An overview of how our family is prepared

scrumper

How do you keep the drinking water actually drinkable over any time period? Anything stored gets nasty.

qrush

I barely am able to plan groceries for a few days to a week ahead, especially with two middle schoolers eating everything in sight. While I would agree with the sentiment (definitely something will disrupt heat/water/food access), I struggle with actually executing on doing anything other than having some real basics around. 30 days of spare food feels like such an enormous amount of space and material.

bumblehean

I'm reminded of a book I read a few years ago, Notes from an Apocalypse by Mark O'Connell, which discusses (among other things) the phenomenon of "prepper" culture.

ajkjk

They keep saying 'we' and 'our' but I'm pretty sure this is an 'I' and 'my' thing.

throwitaway222

I used to be a prepper, but have decided that moving remote is the only thing I'm willing to do anymore. If the world's population really does drop 99% from something, the person that kills me will be me. Totally hoping something like that doesn't happen.

infecto

This is a sensible type of prepping. Prep for the things you will most likely face and some outliers within your geography. I myself could never understand the years worth of food types of folks. If things breakdown that much I don’t know much that food is going to matter.

comrade1234

I'm in Switzerland and hadn't ever experienced a power outage in the 13 years I had been here but when Russia invaded Ukraine there was talk of intermittent rolling blackouts. They never happened but just in case I bought an ups for my home Ubuntu server and to my great surprise we had a blackout! There was a problem with a high-voltage power line coming from the mountains to my part of Zurich. I happened to be in the cellar where I keep my server when it happened. The lights went out and I was in complete darkness other than the lights on the server and drives. I got my phone flashlight working and looked at the screen on the ups. It was working perfectly - the server was running and the amount of minutes remaining was dropping until there was five minutes left and my server initiated shutdown. Later that day when the power came back on the server booted back up. So I'm a prepper too.

throw0101d

September is (US) National Preparedness Month: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Preparedness_Month General guidelines to have a decent pantry, someway to cook things, some spare water, a way to heat your home if you're in a place that has winter, a source of emergency lighting: * https://www.ready.gov * https://getprepared.ca Zombie apocalypses are a fun meme, but a broken city water main or an ice storm can be quite disruptive.

walthamstow

Holding 35L of water for 2 weeks drinking and 25L for 3 days flushing seems a bit out of whack

CodingJeebus

A major hurricane hit my community in the US not too long ago, hundreds dead, a tremendous amount of the community destroyed. We had no water, power, or telecommunications for several days, no way to reach the outside world until the nearby cell towers came back online unless you had Starlink. In those early days post storm, I had neighbors regularly knocking on my door to make sure I was OK and I had enough food and water to get through the day. Since we had no internet, everyone was outside talking to each other, walking around and checking in. And we had huge cookouts at the houses with gas stoves so we could cook the perishable stuff before it went bad. Curfew was strict and law enforcement was everywhere, armed National Guard protected the grocery stores from looting. It was a traumatic experience in some ways. I knew people that lost everything, had friends pulling bodies out of the river, sharing stories I never thought I'd hear in my life. But the community came together, and never once did I think "man I really wish I got into prepper culture". I personally think it's insane to believe that someone could survive a major event like that completely independent of the community. Humanity got to where it is today because of community, not in spite of it. And prepper culture ignores all of that through it's "can't depend on anyone" ethos. I personally find it really sad.

nemomarx

> We have a strong preference for sheltering in place, so we do not have a go bag or anything like that. We'd shelter in place because that's where all our preps are! I don't totally understand this because quite a lot of disasters or threats will mean you can't shelter in place? Even if it's not your main thing to plan for how can a threat model just rule out wildfires, massive flooding, a hurricane or so on.

bluGill

The most important preparation: be friendly enough with your neighbors that you look out for each other. You can hate each other in general: so long as you won't allow looters in the neighborhood, and you can force yourself to get along enough to share/divide labor (in whatever way it turns out you need). In the worst disasters preppers prepare for - odds are they die, so make sure your neighbors know what plans you have, if you die (or just you are out of town on vacation) your preparation can save someone else's life.

matltc

So like a month of food and water? If the big electrical grid pop happens < https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/18/magazine/national-blackou... >, we're looking at years, which no storage solution can accommodate. So while this is sensible for most outages, doesn't do much for this event, which becomes quite possible if (1) China moves on Taiwan and (2) USA intervenes on behalf of Taiwan. I would expect that China would activate their dormant ICS and telco access in such a circumstance to knock the US out of the conflict basically immediately I suppose this could be true with the rest of CRINK since they are all capable cyber adversaries, but China is on another level in terms of capability and it's their best lever with little cost. I suppose they have to calculate whether the US would bring out the nukes in such a circumstance

andrewstuart

Third world behavior

bryanlarsen

After having lived through a couple of natural disasters, I think the most important preparation you can make is to get to know your neighbors. Exchange phone numbers, give them a key. Help them out, ask for favors. (Asking for small favors is a good trick to establish trust: ask for the proverbial cup of sugar to make them feel comfortable asking you for favors. And then when they ask, be reliable). The other is to make sure you have a good insurance company. Go to a neighborhood that has experienced a tornado or similar. Ask around -- people will know which insurance companies were helpful and which were penny pinching obstructionists.

dw_arthur

Is there a plausible scenario where having 2 weeks of water does anything more than having a weeks worth? I feel like after a week you're either getting evacuated, the government is delivering supplies, or large parts of the country are not functioning.

jongjong

Part of my motivation for moving back to Australia was because the low population density means I could potentially survive on a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. In the event of an apocalypse, I would probably move back with my parents as they live near a beach in Queensland which is a really good fishing spot. My parents catch big fish from the beach every week. They never buy fish. The area has lots of mango trees. Also, there are kangaroos in the area so there is no shortage of options. I remember I was surprised when I moved to The Netherlands for a while and one of my colleagues said something along the lines of "As humans, we can't survive without each other." I was thinking to myself WTF? Of course you can. But in retrospect I think maybe Europe isn't quite in the same situation. Low-density nations with good weather like Australia and New Zealand are actually quite unique in that way.