Hello my friend and welcome back! I hear Preppers all the time saying they are ready for anything. They can survive without any outside help at all for years! They may be right, but the odds are that their not. This is the subject of today’s post, so grab a cup of coffee my friend and have a seat while we visit.
I just have to tell you, that I don’t like what I’m seeing going on in the Prepper Communities right now. With President Trump in the white house, many Preppers are letting their guard down and resting on their laurels. The way they see it, the threat is gone for 4 years so why worry? Don’t fool yourself; there is still plenty of danger out there.
Do not let your guard down now. Those who seek to destroy America have not gone away and are fighting every day to destroy it. The left refuses to accept that they lost the election and will do anything to make life hard for those on the right. Demonstrations all over the US are just one sample of their determination to over throw our Government because they don’t like the outcome.
OK, enough about politics and on to the subject at hand. We as preppers tend to overestimate the supplies we have stored. Food is a prime example. Preppers who are unfamiliar with how far something will go tend to think it’s more than it is and will last longer than it will. It’s not always easy to figure out how long a 5 gallon pale of rice will go and that is a big part of the problem.
If you buy dehydrated or free dried food, beware that the serving size on many of these are based on calories and not quantity. For example, a package that says it has 5 servings will usually amount to two and a half servings for the average person. Unless you want to go hungry and live on the calories alone, you had better double what your thinking will last you a year.
Things you need to take into account are things like the fact you will be doing a lot more hard work when SHTF hits. Some examples are chopping and gathering wood, hand washing and hanging clothes, as well as hunting and cooking. The easy life will be over and everyday life will be much harder and you will be a lot hungrier. If you don’t replace all of the calories you burn, you could compromise your immune system and that could lead to illness. Not good!
Remember the Prepper saying “Two is one and one is none.” This is true for food as well. Having enough food to squeeze by in not a good idea and you need to almost double it during times of excessive work. Not keeping your strength up is not an option during periods where you may have to fight against others for your very survival. Building your strength takes calories and lots of them.
Don’t fool yourself, your very life could depend on you having enough to eat and keep your strength up. Don’t take chances, store a lot more food than what you actually think you will need. Not to mention, the last thing a parent wants to hear is a child crying from hunger. That would just kill me.
Another place where I see Preppers getting into trouble is believing that the water source near their home, especially those which come from natural springs, will always be free of harmful chemicals that can make you sick.
Every Prepper, regardless of their planned water source, should have plenty of high quality water filters including the kind that will let you fill a glass quickly. I’m talking about the ones that are built for filtering water for camps. Drinking bad water will kill you, just like dying of thirst. Don’t take chances on your health and add plenty of water filters to your Preps.
You have seeds, but do you have shovels, garden hoe and a shovel for creating a garden? There are just so many things that you could easily over look when you are preparing to survive in a post SHTF world, and thinking you have it all covered is something you should never do. You should always be looking for ways to improve you preps because in reality that is the only way to be sure you really do have what you need when things go bad.
Prepping is a journey, not a destination and as long as you remember that, you will be on the right path to surviving. Well that’s it for today and I hope you have found todays post worthwhile. Until next time, stay safe, stay strong and stay prepared. God Bless America!
-Sarge-
P.S. Thank you for all of the get well wishes. They are appreciated. 🙂
Sarge: Good article (and comments) as always. Preppers who think that they are “ready for anything” are, at best, only prepared for the events that they have visualized and planned for. That leaves an infinite number of other potential events and coping circumstances that they either ignored, failed to visualize, or to take seriously. No One is ready for anything/everything, ever.
At the risk of being somewhat morbid, I suspect that many Preppers overlook the prospect of a significant die-off in the event of an EMP or Solar Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) that could take out the power grid on a national scale, for several years. There is abundant, authoritative documentation that projects the potential for a loss of up to 90% of the U.S. population within the first year due to lack of food, potable water, medicine, heat, etc. Anyone who thinks they have effectively planned for that level of SHTF is almost certainly delusional. An EMP event is dependent upon the ill will of a national adversary and our ability to defend against an attack. A CME is a non-political event that depends solely upon the earth’s orbit at a particular point in time. CMEs are inevitable.
