Preppy Prepping

Have you ever considered that, one day, you might find it necessary to evacuate your area. We live in a relatively safe area of the country where the need to evacuate from floods, hurricanes, tsunamis, or tornadoes is pretty non-existent. But we also live near several nuclear facilities. In the past, our city has hosted evacuees from coastal areas numerous times, including Hurricane Katrina. Shelters have overflowed and many evacuees simply can’t afford hotel rooms, even if any were available. It begs the question, if my family was forced to evacuate, what would we do? After Hurricane Katrina, my family discussed this very issue in detail. There are several concerns that have to be addressed if an evacuation order is issued for your area. First and foremost, how do you go about gathering your family? This was a huge question, since my husband worked at one of those nuclear facilities, a 55-minute drive from our home. We discussed in detail (and never fully resolved, unfortunately) a ra...

When I first began preparing for a potential emergency, everything I read stressed the importance of ROTATING my stock. Eventually, this task became overwhelming, partly because we don’t typically eat a lot of beans and rice. The things I was stashing away could not easily be transferred to our daily food supplies. But keeping up with dates on all my cans also put me way out of control. So how do I ensure my food doesn’t spoil before my family needs it? My solution went two different directions. First off, I found articles (case studies, really) about canned goods that had been discovered more than 100 years after purchase. One occurred in Texas when a company bulldozing an area to build a parking lot for a new shopping complex discovered a root cellar that contained hundreds of canning jars full of food. The food was taken to an independent lab and tested for bacteria and nutrition. Every jar, still carefully sealed, was free of bacterial infiltrate and still held it’s original nutrit...