What are you prepping for?

[AuntBess]

There's a thread elsewhere talking about a huge prepping thread and I couldn't locate it to research my answer so I'm asking.

What are you prepping for?

Of course, I understand prepping with a few bottled waters and canned food for extreme weather scenarios etc, but apart from that, what else is there to prep for? Furthermore, nothing is ever so bad in the UK that you'd need more than a few weeks supply at the very most!

C&P from AIBU, except the last one as it didn't seem relevant or helpful to the OP on that thread:

Most of my prepping is just taking sensible precautions:

• doing a winter car check and keeping basic essentials in the boot in case of snow.

• making sure I have working smoke alarms and that everyone knows what to do in the event of a house fire.

• Budgetting and setting aside some rainy day savings.

• Having a bag I can grab if I need to leave the house in a hurry for some reason: flooding, gas leak, sink hole etc.

• Having basic long-life food and bottled water in-hand in case I can't afford to buy it, get to the shops or some other reason. Possible scenarios: Ex doesn't pay child maintenance one month, job search after redundancy going on longer than expected, we're all ill.

Really basic stuff here too, shovel and tracks in car, candles in house, smoke alarms etc. Thinking about possible likely scenarios - power cut/water supply issues/house fires (have had the first two, but never for more than a few hours).

So no one at all is prepping for an apocalypse, as expressed on another thread?

I'm prepping for another credit crunch. I think there will be another one in the not too distant future. So things like paying our debts off as quickly as possible.

The financial side sounds very sensible. The rest just sounds like Risk Assessment. Doesn't everyone have a house fire plan? A mental what if type plan? If I made a grab pack of children's clothes they would have grown out of them by time we would perhaps have to use it.

I'm not preparing for an apocalypse, no.

I have two small DC. I update the go-bag when they go up a size.

We're prepping for power cuts and tsunamis. We're not storing too much in the house because power cuts generally don't last longer than a couple of days so 3 days worth of stuff in the house. The main thing is the car, if our local tsunami sirens start blaring then the first thing we'll be doing is jumping in the car and heading for the hills so anything in the house will be pointless.

To my mind it makes sense to be prepared for a time when fuel is scarce, as fossil fuels are on their way out and the investment isn't there to find solutions any time soon. As everything is so interlinked, a lack of fuel will impact everything else. So I don't necessarily prep for an apocalyptic event (however I do think it a tad naive to believe that our emergency services could cope with a prolonged emergency in an effective way) but I work towards a more self-sufficient mindset and way of life.

Depending on where you are in the country being prepared for being snowed in/otherwise blocked for a week at a time makes sense. You can't get much more Southerly than where I live and my parents still got snowed for 5 days a few years back...and the boiler went at the same time!

Getting snowed in.
Power cuts.
Flooding.
Financial crisis, either personal, or major.

All of those are perfectly feasible, and fairly likely to happen. There's a hell of a lot of heads in the sand imo. Easier to not think about it.

Tsunami? In Britain?

I've two little kids my grab bag is basically my change bag (change of clothes for both always in the bottom, medicine and a little first aid kit in a side pocket, snacks in the top, nappies, mat and wipes in the main bag. I guess the weird bit is copies of passports in an internal pocket.

I'm not prepping for za either just the things that are likely where i live and for us personally (job loss, house fire, snowed in, power and water cuts are our main ones)

We aren't all in the UK

Much as others have said - extreme weather, power cuts and future financial/fuel crisis. Eg my heat and hit water are not reliant on mains.

Long term power cut (a week or more)
Snow.

A few years ago we were snowed in and whole village was cut off for quite a few days. Luckily power stayed on.

As a child I remember quite a few winters where we were snowed in and also power being off at the same time for days on end, maybe up to a week. We had bottled gas for the hob and gas fire so could at least keep warm and eat. I seem to remember dad bought a generator for the freezer. Mum always had lots of tinned food in the house.

Flood, earthquake, landslip. Being cut off from town for a couple of weeks. Not in the UK, quite realistic. That said, i feel better prepared here than I would in a UK City where people are so reliant on having immediate access to everything, water, power etc.

Our whole area was affected by having no water for a day the other week, (South east) I wouldnt have wanted it off for much longer. Even the loos wouodnt flush, which with 5 of us was soon a problem, let alone no water to cook with, or for drinking, washing, showering.

I now have a fair few litres of water essential for loo flushing and drinking, if nothing else.

Aunt Bess - there has been tsunami where I live in the UK, you can see the sediment in the soil when you dig.

There hadn't been tsunami in the lifetimes of those people who died in Japan the other year... hence they build their houses below the signs reading "do not build your houses below this sign"!

I am unprepared and proud.

I've taken the batteries out of the smoke detectors and moved to a crocodile infested swamp next to a graveyard.

Fuck you, fate.

World Wide Web www

I am beginning my prep for Christmas

Flood, earthquake, landslip.

Oh bless you, you really do live in a little bubble.

Flood. We have just had over £100K's worth of new road signs installed. They mark the evacuation routes across some of the county. For flooding. I doubt a cash strapped council would spend that sort of money if they didn't think it necessary. Plus there were areas less than 15 miles from me that were very badly affected in the '53 flood. It reached here, but not as far as my house, luckily. I won't be complacent and assume it couldn't happen again.

Earthquake. Yep, had one of those here a few years ago. Caused a fair bit of structural damage. Not massive, but enough that some people had to leave unsafe houses.

Land slip. You can see land slip scars all over the place here. They happen.

I live in the UK, all of those things that you have mentioned have happened within living memory. Then there's being snowed in for days on end, power cuts, and personal financial blips. I'll stick with my insane hoarding tendencies tyvm, I have dependents to take care of, and imo I'm merely being sensible. But if makes you feel better mocking, be my guest

AuntBess there is plenty of geological evidence for tsunamis in the UK. They just don't happen very often. That doesn't mean it will never happen again, I just don't think it's the sort of thing worth worrying about. Like Yellowstone blowing, it'll happen again one day, but again it's not something worth fretting over.

I think that Athrawes was saying she does prep for flood, landslip and earthquakes and that she doesn't live in the UK so those things were a realistic possibility.

Like Athrawes said, flood, earthquake, land slip. We were cut off two years ago when a flood took out the (only) road in both directions. There were houses washed away. And I live on the side of a mountain, so land slip an eminent possibility. We have had a few, and avalanches close the roads routinely during the winter (which is about 7 months of the year). This is the trans-canada highway, btw, not some pissant backroad.

The flood was managed very well. Houses were evacuated around 3am by a convoy of school buses to the rec centre (including pets). The town got water tankers out within a very short period when it became obvious that the water supply was contaminated by the floods. After about 12 days we moved from a 'don't drink the water' to a boil advisory while they repaired the infrastructure. And the power supply was repaired to most of town within a week. There are still people whose houses have not been replaced though, which is a bit of a pisser.

I'm not a prepper though. The shops remained open (and the restaurants) and with a few exceptions (no slushies) business went on as usual. Everyone stepped up and helped each other out - people got out their boats, kayaks and paddle boards and roamed around checking on neighbours. Mostly people walked up to safe zones by the creek and stared in awe. It was a fucking impressive display of the power of nature.

We were at the 'beginning' of the flood chain. It swept down our mountain and then barrelled on down the waterways, gathering more water as it went, towards the city.