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?

Sorry but 10% of British households are not too poor to buy food. That is nonsense and there are not statistics to support that.

I have the wind up radio because even 1-2 days believe it or not would feel a long time without updates.

Why are you so sure?

It's regularly reported on, food bank use is extremely high, and many people live with very little money.

Have you never been to the UK? If not I can see why you wouldn't know about it.

I am so sure because I read beyond the headlines. Semantics are important.

My take is that, actually, we need to be preparing for frequent possibly shorter term issues, not one long one which even I know means all bets are off. The mixture of current international factors relating to fuel, weather, cyber risks means we should be looking at an intermittent resilience picture, not one 2 or 3 or 5 day isolated incident.

They’ve not just said it once. Wes Streeting has said it, Angela Eagle has said it, and Dan Jarvis has said that a preparedness campaign will launch later this year.

I am amazed at how much I take electricity for granted. It's just there and I don't have to think about it.

Reminds me of a powercut (didn't last long) during one of the storms last year. It happened at night so of course everything went black dark. Anyway I said to myself, no worries l'll go to bed and put on my electric blanket. 😊

I'm originally from London and yes it could well be pitch black depending on the level of power outage.

I think it is serious so I am planning to do an online shop and put it away.

Hybrid warfare, yes.

We have overhead lines here, and for several years we had power cuts very regularly. They upgraded them, and now they are more resilient, but still a bit dodgy when it blows. It's very frustrating, and really illustrated how awful it would be to have no power for several days. The worst we had was 36 hours when we had those awful Xmas storms. Freezer was surprisingly ok. So we have always had a supply of candles, torches, and basic foods. We do have a gas cooker and a gas fire, so that helped too, but it got cold in the bedrooms.

https://foodfoundation.org.uk/initiatives/food-insecurity-tracking

Its not odd at all to be aware of what's going on in the world.

It seems sensible to have some back up supplies if you can. Not just the apocalypse, but also more mundane things like power cuts, burst water pipes, everyone in your household is ill at the same time, you lose your job or access to your bank account etc. I remember 20ish years ago when people were blockading oil refineries in protest of something and there were petrol shortages and the supermarket shelves were empty. We had regular power cuts in our last house. I remember this spring when we had no water for two days because of some pipe issue 5 miles away. I remember not being able to book a supermarket delivery slot during Covid lockdown and being reluctant to go out shopping in person as the queuing was ridiculous and DH had medical issues. It’s not all nukes and zombies. Having some supplies in removes a lot of the stress from these situations. And who wants to rely on the government if they have an alternative? Not a recipe for peace of mind!

can you answer the question? Is it me or the other 60 million Brits who need to be informed of the requirement to stockpile?

stockpiling really isn’t related to knowing what’s going on in the world. As many of us have said, having 3 days supplies is no big deal and most of us have it without effort.

the point is- you don’t inform the British public they need to do something via means of 1/2/3 politicians speeches. You have a campaign.

this is surely not just obvious but common sense. No idea why you and @noblegiraffe are arguing otherwise

@LilyBunch25that wasn’t my experience, there were still cars driving

Have you ever had absolutely NO money in your bank account? Or reached your overdraft limit? Had to wait until pay day before you can buy food, and once all direct debits etc have been deducted, you are once again left with very little? Oh, and don't have any family or friends to ask? Just because you've never been in that situation, doesn't mean others haven't.

<Adds hammer and bolt cutter to Amazon battery order>

https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-9209/

There is definitely a substantial chunk of people who do not have the resources to have a reasonable supply of food built up, however you measure it

No anxiety here. My DH has served in campaigns where he has learnt a lot the hard way, and he started us preparing- incidentally he hates social media and has no SM accounts. Also in my own work I've personally supported Ukrainians who have lost absolutely everything and thought they'd be back in their homes a couple of years ago. One family explained that without their emergency bag they would never have evacuated safely.
Being prepared is fantastic for my anxiety.

@Backedoffhackedoff i agree that the government should be explicit about the message because not everyone reads beyond the headlines in fact very few do!

And do you know why that's all happening?

Being prepared is fantastic for my anxiety.

I said upthread that I think it helps a lot of people.

As soon as govt make a big announcement then a lot of people will all try to stock up at once. It would arguably be irresponsible for the government to say nothing at all for ages and then make a big announcement to everyone at once.

By doing it this way, they initially get a few people taking action, then a few more, then a few more. Then we get a couple of ministers saying something but during other interviews, like Angela Eagle and Wes Streeting. That's a few more reacting. Then it becomes a topic of discussion and you get a few more. They see or even encourage a few news stories popping up and they know that the word is spreading but slowly. All manageable for supermarkets restocking despite lots of people buying a bit more each week.

By all accounts they are going to launch a campaign towards resilience, but quite a few people having already started or even finished will mean fewer people all trying to start from scratch at the same moment.

@LilyBunch25 Oh I am sure you can educate all of us 😆. However a lot of our problems can be traced to years ago