New Government guidance on prepping

[HasaDiga]

Just launched. Advises that everyone should have emergency supplies including a food stockpile. Seems we've finally caught up with other European countries in issuing guidance!

https://prepare.campaign.gov.uk/

I just noticed this too and was coming here to post this! Interesting that the new website has a section on coping with trauma. 😬 But in a way it's good that there is some guidance for people.

Well this is good news. My prepping has trailed off - then we had a power cut and it turned out lots of batteries was flat!

I know people scoff but again, I was quite happy with my battery candles and head torches.

I stocked on batteries the next day

It's simple common sense. 3 days is better than nothing. As I have said on here maybe 100 times.

I'm from a rural community and I was brought up like this in the 1970s! Rotating tinned food and packets, water butts, human first aid kit, hardcore veterinary first aid kit, camping stove & canisters, candles & matches, torches & batteries, and oil lamp for the living room, big blankets & hot water bottles, shutters on windows and a log pile.

And that was just for a bit of a hooley.

Our vet owned an all-weather all-terrain 1960s landrover and would advise on keeping bottle of iodine etc for livestock. My father was not beyond using it on us, and I recall a sore on my leg being painted with cade oil at some point!

Didn't you write it?

Maybe they've nicked it off your posts! If we find the milk bottle lamp in it we'll know!

Get a room..

😂😂😂

What I really want to know is what catastrophe the government is setting up “prepping” the public for.

Maybe Sunak has planned it with Putin-like cunning so that he can declare a national state of emergency in late June and cancel the election.

@scalt I don't think it's anything in particular. Most countries have something similar.

All it needs is for you to be snowed in or there's a power out or something like the water contamination

I was glad of the nudge, my prepping supplies have run low. Started building up stocks with bottled water as it was on offer.

(may also have bought a little extra chocolate too) 😁

My 8 year old dd came home from school in tears telling me her friends have told her we are all going to die!! It's taken me 2 hours calm her down. I didnt even see this prep article until i googled to see what the children at school meant. The worse part is I know how she feels because when I was younger I was petrified of war, I can't fully remember what caused it but was something I saw on thr news and growing up I was terrified and caused a lot of anxiety even through my adult years. I learnt to live with it and stopped reading news articles etc but once i calmed dd down I did find myself go back to the anxiety I had as a child as it seemed all the more real when reading this and knowing my dd is upset over this asking if we will die, will we be in pain and other horrendous and heartbreaking questions it makes me quite nervous.

It says that ideally you need 10 litres water per person per day for comfort (minimum 2.5-3litres)
so for a family of four for three days you would be looking at 120 litres of bottled water to be stockpiled

I only have drinking water for all of us for two days (2l each, no one will dehydrate in two days) people got very inventive recently in a water outage and filled the loos from one person offering out their hot tub contents. We have a manky pond. I think we need to dig holes in the lawn!

After two days the free water no longer needed to be queued for hours for. Everyone rushes out on day one, day two the die hards are getting thirsty. Day three everyone is just getting what's needed as it's needed.

Water butt's would be a good investment and 2x2l bottles of water per person in your house

Bless her. My DD is like this. They watch some stupid stuff on Newsround at school, then some of the kids make it worse. She's 12 now, but when she was 8, I picked her up from school and her teacher said "She's been a but upset as we've been learning all about this brand new Chinese virus on Newsround. It really is nothing to worry about"

I'm not sure my jaw has ever recovered from the clenching it did that day.

Oh no that's awful. Back last year my dd came home to tell me they had done some sort of drill where when they hear a bell they have to sit behind a desk with and book and be quiet and not move and said this was incase of a bad person entering the school or a dog entering the school grounds. This did upset her but she said she knew she'd be safe but this time around she said the kids said if we were at war we would not be safe, nothing can protect us and we would die painfully. I have been to see the teacher and she has said they read a war book in history which may have triggered this and obviously alot of the children do read the newsround also. Dd did tell me some children were on Google in school and it says Russia are coming and we need to buy extra essentials and begged me and her dad to go get these essentials. I've also let the teacher know exactly what the children are doing on computers as I thought websites like this would be blocked in schools. It was heartbreaking watching her get so upset lastnight.

When there was all the talk of the gulf war in 1991, I remember them explaining to us at school that it was not a war like ww2, perhaps to calm anxious children. I was 11 at the time.

