Unclutterer

1. Posted by Courtney - 09/03/2009

   Hi Erin. My husband and I are “preparedness geeks”.

   We live in a very snowy area of the Northeast. After hearing about Daniel Kim and several other people stuck for days in a snowy car, we each packed a backpack and store it in our trunks. It contains a flashlight, $20, flares & bright orange flags, change of clothes, jar of peanut butter, trash bags, and other items that would be handy if the cell phone is out of range and the car broke down. The clothes also come in handy when you decide to sleep over last-minute at a friend’s house or get a tear in your clothes at work.

   We have a pantry in the basement, inventoried with index cards. This also helps with meal planning, and serves as “insurance” for if I lose my job or fall ill and can’t buy groceries for a while. This type of preparedness costs NOTHING because we use up the food throughout the year and rotate in new food. Just make sure you buy food for your pantry that you normally eat.

   We also have a fireproof box labeled clearly “FOR EMERGENCY ONLY”. This contains our home deed, emergency plans, financial information, photocopied credit cards, passports, etc. It came in handy just this week when my credit card fell out of my wallet and I had to call to cancel.

   When you decide to get your family prepared, it can be an overwhelming and expensive process. So here’s my advice: sit down and make a list of the most likely emergencies to happen in your neck of the woods. Everything from a car breaking down in the middle of nowhere, to a burglary, to a snowstorm that takes out power. Now think through what would be helpful to have, and what you would do, in those situations. Start with that, and you’ll be fine.

2. Posted by Lose That Girl - 09/03/2009

   For my fellow Canucks, they can visit http://getprepared.ca/index_e.asp to get info relevant to Canada.

3. Posted by Dawn F - 09/03/2009

   I read about this idea in a magazine one time to make a handy “Wallet Contents” page:

   Take all of your credit cards and identification cards out of your wallet that you carry daily and lay them on a copy machine and make a copy of the front and back of them (put as many as you can on one sheet to save space). That way “just in case” your wallet is stolen or lost you can simply pull out your handy Wallet Contents page (that was hopefully stored properly in your filing cabinet/system at home) and quickly call all of the necessary people to report your stolen/missing card(s).

   It’s such a super easy way to be prepared for an incident like this! Even if you just carry 1 or 2 cards, having that 1-800 number to call quickly will be easily accessible by referring to your handy Wallet Contents page.

4. Posted by Sky - 09/03/2009

   You can go to your phone company store and they will print out your phone contacts in case your phone battery dies or it won’t work for some other reason. If you are like me, I don’t know anyone’s number and may need them in an emergency. Or you can just write them down. Either way, keep the list in your wallet.

   Also make sure you have proper carrying cages for your pets if you have to evacuate. My 2 cockatiels have a large cage they live in but I also have a small cage for them if I have to take them somewhere.

   A few other good thing to keep in your car are a large jug of water, a blanket, a roll of paper towels and baby wipes. These come in handy anytime and especially in an emergency.

5. Posted by Gillian - 09/03/2009

   @DawnF: If you photocopy one column of cards, and put the relevant phone # beside them, it’s even more useful. Might as well do your passport at the same time.

   I really like Courtney’s ideas too. I inventory the freezer, but not the pantry cupboards. Her thoroughness is great.

6. Posted by Diana - 09/03/2009

   I moved to San Francisco in 1989 to start college. A month after I moved there, a huge earthquake hit. My roommate and I had nothing to eat that didn’t have to be cooked. We went to the market down the street and they were only letting a couple of people at a time and were totally out of water. We each got a deli sandwich, some crackers, and two six packs of beer. Luckily for us her parents came and got us the next day or we could have been in serious trouble. Ever since that experience, I always have a 72 hour kit with water and food, and have recently started on a three month supply of food we eat normally.

7. Posted by Lori Paximadis - 09/03/2009

   Great ideas from @Courtney and others.

   Some of my friends and family laugh at me, but my pantry is always stocked to the point where I could probably go a few weeks before running completely out of food. After living in Hawaii and seeing what happens to grocery store shelves when hurricanes threaten (or that really surreal week post-9/11 when nothing was coming in or going out, including food), and after dealing with a few periods of very little income, I’ve come to appreciate the merits of keeping a stockpile of food.

   I always have backup; I buy a new jar of peanut butter/bag of rice/bottle of olive oil/box of crackers when I open the last one, a new case of soup/tuna/crushed tomatoes/black beans when I’m down to the last three or four cans, etc. It’s all stuff that I use, and I put the new ones in the back and use from the front. And it’s not clutter, because I have the storage space to keep it all neatly organized.

