type of drills. We need to shut the water off, shut the electricity off for a weekend and see how we would do at handling the lack of services. We need to practice our plan and see if the plan is workable. We may think we have it handled, but our plan may have glitches in it that we need to know about before an actually emergency happens. 

I know we have talked about it for a long time. And having grown up with out indoor plumbing better outfits Rick and I for handling such a problem, but we still need to practice, I am not sure where the camping potty is, and that may just be kind of important since we no longer have an outhouse. 

At least think about it. 

Here is a great recipe for preparedness. The ingredients can be layered in quart jars and pressure canned or they can be put in a slow cooker and just fixed for supper. 

Pot Roast Soup

Left over pot roast, chopped

Juices from pot roast pan

Onion, chopped

Potato, chopped

Celery, sliced

Carrot, sliced

Canned green beans

Seasonings, Salt, pepper, other seasonings to your own taste

For canning divide meat among jars, My canner holds 7 so that is where I start. Layer vegetables over meat. Don’t fill the jars too full a little over half is great. Divide the pan juices evenly among jars and fill jars with boiling water. Pressure can quarts for 90 minutes at 15 pounds of pressure. 

For Crockpot supper just put all ingredients in pot, fill with water season to your taste and cook.