We need to have enough tinned food and bottled water to be self sufficient for three days

[CruCru]

There’s a thing in the Times about the Prepare campaign - people need to be prepared for risks like localised flooding, another pandemic, a mass cyberattack which cuts off the internet, disruption to UK space systems that affect GPS signals, conflict and nuclear attack.

I must admit that my first thought was that there are countries in the West Indies who have these sorts of rules - mainly in case of hurricanes. It probably would be useful to have bottled water if we had flooding and the mains water would be turned off. Am a bit horrified by the mention of nuclear war but perhaps this has been overly highlighted by the Times.

Have you seen this? What do you think?

Yes, which is why lots of the most wealthy are building home with underground bunkers.

I do have one. Wouldn’t have got them without it.

Assuming the power doesn't go and your freezer food goes rotten...

Edited - only a few posts were showing when I posted (didn't refresh). Of course lack of power has been discussed

I have a generator.

Most of us will have enough food for 3 days. It just won’t be very exciting food but it’s amazing what tastes good when you’re cold and hungry.

It’s really easy to can water in empty jam jars and very common in rural USA. So that’s what I’ll do. I don’t think my parents will bother so when the panic is over they can buy some bottled water in glass bottles. It’ll cost more but last forever.
You can just fill empty bottles but the water has to be changed every month or so. If we get some warning you could just store empty bottles and then fill them

My family are always going on at me, because of the amount of food I have in my cupboards. I think I could probably manage a good 4/5 months, or 2/3 months when family run out and need supplies. Difficult thing would be drinking water, but I have enough soft drinks, to last 2/3 months (loads of alcohol, but I’m actually tee total) if I rationed myself. As for toilet rolls….I’ve got at least 9 months supply!

We should be relatively ok here. Depending on time of year, we grow our own food and have a huge pool, cold sheds and pantry and could always shoot the pigeons and squirrels I guess. We have a chimney, we camp so has gas stove and such. Solar lights yadda yadda.

Most people have three days of food even if it’s boring cereal.

We've got maybe 12l of mineral water in glass bottles in the garage. Gloucestershire 2007 floods also meant we got a waterbutt... water cut off for a while. Had to use pond water to flush loo... luckily they found a way to get water (though non-drinkable) flowing before the fish died!.

We have camping gaz stove and a barbecue so can cook outside.

Food, we've got a few days. Medication a month in hand and I know where else I can get the important one.

But mostly... I've got the means to defend it.

Living where we do, a nuclear attack would wipe us from the face of the planet.

Electricity/gas/water denial by cyber attack would be hell. No idea how long it would last... how generous can you afford to be?

The electricity will be among the first things to go so your freezer food would be useless! Hope you all have a manual can opener and not an electric.

'Lots of the most wealthy are building homes with underground bunkers'.

Evidence please.

Do you have a generator, wind turbine or solar panels to keep your freezers going if there's a power cut? Otherwise it will all spoil in a few days.

I did prep a little bit for Brexit (supplies all used now) but I didn't go as far as getting a camping stove etc. I don't know what I would do for food if the electricity was out. Lots of cold baked beans, I suppose.

I have some tinned or dried food. It would depend on the disaster - electricity going out for a week, I could light the gas hob with a match. Gas going out would be harder to cope with, although I suppose I could light the barbecue. Flooding is very unlikely here as we're uphill and not near any large water source. Water going off - I would set out buckets to catch rain water, and if the car was still working I would literally just drive a few miles to a quiet spring, fill up bottles and buckets and then either boil it or just take my chances. I'm on the edge of remote countryside so the water ought to be reasonably ok, bar the possibility of dead sheep upstream. DH works for a water company so ought to know a few tricks for purification.

Thank you.

I have got a couple of camping stoves, and some gas canisters somewhere, probably in the garage. They are left over from actual camping. So they could come in handy, especially if the emergency happens in the Summer when it's too hot for the wood burner.

Nah, fuck it. The Spar is only round the corner, I'll just go and join in the looting.

Yes generator. Camping stove with gas bomb too.

That's brilliant! Can I come round yours come the apocalypse?

I know this is an MN bromide but I wonder if its an age thing? I come from the generation with no internet, no mobile phones, no online ordering. My Mum always kept stuff like candles, hot water bottles, cans of soup and so on. Until I was 11, we had open fires we could heat stuff on if needed and my mum would only ever have a gas cooker. She told us that in the war, there was often still enough gas in the pipes to boil a kettle but if you cooked with electricity then you had nothing. My sisters and I grew up knowing this stuff. Nowadays the prep is different, wind up radios and camping gaz stoves, but the intention is the same.

We had 4 days with no water earlier this year. I did have to buy bottled water from Amazon for drinking and shared some with neighbours, the waterboard distribution was useless, but I have got 7 waterbutts. I tied cloth over the tap to sieve out the lumps, used it untreated to flush the loo and put purification tablets in and heated it to wash with.

We live rurally so stocking up is something we had to get used to when we moved from the city with a lidl on our literal doorstep. I just didnt have the time with a long commute to pop into the shops every day any more.

In January 2020, DH suggested that I start adding a few extras to the weekly shop, I stocked up on most dried and tinned food and baking items. It meant in the first couple of weeks of lockdown we had no need to leave the house.

My DB is a bit of a conspiracy theorist so his focus was on the likes of a cyber attack or economic attacks - so he was ensuring he had cash in the house but also bought small amounts of gold and silver, I'm guessing in the event that currency is worthless for some reason. I switched over almost exclusively to using contactless for paying so this gave me food for thought if a cyber attack brought down the banking system.

Prepping aside, I love the idea of self sufficiency and living off our own produce. On our wish list for the future is solar panels, veg and fruit gardens/trees, chickens and maybe even a goat. Reading this, I think a generator & diesel, a gas stove and even just things like buckets or an analogue radio are things I hadn't thought of. Not for a disaster, but there were a couple of long power cuts last winter, and one day a tree fell and blocked us off from all roads so you never know.

Did you actually pass a convoy carrying nuclear warheads though? Or is that the part you were joking about?

It just makes sense, if you can afford it, to have a few days of food and supplies just in case.

It's not evidence of impending doom.

COVID exposed some people thought the world was ending because toilet paper ran out in most supermarkets and pasta.

That's what the current advice is about. COVID exposed how some people lost their shit.

The world didn't end. I bought kitchen roll to wipe with and put it in the bin. I also had zero difficulty after the first 2 weeks getting a Tesco delivery despite not being in a vulnerable group or registered as such.

😁

@hjrl Sounds like you did very well.

That poster was joking.

There's no objective way to tell the difference between a general missile/bomb and a 'nuclear' one by looking.

And even if there was, the MOD is not transporting missiles or bombs in obvious ways that the population could tell- there are strict transportation rules.

They're not visible on the back of a van or in closed vehicles that say MOD on the side 🤣

It's a matter of national security.