One way to actually tell whether you have what you think you have is to use it! We have done a one-month exercise on several occasions where we ate nothing but what we had in storage, including some of our freeze-dried foods, which we then replaced. You are totally right that it’s not as much as it may seem. Those #10 cans of freeze dried foods have way less in them than you may think.
Actually DO that garden! Keep chickens, keep bees (in my first year!). Practice with that HAM radio. Do you have a way to operate it without power?
AmRRON, the American Redoubt Radio network, does a couple of exercises each year where they simulate a disaster and you get to practice for a few days, usually over a weekend. The T-Rex exercise is one such event. It’s very radio oriented, but we have shut off the power and water and tried living for three days that way. VERY eye-opening!
Can you really cook without electricity? Are the foods you have stored really to your liking? How much water do you need to prepare them? What if you’re housebound? Quarantined? Do you have everything you need if you can’t leave your house? A way to heat your house? Have you actually tried it?
Sarge: Just a few gentle corrections from an old English teacher and writer: Your (possessive)/you’re (you are). Their (possessive)/they’re (they are). Sorry. Bugs me . But still love you dearly.
Thank you! I have always been confused about which one to use. Thanks again! 🙂
I agree with all of you. One aspect of prepping that has always caused me concern is the fact that everything that we stock is finite in nature. Eventually we’ll eat our last can of beans, use the last drop of solvent on firearms, and the candle will run out. Therefore, I think that it’s necessary to prep for the first year or so, but make solid plans of how and what will really be needed to continue to provide for our families after year one or so.Tools and equipment, are necessary, but are they the right type and quality to realistically support your efforts after SHTF?
While I agree that it is wise to have preps stashed in several places, if you are an urban dweller – such as myself, that may not be doable. Also, the type of emergency will have an enormous impact on the stores. EMP will render most automobiles inoperable – kind of tough to get out to the cache in the woods when you are hoofing it.
Anyway, my two cents. Glad you’re feeling better.
Great article Sarge! I agree 100%, especially about the food. I have been prepping with that mind set for years. Hope you are over the flu!
Howdy, Sarge.
Wise words of wisdom you post regarding overall quantity of foodstuffs and water recommendations based on REALITY instead of a computer matrix of Best Case Scenarios.
The same can, or SHOULD hold true when discussing medical, dental and personal security equipment, too.
All too often folks talk about having a stockpile of “X” number of rounds for each firearm set aside but fail to include practice ammo (yes, shooting IS a perishable skill and MUST be maintained), and the same goes with spare pants (don’t forget smaller sizes for each adult….we will ALL be losing weight, remember), socks, t-shirts, underwear, etc.
The list is daunting, to be sure.
Along with the above and countless other items not mentioned, I suggest that your supplies be split up into two, three or more locations so in the event your compound should suffer a fire, flood, tornado or is overrun by some bad hombres, you don’t lose ALL of your prepositioned stocks in one fell swoop.
True, it might be inconvenient to have to shag an acre or two away to grab a can of heirloom seeds to plant or to pick up a case of TP (you DID set aside a BUNCH, RIGHT?!?) but what if one location had an errant goat get loose inside your storage facility and gorged on all of your prized seeds overnight?
That is a catastrophe not easily overcome.
Same with spare clothing that may be infested with vermin, or fire erupts in your armory and ammo stocks?
Again, the logistics can be staggering to think about and more so to implement in the short term, but as the saying goes, “Failing to plan is planning to fail” and in a Life or Death emergency situation, is THAT when you want to discover you have/had been shortsighted in your preparations?
As always, I Pray we NEVER have to reach a point where these discussions are put into practice. Better to “waste” (?) the money, time and energy to set aside now than to suffer later if is DOES come to pass. And what would you tell a crying child when they are hungry and your stockpiles are, literally, going up in smoke?
God Bless and Good Luck.
All very good points Huggy. Thanks for the input brother! 🙂