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I’m going to talk about water. I know I sound like a broken record, but I think that right now, with the extreme heat that we are experiencing, that it should bring home the importance of water. We are all feeling pretty comfortable in our lives, well at least I am. I have refrigeration, cold and hot running water, ceiling fans, and air conditioning. I can get along without the refrigeration, the ceiling fans, and even the air conditioning. I don’t want to, but I will not die if I don’t have them. However, if I don’t have drinkable water, I will die.
A short time ago my mom got sick, and she kept throwing up. For days she was afraid to drink water, or any liquid, because she was so afraid of throwing up, and she was so miserable. About the third day she and my dad got worried and so she finally went to the doctors. The doctor rushed her over to the hospital and hooked her up to an IV. She was in the hospital for several days while the doctors worked on re-hydrating her. They told her that she had just been hours away from kidney failure and death. My mom was just hours away from death because she had not been drinking water! The kidneys aren’t like the heart; once they shut down, they can’t be restarted. Fortunately her community wasn’t in an emergency and she could get proper medical attention. During an emergency it won’t be so easy to get proper help and you might not be so lucky. Get your water stored!
You should store two gallons of water per day, per person, for a two-week period and you should store them in different types of containers so that you can still use the water if you need to leave your dwelling. Fill a 50+-gallon drum, some five-gallon containers, and a bunch of two-liter bottles. Please, if you do nothing else this week – please get your water stored! I BEG YOU.
Now, I said that I could do without refrigeration, ceiling fans, and air conditioning, but I don’t want to. I would have made a lousy pioneer. Do you have a generator? If nothing else, it would be a good idea to have a portable generator, with back-up fuel, that can at least keep your refrigerator and freezer going.
I was watching a show on TV about a family and their everyday life and one of the challenges they had to face was having their power go out on a regular basis. One time they had the power out for two weeks and were forced to move to a motel. They weren’t very happy about it. The first thing they did when they got back home was to go out and buy a couple of generators. They had used them several times since then because they were in an area where the power goes out quite often, especially in the winter.
These days they make generators that can be directly wired into your house and will sense when the power goes out and it automatically turns on. This is especially good when you are not home, and your fridge and freezer might be at risk. I especially like generators that run off of propane because you can store a lot of fuel on-site, and you don’t have to worry about getting enough gas to run it when the power is out. Remember that the gas pumps won’t work if they are also affected by the power outage. Go figure.
Another reason that I like these hard-wired, automatic generators is because if you are medically challenged and need electronic devices to work to keep you alive and healthy, it is sort of a necessity. Do you use a C-pap, is your oxygen dependent on a rechargeable battery system, does your bed raise and lower with a remote, are you confined to an electric chair? Does your medicine need to be refrigerated? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you might want to consider looking into it. If you can't afford it by yourself, you might consider going in on the price with other family members and offering your house as an emergency bug-out refuge during a crisis. Just putting out options to consider.
Dawn