AIBU to wonder whether the three day emergency advice is serious?

[Mich1986]

I know I might sound crazy, but is anyone else worrying about all the posts about stockpiling and prepping for 3 days that the government is telling us to do? Is anyone actually taking their advice and buying torches, extra water and wind up radios? I just don’t know whether to take it seriously?

Thinking about this. I know there are people in our town that are really struggling. Typically we're a small close knit town where generations of family have lived, grandparents, parents, cousins. There would always be someone to borrow from if you were short.

Now, people are becoming more dispersed. I know that people have been housed here from hundreds of miles away from their support networks and their own local authorities would have considered them intentionally homeless if they hadn't come. I imagine it's the same across the country.

This was also evident during Covid. The value of having family nearby or a close community of neighbours.

I always have tinned food that I can cook in the garden using a real fire if something like the leccy going off for a while happened.

I wonder if this foiled attack was something related to the warning?

The worst would be a dirty bomb, nuke or chemical. Then I'd have to use the gas camping stoves. Mind you, if it was either of those and was local I probably wouldn't want to live after day 3 anyway.

I'm just gonna rely on Daryl and Michonne if the event of an apocalypse. And use the holes made my badgers all over my garden to wee and poo in. I'm not good at this stuff, especially now there's talk on here of bunkers and living on beans for a year. I thought all we had to worry about was severe weather this winter, power cuts, flooding.

I'm not sure about that. People will already be buying for Christmas.
If I have to buy more coffee and gin to see me through a zombie apocalypse, I'll buy one less sparkly dress.
Also, It's creating uncertainty and people tend to hold back on bigger purchases when uncertain.

If I have to stockpile money in small denominations in case of bank outages, then I don't have three money to fritter on takeaways.

Poor badgers!

We suffered during Storm Goretti badly, many days without power and water. I haven’t stocked up since but I will be heading into winter because we are expecting more storms due to El Niño. We always have torches and candles anyway, but I will be making sure we have somethings like bottled water. It was awful when it happened, people bought the local stores out and the local water company took a long time to give it out. It was rough times.

No, it’s not advice the gov want you to take seriously, they’re just trying to find work for all the emergency planners to do. 🤷‍♀️

Hence the campaign later this year? Ensuring everyone is informed. And absolutely everyone I know with older relatives are making sure there's a plan for them- vulnerable and older people with no support network will be the ones the campaign is designed to reach most.

😁

It isn't a scam. Most people are only able to buy a few extra items a week, and most I know have been doing it a while. Also, they aren't spending on items they usually do because costs are high absolutely everywhere, fuel, borrowing, everything. Very, very few people have the disposable income available to actually 'stockpile' in the sense you're describing, and if they are stocking up to any degree then they are simply changing what they buy in their shop, ie do I spend a few quid on plug in air fresheners/a deal on frozen food I might usually buy or, spend it on foods that will last longer or batteries. People will just change what they spend their money on in the main.

I always have had candles, batteries, torches and food.
grew up in the seventies and eighties with power cuts, then my village was cut off for 3 days in the ‘87 hurricane (my mum and dad were prepared anyway) and later on as an adult living in a high level village in Wales meant being cut off by snow for a few days.

Being prepared has always been second nature to me.

To my mind 'stockpiling' is filling your entire garage with dried pasta and toilet rolls, and raiding CostCo for whole trays of tins etc. not just gradually adding an extra item to your shop each week for your store cupboard. A tin of tuna, a carton of custard and tin of pineapple, one of those pouches of grains (currently £1-50 in Sainsburys) etc, gradually. Build up a contingency.

This isn't going to suddenly massively increase the profits the profits of the supermarkets.

Don't we all have the basics for a power cut? Everyone near me has a few litres of bottled water - we have had 5 water outages this year courtesy of Thames Water.

To my mind it's basic household management.

We often get power cuts and no water. We also love camping so have cooking equipment.
Two weeks ago we had no water for three days which isn’t unusual here.

Thanks for posting the figures.

I think people who don’t experience this don’t understand this. Rural living means sometimes, at random, things just stop for a bit. I mentioned Goretti last year and the loss of energy and water, some local people went weeks without but it didn’t make the national news. When London went a few days without, it was everywhere!

We have somewhere we can go which is very remote.

I expect others will do the same yes and the roads could be gridlocked so have worked out how many days it would take to walk!

Hoping we never have to do it. But that’s the plan.

If the electric goes off for a few days I would probably have enough to feed the family and the neighbours from my defrosted freezer - no need for tins. We have plenty of firewood so could light the bbq to cook everything and throw a street party!

Mumsent was definatly way ahead of that curve !

Agree.
Food chain issues Hormuz /diesel issues epescially / transport /petrol and that is without el nino / Russia and the IRG already cutting off a power station for four days .

Mumsnet vs Boris = no contest

If Mumsnet says we have the potential of a rough winter coming up - believe them.

People on MNs had claimed they had clocked covid before the news had even reported on it!

A quick advanced search will reveal that Mumsnet had clocked Covid by mid January 2020. Some UK MSM had clocked it, some hadn't. Some of us had lived in SE Asia and got the news a week or two in advance.

I definitely remember posters saying that they knew about in winter 2019, doesn’t mean they had started a thread about it then though

I asked AI and it backs me up

“Mumsnet posters have claimed in various discussions that they knew or heard about COVID-19 as early as November or December 2019, slightly before it was widely reported in mainstream Western news.”