Filling the Holes In Your Preparedness Plan

In "Are There Holes In Your Preparedness Plan?" Jackie Clay-Atkinson writes about common mistakes or things that preppers can easily overlook, like not storing foods that your family will eat, forgetting to stock up on foods for pets or livestock, and that you need to be self-reliant once you eat through your food stocks.

 

The bare fact remains: Once you eat up your food in your 36-hour pack, then from your storage pantry, you must have some way to replenish it or you’ll starve. Period. Any steps you take toward family preparedness are great but the more steps you take, the easier hard times will be for you and your family. The more self-reliant you can become, the less outside upheavals will disturb you. If you are ready for one type of emergency, you’re pretty much ready for whatever comes along.

She also discusses preps to keep on your person, a bug out kit, prepping your vehicle for bugging out, and self-reliance tips. I liked her comments about how she and her family made use of an evacuation trailer:

    In Montana, a forest fire would have been our biggest emergency requiring evacuation. I had a big pantry full of food, but I knew I couldn’t possibly take it all if we needed to flee a roaring fire. So we bought a mid-sized fixer-upper travel trailer for $500 and spent a month tearing out rotted flooring, replacing cupboards, and fixing it up so it was ready to roll. We invested many hours of labor, but only spent about $100 in materials. When retrofitted, there were shelves to hold tins of bulk food supplies, which I filled from the pantry in the house. These were the basics: flours, cornmeal, beans, rice, baking powder, salt, masa harina, and dehydrated foods. The little pantry only took up floor space of 1×4 feet, floor to ceiling, but held a lot of food. I stocked up on tins of dehydrated foods along with some canned food that I kept in the cupboards.

    We also stocked the closets with extra clothes, bedding, a hatchet, water buckets, propane bottles, hand saws, hammers, crescent wrenches, pliers, screwdrivers, rechargeable flashlights and batteries, a weather radio, rope, firestarters, candles, and more. Everything that could be of interest to mice was stored in tins or in other mouse-proof containers.

    The trailer came with a propane fridge and a small propane stove (which had an oven), so we could keep food cold and cook tasty meals with ease. The trailer had a double bed as well as a futon so it easily could sleep three.

    In the summer, we filled the water tank and had 75 gallons of fresh water at all times. This had to be drained in the fall so it wouldn’t freeze. In place of the toilet that came with the trailer, we used a bucket with a toilet seat on it filled with cedar chips to absorb dampness and kill odors. The bucket was lined with a plastic bag for ease of cleaning.

    This trailer could be hooked to our truck at a moment’s notice and we were off to safety. We could live out of our trailer for months! (We also had a stock trailer so we could evacuate our livestock as well, in case you were wondering).

    Fortunately, this trailer was never needed as an evacuation home. But it sure did come in handy when we moved to Minnesota. We camped in it for the first winter, spring, and summer we lived on our new raw-land homestead.

Those comments reminded me of the book, Locusts on the Horizon, which posits a prepper strategy of living in trailers or RVs over being anchored in place by a home. The idea was that in an economic collapse, you could easily move around to where you could find work; or pull up stakes and get out of Dodge in the event of social unrest or a disaster. 

    In any event, the article (more a booklet) has a lot of information--to much for me to summarize--so be sure to check it out.