My take way from this is three things.

One, what will be the cause?

It’s an election year in both the UK and America. Regardless of who wins either election political systems around the world will be nervous until they know who will win. You can also pretty much guarantee there will be a bit of “kinetic” demonstrating in major cities after the results come in.

Solar activity has been producing some spectacular displays lately, but there is always the risk of a Carrington event.

Pandemic has been and will always be a possibility (Remember pandemic has no bearing on the seriousness of the infection, just the numbers involved).

War, personally I think we have a higher percentage chance of a European war than it any time in my life (I am 61 this year). But remember war dose not automatically equal MAD.

Two, duration.

The government site says 3 days (72 hours), this is the usual duration for these things, and I believe its from the early days of American civil defence. Personally, I think 7 to 14 days would be a better target. But one day is better than nothing.

Three, selling it to children.

I am not an expert on this one, but my youngest (he is 11 this year) comes home with some strange ideas from the school. And I lay the blame solely at the feet of the teachers for this, one teacher even told him the cottage cheese in his packed lunch was disgusting stuff.

I am lucky that I run the local Scout group, so I have all my kids prepping. They made solar powered jam jar lights last backend, they all have “camping bags” ready packed. They can (sort off) set up a field kitchen. The secret is making it fun and challenging. And if your local group has a Squirrel Dray, kids can join as young as 4.

I am passionate about groups that get kids outdoors, Scouts, Guides or Cadets, if run correctly the difference in personal confidence is amazing.

I got very upset in school when Chernobyl exploded and we were hearing a few days later the whispers of radioactivity on sheep in Wales and winds blowing the wrong direction to normal which was bad for that...we were all fine.

But I agree with PP that it's about making everyone aware of how to manage if business as usual was not an option for an hour, a day, a few days etc. It can be done in a very normal, non scary way. And Scouts, guides etc is a great option to get DCs more aware of how to manage, make do, plan a solution and do it etc, and then think about how it worked (or not) and why. (It's literally "Plan, Do, Review" strategy). How to use tools safely, dress appropriately for weather, deal with cuts and bruises and stings, use sticks to make splints and stretchers (the goal being carry the leader as a team without dropping him/her!), make progress moving over ground, go in the right direction, carry your own gear, prepare and cook food without electricity, make shelters (put up tents or build shelters from sticks/leaves), entertain yourselves..all sorts of things and very much in a fun way.

My point about Chernobyl was that no one knew what was happening and it was all being kept from the DCs so having learned about nuclear explosions and Hiroshima in history, it was the not knowing that was the freaky part. Age appropriate but giving the facts was so much better!

Not the point of the thread but seriously, a teacher expressing an opinion on cottage cheese surely doesn't count as giving children strange ideas, children are capable of understanding people can have different opinions

To be honest, a teacher who thinks its ok to approach a child having their lunch and go Cottage Cheese, ewww disgusting stuff really needs to give their head a wobble. We have also had meat is bad we should all be vegetarians, cars are bad we should all use public transport (very limited) where we live. And to much on which politics they should support for my liking. Its not about different ideas, its about a group of people telling children which ideas are right and which ones are wrong simply because its their belief.

The only reason I have not complained about this, is he leaves at the summer.

This may be of interest?

I've been thinking about this recently. I know most people assume war or nuclear with this but think about storm ciaran

I'm in Jersey and we were badly hit in storm ciaran in November. People lost their homes to the tornado, people were pretty much trapped by the hundreds of tree that were down on our small island and there were no food deliveries, shops were closed etc. For some that extended from the Thursday till the Sunday.

3 days of food, planning for evacuating, all of that would have been useful to people who had to be moved from their homes that had lost walls or it's roof. My daughters best friend had to be rescued when the tornado hit them.

For me and my kids, as we are preppers, we had a go bag ready with important documents, clothes, water, food, books. We had the cat carriers ready with food and water and bowls. Thankfully we didn't need to.

We also had an incident of major flooding to an area. People were woken at 5am by water rushing into their homes with no warning. No time to prepare.

At the end of the day, it's right, everyone should be prepared incase something happens. It's better to prepare and never need than not to prepare and be caught out

It could be anything. We live in uncertain times.
I’ve just watched the new Jodie comer film
on Netflix which is about a catastrophic weather event. I’m upping my food stocks I think and increasing the food I grow