Scared to Prepared

First off, I am soooo grateful that I live in a mild climate, I can stand heat, it's the cold that well, just sends shivers up my spine. Cold seems to wreck more havoc. You've probably already heard about what's happening in Arkansas, and Kentucky, millions of people are suffering in the icy cold and will be without power until February. Pray for them.

I don't like bad news, (no one does except the media) and there is waay too much of it lately, but, let's put it into perspective...

A few questions arise about their situation...how were they prepared? Do they have enough water to sustain them if their pipes break? Aaaaa, what about doing laundry? Do they have a wood burning stove to keep them warm if the gas doesn't work, what about those whose heat is electric? Do they have enough wood to burn? Do they have batteries for their flashlights, or enough candles to see at night? Do they have enough food (or diapers) because they can't go anywhere to buy food? In nine months are their hospitals going to have enough capacity in the maternity ward for all those babies that will be born surprisingly at about the same time? Hey, hypothermia, can't be too bad, right? *wink*

So, I've been thinking about the 8 families that lived on their food and water storage and without power for 3 days, they documented it here. So thank you to http://www.allaboutpreparedness.com/3dayexperimentdocumentary.php for documenting it. But here is a little exerpt to tease you (I will eventually add more in later posts) I know it's long but well worth the read:


Three Days Without Running Water

In our three days without electricity or water we all learned to love being able to turn on the tap! What a blessing that clear, clean, fresh, and ready to use water is! It comes to us to use in hot warm or cold! These are a few things we learned:

Were the recommended 14 gallons for two weeks adequate?
This amount equals 1 gallon of water per person per day. I can’t even begin to tell you how much water that isn’t. Think about it like this:

· Personally I drink 12 cups a day. A gallon is 16 cups. That leaves me with 4 cups or one quart to brush my teeth with 3 different times, wash my face once in the morning and once at night. To cook whatever food I eat and not only that but wash dishes too. That doesn’t include washing any clothing or taking even a spit bath. One gallon isn’t hardly any water at all.

· We found that it takes about one gallon of water to do dishes for 6-10 people and about ½ gallon to rinse. This dish washing is vital to not get diarrhea. You could use paper plates. That would be about 1000 plates per person per year. Oh and cups too, along with the plastic wear.

· To brush teeth each person got a cup of water.

· We mopped the floor with the left over rinse water from the dishes. We flushed the toilet with leftover water from washing dishes and clothes. There was no water wasted!

· To wash clothes we only did a small load of socks and undies, a couple of shirts and a pair of jeans. We used 2 gallons of water and that was skimpy.

· To wash faces and bodies, we each used 2 cups of water warmed. (We were sure happy when we could all shower again.)

· We also used water in food preparations such as cooking rice, adding water to soup, washing potatoes, etc.

I think you can see from this minimum usage we were still went over our 1 gallon per day per person.

How did you heat the water?
This was difficult. As soon as the water was heated it was used up. We used fireplaces and cook stoves, galvanized buckets were invaluable for this. Also heavy pans are a must to withstand the high heat of open flame. We also felt we needed to find something to suspend a pot rather that having it right in the fire.

Was your stored water ok to drink?
It was, but we trade it out every 6 months. Some was a little flat, but we just shook it. She water storage article for more on this.

How did you wash clothes?
To do the smaller lighter fabric we used a toilet plunger like an agitator in a washing machine and it worked quite well. For jeans and heavy fabrics you would have to have a washboard. Laundry soap is really hard on hands. You need some kind of gloves or lots of lotion.

What are the things you need to purchase?
Galvanized buckets
Washboard
Toilet plunger for laundry
Post suspender
More hot pads.
Lotion
Rubber gloves
Big container to hold water if it had to be brought from long distance
Some type of wagon to put that barrel or container in to transport it.

One thing we learned is how valuable water is, literally not one drop was wasted.Independent of one another all evaluation forms said each family wanted to store much more than recommended.

Thank you to http://www.allaboutpreparedness.com/3dayexperimentdocumentary.php for their sacrifice to do this experiment and taking the time to document it for our benefit.