   Good point from @Diana, too, about having stuff on hand that doesn’t need to be cooked.

   Adiing “more disaster preparedness” to my September to-do list.

8. Posted by infmom - 09/03/2009

   The fires in the Los Angeles area have prompted us to get off our fannies and do some serious computer backups onto easily portable media, among other things.

   All our family photos are in archival Shoeboxes from the Exposures catalog (someday, oh someday when I get a new scanner, I’ll digitize them all). All the super valuables are in well hidden but accessible (if you know where they are) places.

   We keep canned food and bottled water on hand as a matter of course in earthquake country, and we have two manual can openers. We have extra food and a large carrier for the cat. All our medications are in a basket together and I have boxes of insulin syringes that are taped together so I can easily grab them all.

   Even with all that, I don’t think we are 100% prepared to get the heck outta here–good thing the fires are on the other side of the Verdugos from us.

9. Posted by Michele - 09/03/2009

   I’ve jokingly been calling myself a “millennialist/survivalist/eschatologist” for a few years. The quickest tips I can come up with are the following:

   - A very good book is “Passport to Survival,” by Rita Bingham. It’s based on the teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, who apparently require (or at least urge) households to have a year’s supply of food and other necessaries. The edition I have includes some homeopathy bunk, but the vast majority of what’s in there is very useful, even for people like me who use it in only the most secular sense. (That is, I don’t keep a year’s supply of stuff in my home, but I’m on board with the concepts and fundamentals in the book, which talks a lot about unexpected emergencies: drought, blizzard, riot, etc.)

   - You are “out” of something when you have 1 left, not when you have zero left. For example, when you have one tube of toothpaste in the cabinet, and you’re using another in the bathroom, you’re out of toothpaste. If the only tube of toothpaste you have is the one you’re currently using, you are “post-out” of toothpaste. Or when you take the next-to-last can of beans out of the pantry, you are out of beans. If taking a can of beans out of the pantry leaves you zero cans of beans, you are “post-out” of beans. The idea here is, what if your supermarket were not available tomorrow?

   - Though I don’t keep a “skip out of town on no notice” pack by the door, I do keep a ziploc bag of documents immediately accessible in our hall closet. I’ve also worked out a few routes for getting out of the city on foot if something bizarrely catastrophic happens, and the ziploc bag includes a detailed street map of the city.

   Just about anything else I’ve done for preparedness can be considered details of these items. After I moved in, it probably took me half a year to build up our food and emergency kit reserves — mostly by bringing home a few extra items from the supermarket on every trip.

   The only thing I don’t have currently is a good emergency supply of water, because storage space in our 2-bedroom apartment condo is problematic. As it turns out, I haven’t had a water loss emergency in the 3 years I’ve lived here. Such an emergency is probably seriously unlikely, though I know that that is no reason not to keep water on hand.

10. Posted by Gerard - 09/03/2009

    Medications! Ask your doctor for an extra scrip for your regular meds for your “emergency go-bag.” You might need to do this every couple of years – but many people mention this as something they didn’t have when they had to flee an area and getting in touch with doctors and/or pharmacies can be difficult.

11. Posted by Ruth Marie Oliver - 09/03/2009

    I helped start a camp for sixth graders to teach preparedness in Alabama. http://www.bereadycamp.org/ Next week we will start our fourth year! Thanks for you efforts in the cause!

12. Posted by James Fraleigh - 09/04/2009

    Go-bags and ready kits are rightly thought of as tools for escaping an emergency, but influenza can be an emergency too if it leaves you housebound and thus unable to secure medication—or even simple food you can keep down. Scroll to the end of this LJ entry for the components of a flu kit, which covers everything from OTC fever reducers to dehydrated soup and stomach-calming agents. Found via Jim Macdonald’s educational flu post on the Making Light blog; Jim and the discussion participants add a few components to the bag, too. Both posts were written during the H5N1 bird-flu scare a few years back, but are equally applicable to seasonal and H1N1 flu in any year.

13. Posted by Jackie Pettus - 09/11/2009

    The Emergency Info list available at Habitudes (www.Habitudes.info) serves as a preparedness checklist as well as storing contact information. It’s customizable, printable and protected online where it can be accessed anywhere there’s internet access. (If the house burns down or washes away your Emergency and other household info won’t be lost with it!) Emergency Information is free this month with Habitudes membership (also free the first year).

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