Monday, November 5, 2012

How To: Prepare for an Emergency

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We made an emergency bag last year and prepped an emergency food area in our basement. Hurricane Sandy put our prep to the test.  We live 20 minutes from the New Jersey border.  We had 81 mph winds whipping around our house and were lucky to only lose power for a few days and have no damage to our house.
I felt like we were pretty well prepared, but there are a few things we are adding to the bag after this storm. I want to share with you all what is in our bag.

These are all products my Hubby purchased and we are not being compensated in anyway.  We also ordered just about everything off Amazon.com.  I am not affiliated with them in anyway. We just think they rock!

This is a long post because my Hubby was very thorough in preparing us for an emergency.  
The best time to prepare for an emergency is now.  
Don't wait until the last minute to prepare. 

Before the storm hit, we charged all our resuable batteries, our laptops, all electronics, and old cell phones for emergency calls.  We got our cooler down from the shelf in the garage, filled our cars with gas and filled bathtubs with water.  We also pushed all our heavy patio furniture next to the house and any light furniture went into the garage. 

Here is our emergency bag:







It is my old school bag from college.  It has lots of compartments and fits a ton of stuff!  It also has backpack straps on the back. We keep it in our closet.















Here is what is in our bag:





Crank Radio, flashlight, cell phone charger in one, and it's solar powered too. At night in the dark, this was amazing.  A minute crank gets you some serious listening time.  We listened to NPR and I kept falling asleep.  All their voices are so soothing and no matter how interesting it is, I fall right asleep every time.














Solar Powered USB Charger.  You can plug this into the wall to get a full charge but just stick it into the window when you have no power to charge it back up.  It also has a reading light.  I used it to charge my iPhone, it worked!










Max Craft LED Work Light
We have 2 in our emergency bag and one that we use all the time in our garage. It can shine a big light out the front or a smaller light out the bottom.  The handy hook means you can hook it to your shirt when you are carrying things into a dark garage like the trash.  When you do this you look and feel like Iron Man, it's awesome.  It also has a magnet on the back.
















  Work Gloves, lighter (we need fuel), small screwdriver, Bear Grylls Survival Kit (he is not as awesome as Survivorman but he does have a kit that is very useful), Ponchos     



















Adventure First Aid Kit 4 SporksOrange Rope, small orange umbrella, 2 reusable water bottles

So many orange things!! I recommend getting orange gear, not just because it is the best color, but because it is easy to find.  Well, if everything in your house is orange, it isn't that easy to find :)












 Thermal Blankets and batteries.  Get the size batteries that your electronics and flashlights use.  We need to add D batteries to our bag.














Local Map book and Important Document pouch.
 We have a list of our food items and other important documents like copies of our birth certificates.  We also have a small amount of money in a zip top bag hidden inside the emergency bag.











Bag of soap, shampoo, conditioner, toothpaste and combs. They were all taken from hotels :)

Water Purifier with manual, toothbrushes, and survival manual. Hubby had this book already. I think he really wants to be MacGyver.  

Water purifier might seem excessive but we had a boil advisory for a few days in our area before we made the bag.  That made us decide to get one. 




Our bag holds a ton of stuff and can be used at home or can be grabbed to go in a hurry.


Now for the rest:




Gas stove.  We could not have survived without our stove.  I cooked our meals and heated water.  We have 2 grills and one has a side burner, but when the weather was bad, we didn't want to be outside grilling our food. Make sure you have a long lighter or some matches or you can't use your stove!

We have 2 large pots that were great for heating water.  We only have 2 small pots for heating canned food and there are 3, soon to be 4, of us.  I might pick up another small pot.









Large cooler. I prepared "go bags" in our fridge and freezer before the storm hit.  I had butter, cheese, a small container of milk, leftover chili, yogurt, and a few other things in plastic bags on the bottom shelf of the fridge. All of our reusable ice packs and a few large frozen bottles were in the freezer bags.  When the power went out at midnight, we quick grabbed the bags out and packed the cooler.  I stuck 2 frozen juice bottles full of water in the fridge.  We debated buying ice before the storm but we just bought it the next day.  Stores were giving out 2 free bags of ice a day and water to people without power.  It was really nice.



Food:
We have cans of soup, beans, sardines, tuna, raman noodles, and fruit cups.  We also have rice, almonds, popcorn, granola bars, pancake mix, and crackers. We store these in our basement with some gallon jugs of water. We always have peanut butter, pasta and jar sauce in our pantry.  My Hubby has a master list of food in Evernote and he put a printed copy in our emergency bag.  I also bought a few last minute things like cheese curls, 2 loaves of bread and extra granola bars.  Chocolate should be on the list too, luckily we had trick or treat this weekend, so we were covered!

Things we discovered we were missing: 
-A lantern- it was difficult to cook with just a flashlight.
-Hot water bottles- we got seriously cold in our house, these would have helped.
-Flashlight for PB- He wanted his own flashlight and really bugged us about it :)
-We had no way to heat our house so we are thinking about a kerosene heater
-We are also debating a generator.
-We need to add duct tape to the bag and a large plastic tarp.

I should have quick done 2 loads of laundry the day before.  I have enough regular clothes to make it through 2 weeks easy, but not maternity clothes.  I was lucky my sweatpants and sweatshirts still fit.

Do you think we are missing anything?  What would you add? We want to be well prepared so if you think we are missing something, please let us know!

i linked up:
Skip To My Loucraft linky party for craft blogs

7 comments:

Danismom said...

Hey Kris-if you do get a generator or are fortunate enough to have one I recommend 14guage extension cords- we didn't have one of those and the cord we did have couldn't power our microwave which is what I was hoping it would do given we don't have a gas stove. Very thorough post!

Kris @ everywhereorange.com said...

Thank you! that is a great tip!!

KendasCrafts said...

great post, Kris! We have nothing like this prepared. I've had an emergency bag on my to-do list for a while, but keep putting it off. I guess because we've never been through a really bad storm where we've needed it, so it doesn't seem urgent to put together. Hopefully I didn't just jinx myself....

M Mommy to 4 said...

Please be careful about a kerosene heater. They're not normally meant to be used inside and can cause serious carbon monoxide problems. Here in Utah, we had people die from using them in tents and other confined areas in past years. Just check before you do it. Thanks for all of the info about your pack!

Kris @ everywhereorange.com said...

Thank you so much for that tip!! i am definitely worried about the heater and have not let him buy it yet. It just seems a little too dangerous for me. He said he would get a battery powered carbon monoxide detector but anything that needs that just doesn't feel like a good option to me.

Kris @ everywhereorange.com said...

I hope you didn't jinx yourself!! just put a few things together in a bag, or at least get a bag out to put things in. Even if it's not as "crazy" as ours is, it's something. and a few extra cans of food is always an easy thing to pick up when you are shopping :)

Shanea said...

Hi Kris~
I love all of the super survival stuff that you have in your kit. I have a really cool lantern that really lights up the room. It uses batteries though. Who knows if our flashlights will ever make it back to the kit, my son had them today and was using them as his "vroom, vroom headlights". Just make sure you keep the cheese curls handy and you will be fine :0

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