Sunday, April 21, 2013

E is for Emergency Preparedness

Blogging Through the Alphabet
I totally missed last week (D is for Dingbat?) but had to get in on E week.

E is for Emergency Preparedness.  

Why?  Well, a couple of reasons.  Trina earned her Emergency Preparedness badge in American Heritage Girls this week, we're looking at getting Thomas going on earning his E Prep merit badge in Boy Scouts, the whole Boston Marathon thing just has me thinking, and we've recently run into so many people who simply are not prepared at all.  I want this to be an encouragement to anyone who isn't prepared to just do something.

Trina has been working off and on for her Emergency Preparedness badge with American Heritage Girls.  It started last fall, when her brother needed to do a fire escape plan and practice it with his family.  We decided that since Trina had to do the same thing for E Prep, she may as well work on it too.

For this 1st-3rd grade level, she had to do things like learn about calling 911, making a list of emergency numbers, do that fire drill where we discovered that one bedroom window was stuck (big brother fixed that) and that a bunkbed was too close to another bedroom window and therefore the window couldn't be opened.  She also had to do stuff to locate flashlights, and discovered that one doesn't work anymore.  Very productive badge.

With Thomas, we decided against him starting on the E Prep badge at summer camp, but he is going to have to do it sometime soon.  He's going to camp this summer and will be working on other things there -- camping, cooking, wilderness survival.  Fun, huh?


But what about the adult preparation?  It seems lately Dale & I have both been talking with people who aren't at all prepared for any sort of emergency.  You know, the "we go grocery shopping every two or three days" sort of thing.  They want to be prepared, but it seems so overwhelming.

Here's my profound advice... just do something.  You don't have to go from shopping three times a week to having six months of food storage for your entire family straight away.  What can you do right now that could make a difference?

My suggestion is that this week, you think about what you could store to feed your family for a single day, and on your shopping trips this week, you purchase that, and set it aside somewhere.  In my home, in a power outage scenario, we'd still have access to the stove, but we wouldn't have water.  So if this was me, I could purchase a box of matches (to light the stove), a couple cans of stew, a couple gallons of water, a couple cans of fruit, makings for a stove-top tuna casserole (tuna helper and tuna, if you prefer!), and some pancake mix.  As an off the top of my head suggestion. 

It does need to be food your family is willing to eat.  And once you have it stored somewhere (do you have seldom-used cupboards above your fridge?) you will want to rotate it out periodically.

So it isn't much, but it is a start.  And next time there is a storm you don't HAVE to run to the grocery store.

And next week... or next month... you could figure out another breakfast, lunch and dinner option, and have two days of food stored up.  Do it once a month, and next May, you'd be able to go about two weeks without a grocery store visit. 

What can you do this week?

This post has inspired me to do a bit more to build up water storage.  That's one area where we are lacking.

Check out Marcy's blog, you can see where E is for all kinds of other great things like the elephants, engineer, and exercise.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Great ideas! Thanks for the reminder!

Cristi said...

I need to get something for water storage, too. That might be the most important thing of all considering where we live. Shelf-stable (and allergy friendly) food needs to be second on my to-get list.