How to survive the next disaster

Talking to my cyber pal Steve Bates in comments about incoming sunspot activity, I asked him how he had survived the awful two weeks without electricity after Hurricane Ike. I've always had a fascination with survival techniques stemming from my youth where my mother would explain what we would do when Russian bombs fell on Los Angeles. That and the fact Southern California has the constant threat of earthquakes and the Big One is soon to arrive...

Anyway, I've put by camping equipment in the shed so that when everything falls down, these things could be retrievable: tents, sleeping bags, camp stoves, travel sized bbq grill. For water: toilet tanks (no chemical cleaners in them), water heater (if it hasn't fallen over), 2.5 gal. water bottles. Food: stocked pantry with both dried and canned food. Had stored some in the shed, but it really really goes bad quickly out in the heat.

Special tool to turn off gas to the house tied to the meter. Awareness of where the water turn off is and the electrical meter box.

Strapped some bookcases in the house but don't have the black elastic cord that runs in front of the books to keep them from hurtling off the shelves. Don't have our aquariums strapped to the wall... another source of water, btw. (Don't know how edible the tiny fish are but really don't want to ask my husband, they're his babies.)

Each time we have our infrastructure unravel just a bit, we learn how much we count on everything to work without any effort on our part. I've overheard our town's plastic Barbie housewives huffing about some tiny detail that wasn't just exactly the way they wanted it and I wonder how they will cope when everything comes undone all at the same time.

I want to be realistic and prepared.

Here is Steve's comment:

* Ice in the freezer or fridge is good for about two days. All our frozen and refrigerated food was bad... all of it. Forget recovering it; that $200 or $400 or however much you had in the fridge is just gone.

* Canned foods are good for a couple years, maybe three. I need to change ours out now; Stella has a tendency not to want the hassle of storing it, and arguing with her about it gets me nowhere.

* A camp stove may be a good thing to have. We don't, but it might be a good thing to have.

* Portable generators fail when you need them most. A couple weeks ago, when there was a brief threat of tropical weather, people here who have generators fired them up. The local storm tracker AM station (which doubles as the local right-wing nut-job talk station) said that 183 households reported their generators failed. We don't have them; we depend on lots of batteries. (Yeah, I know, that's not environmentally sound... so sue us!)

* Packaged foods last a good while if you don't open them. Dry cereal is pretty dull fare, though.

* Bottled water... WATER, for Dog's sake... goes bad after 2-3 years. Again, I need to replace ours. Again, it's environmentally unsound.

* Don't expect traffic lights to work. Even if the streets are cleared out enough to allow passage, it's dangerous crossing even medium-size intersections.

* Your land-line phone may not work for literally weeks after the storm, earthquake, whatever. Be sure you have a car charger for your cell phone; it may be your only contact with even your local world. Gasoline may be available, if you can get to it, and cell service was surprisingly resilient after Ike.

* Expect to sweat a lot. Just don't even think about getting A/C back quickly; ain't gonna happen.

Update: Adding to the discussion is Badtux the Backpacking Penguin who has some excellent ideas as well in comments:

You can survive a couple of weeks without much food, if you're a typical fatso-American, but you're dead within a couple of days without water. It always amuses me to see people stocking up on canned foods, but making no (zero) provisions for ensuring that they have drinkable water.

Get a couple of those backpacking water filters and one of those backpacking chlorine dioxide "Miox" generators, the kind that takes table salt and water and uses a battery to "crack" it into chlorine dioxide for killing nasties. Chlorine dioxide won't kill larger parasites (thus the water filter) but kills viruses and bacteria. Make sure you keep plenty of the lithium batteries and salt for the thing. Know where the nearest freshwater supply (no matter how nasty-looking) is. Even if it's the color of tea and smells like poop, it'll keep you alive once filtered and treated.

Think about pooping and peeing. If you're of the feminine persuasion, one of those portable potty seats makes peeing into a hole in the ground (and pooping for *everybody*) *much* easier. Don't expect the sewers to work, most of them rely on lift stations that are powered by electricity, if the pipes aren't simply sheared in half and collapsed by the earthquake.

For charging your cell phone without using gasoline, you can get a very good solar battery charger at Amazon for about $90 that'll charge up two AA NiMH batteries at a time (takes about 3-4 hours of sunshine per pair) then you can use its USB port to charge a (USB-chargable) phone from those batteries. Note that it only puts out half an amp on the port, so some big power-hungry smartphone won't work, but a regular old phone will charge just fine.

For cooking, if you have access to gasoline get a gasoline-powered camping stove. See rei.com for a large supply. If you want to cook over wood, a campfire is the least efficient way to do so... what you want is a coffee can type cookstove, Google 'coffee can stove' for how to make one. There are also more-efficient gassifying stoves like the 'Bushbuddy' that allow using much less wood. You can literally cook for two weeks with a pile of (dry) twigs with one of these things.

Uhm, make sure you have stuff for starting a fire (matches, firestarter blocks, etc.) in the first place! REI has some really cool damp-proof matches that work quite well combined with normal BBQ starter blocks.

Regarding food: One mistake most people make is that they stock food they don't normally eat. Then when they go to eat it in case of an emergency, they find out that a) it's expired, or b) it's nasty and nearly inedible, which makes a miserable experience even more miserable. Stock foods that you normally eat and rotate them rapidly. That way you'll have fairly fresh foods and you'll know what they taste like *before* you eat them.

Just some hints from a non-survivalist backpacker penguin...