To stockpile 72 hours of supplies

We do this already especially from October til March time but I live in NE Scotland where we can get battered by storms with the longest power cut in recent years being 6 days with -4 and snow. This winter we have had 2 power cuts of a day or so each.

Most properties (including mine) around the area have wood burners for winter and we always have a stockpile of seasoned wood.

I could feed my family for many weeks (literally) from my pantry.

And have veg in my garden / greenhouse all year.

However i certainly am not loosing sleep about what if there is some massive disaster

I was in the shop the other day and saw them on the shelf. Was €5.50 for one. Nearly swallowed my teeth. Ffs for food poisoning in a can

You can (I've never used mine - how powerful are they?) but if there's an electric outage, you'd soon run out of charge. Having good torches and batteries is just something I've grown up with as necessities for rural life.

I would have said I have a least a week of supplies but then recently our water was off due to a burst main, and we had to go buy some bottled water. Now I have two large bottles in the cupboard so I am actually sorted. We also keep charging banks charges (not in case of disaster just because we travel a lot!) and I have a nice candle addiction, so we'd be fine

My Christmas cupboard could be seen as stockpiling. But I don't know how long we would last on goose fat and sourdough crackers...

The three days' supplies is in the event of attacks even on water and utilities supplies, whether physical or cyber attacks. So it would mean non perishables, water, batteries, a battery operated transistor radio, food that doesn't require cooking, medicine, cash etc. Not just your usual 3 days of groceries.

A Proper MN thread, it's been a while, sigh.
Feel immensely cheered up.
When does being prepared tip into being a prepper?
A friend still has 100,000 water purification tablets from COVID olden days, ordered online after muchos vino 😁

I mean yeah go for it but the reality is, if something kicked off that would warrant stockpiling, 3 days wouldn’t do much help. If these things kick if they go on for years…. So we’d all be screwed regardless

Phone torches are not that good in compleat darkness, plus they drain the battery very quickly.

I have a private water supply. It’s gravity fed so still works in a power cut but the uv filter that kills off any bugs won’t. So will need to boil or water purification tablet.

Bettor off than neighbours who pump water up from boreholes. No power means it’s a whatever is in the tank has to last.

It wouldn't matter how many hours, days or weeks I prepped... I'd still lose my tin opener.

We have our COVID Fray Bentos pie. So we will be ok. We will die of food poisoning rather than the nuclear cloud.

People in Nordic countries are accustomed to stockpiling anyway, as they are used to severe weather in winter so sometimes get cut off for days or weeks at a time.

why don't you just use your phone torch

Or if you have a gas BBQ just make sure you’ve a full canister on that.

id say we’d easily last a week on foods from my fridge, freezer and cupboards and far longer if we were rationing. We always have candles, gas, cash stuff like that. We’d struggle with water as never buy it (have filtered from the fridge) so the purifying tablets and a few bottles in the shed isn’t a bad shout

I suppose those of you in cities don't have access to fast flowing streams - I can imagine city dwellers being without water if the taps ran dry for longer than a few hours but how likely is that?

I keep a large barrel of water in the shed, rain barrels and 20ish litres of bottled drinking water. Hangover from living in Africa, always shocks me how ill prepared Brits are if water goes off. It has come in handy once. Kitchen is always very well stocked. Just common sense.

Last time ours didn't run dry but it was undrinkable. It was yellow/brown and smelled bad. Took 3 days for them to fix the pipes. They did provide bottled water at the end of the first day, the local shops were completely sold out of water at this point.

We have lost water pressure as well on a few occasions.

We recently got the survival manual in France. I live very rural and we all laughed at 72 hours, I'm good to go for at least 6 months. I have a well with potable water & rainwater recycling. Wood burner for heat, cooking and boil kettle, at least 2 years wood in barn. 100's of books. 2 large freezers that I can switch over to solar. I grow enough fruit n veg if disaster during growing season, if I could stomach it, enough courgettes for a lifetime 😂 I am use to power outages, phones going down. However if the shit really hits the fan we are all buggered. I'm not going feral and eating the local wildlife.

We are always permanently stocked up.
Larder, two fridges and 2 and a half freezers.

When thinking of stocking up I don’t consider three days anything.
Surely at least a month would be considered stockpiling. Although we probably have more than this except for eggs. (which technically I could freeze of course )
If the water was cut off we wouldn’t have enough of that though.

I’d be too busy eating all the rapidly defrosting food from my freezer. Seriously though, after that we could eat rice, pasta and home made marmalade for about three months along with random tins and veg from the allotment.
Water though ..hmm 🤔

I'm surprised no one has mentioned that they are sorted because they have the MN roast chicken that will feed their family of 5 for weeks and then make soup with the carcass for the whole neighbourhood 😂

I keep a few crates of water in glass bottles in the cellar. Have enough food. If I lived in a flat would stash a few five liter containers (stack well) under the sink.

An attack along the lines of WW3 would be so catastrophic it almost isn’t possible to prepare. More worried about a nuclear power plant being inadvertently hit in Ukraine or critical infrastructure disruption.

I think people with gardens/local communities/schooös should be encouraged to grow more. Particularly fruit trees and berries. The UK is ridiculously reliant on imports. Plus you can easily grow berries and fruit that is organic. Also cuts down food miles and packaging. Well kept chickens too.

Solar charger and some solar lights a good idea too. Can easily be part of a camping set.

Everyone keeps saying water 🤔 I can’t imagine a scenario where the taps ran dry. I’ve never bought bottled.