[NYC-L] NYTimes Crisis Survival article

[Jeton Ademaj]

hey

just in case...i'd personally ignore the last paragraph, but otherwise this 
article is deeply useful.


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/10/business/10prepare.ready.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=all

September 10, 2005
Some Ways to Prepare for the Absolute Worst
By DAMON DARLIN
Pam Stegner knows a lot about preparing for an emergency. After all, Mrs. 
Stegner, a former emergency medical technician in Collins, Mo., has been 
stockpiling for years now.

To take care of her family of five during a catastrophe, she has a 
gravity-fed water purifier able to process 30 gallons of water a day, as 
well as 600 pounds of rice and beans, 18,000 dried eggs and 16 tons of 
organically grown hard winter wheat stored in a semi-tractor trailer and a 
temperature-controlled storehouse.

Mrs. Stegner is the first to admit that she may take preparedness to an 
extreme, but her reasons for doing it may not sound so odd after watching 
victims of Hurricane Katrina languish for days without aid. "You can't wait 
for the government to get there," she said. "You will die before they get 
there."

Indeed, the Federal Emergency Management Agency advises that Americans 
prepare a two-week supply cache because it could take that long for help to 
arrive. FEMA says on its Web site, "A two-week supply can relieve a great 
deal of inconvenience and uncertainty until services are restored."

Getting ready for the next disaster doesn't seem so crazy anymore. Mrs. 
Stegner, who is the host of a radio show on preparedness and sells survival 
products from a store in nearby Humansville, says it has been easy to "get 
labeled a nutcase" for worrying about catastrophes. But she and other 
survivalist outfitters are noticing how, at least right now, the general 
public is a bit more receptive.

John Maniatty, who runs the FrugalSquirrels.com Web site out of Morrisville, 
Vt., says he is getting six times the traffic he had in early August and 
considerably more than after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. "So 
many more normal people - I use that term because I get wackos, too - are 
taking a look," he said.

You don't have to go as far as a survivalist, but you can certainly learn 
from them. Here is a distillation of advice from emergency preparedness 
experts from across the spectrum:

WATER. If you take nothing else away from this article, at least heed this 
advice: stock up on water. It is cheap, it has a long shelf-life, and, most 
important, you cannot live without it. Most of us can do without food - not 
to mention e-mail and "Desperate Housewives" - for several weeks.

But dehydration is a very real and life-threatening danger after a calamity. 
Though you drink half a gallon of water a day, you should store one gallon 
of water per person per day. Assume you will be cut off for at least three 
days and store as much extra as you have room for in a cool, dark space. The 
International Bottled Water Association says jugs of water can be kept 
indefinitely, though they may pick up an off-flavor from the plastic after a 
year or so. But it is pretty easy to rotate the stock every couple of months 
since many people drink bottled water.

If you have the room, store some of the water in the freezer. When the 
electricity goes, you'll have more ice to preserve the food in the 
refrigerator for a day or two longer.

If worse comes to worse and you run out of water while your community's 
water supply is contaminated, turn off the water supply to your house and 
drain water from your water heater or scoop it from the toilet tank. It must 
be purified by boiling it for several minutes or by mixing in two drops of 
old-fashioned bleach - not the "mountain fresh" scented varieties - to each 
quart of water.

FOOD. The odds of anything calamitous happening are slim, so you don't want 
to spend several thousand dollars buying and storing food. You have better 
things to do with your money than investing in creamed corn and sardines. If 
you have a pantry or basement with a decent supply of canned foods and 
bottled juices, you should do just fine for several weeks. "You could 
survive for two weeks just on Tang," said Eric Zaltas, nutritionist with 
PowerBar Inc., a maker of nutrition bars.

Given that in most emergencies - floods, earthquake or fire - you may have 
to flee, it is smart to keep a 72-hour bug-out kit. That's a three-day 
supply that you can easily carry out to the car at a moment's notice. The 
crucial concept here is high nutrition in a small amount of space. 
Freeze-dried foods would be perfect, except you'll need clean and heated 
water to reconstitute those products.

Some people buy the military's Meals Ready to Eat. A case of 12 meals costs 
about $73 and they are currently in short supply. Nutrition bars are another 
good choice. The rap against them - loads of fat, carbohydrates and calories 
- is actually a plus during a disaster. Something like the PowerBar 
Performance Bar also contains electrolytes, which when taken with water, 
will help keep your body chemistry in order. Avoid the chocolate-coated 
varieties because they will just get messy when it gets hot and water for 
cleanup is at a premium.

High-protein diet shakes are a bit expensive, but have the added advantage 
of supplying you with liquid, as would high-fiber potassium-packed vegetable 
juice. Throw in some dried fruit and you have enough calories to get by for 
three days.

Don't forget ready-to-feed baby formula if you have an infant. People with 
medical conditions like diabetes or kidney disease will have to pay more 
attention to what they store and what they eat. As for pets, buy the dried 
pet food your pets don't really like and they won't eat as much.

For the truly serious food hoarder, FrugalSquirrels.com, the survivalist 
outfitter, sells an $18 software package called Food Storage Planner that 
will compute exactly how much you need and alert you when to replace it.

CASH. If you get a warning, head to the nearest cash machine ASAP. (You'll 
already have all the food and water you need, right?) The time to raid the 
A.T.M. is before the disaster because when the electricity fails, you won't 
find one that works. Take out as much as you can because you may need it to 
buy supplies at post-disaster inflated prices and credit cards won't work if 
there is no electricity or computer networks are down. When the disaster has 
passed put the money back in the bank.

COMMUNICATIONS. In almost every disaster, cellphones have proved remarkably 
useless. (Old-fashioned landline phones hold up much better.) Without 
electricity, desktop computers become expensive paperweights and laptops 
follow in short order as their batteries drain. Short of a $1,000 satellite 
phone, there is precious little you can do to reach out to the world in an 
emergency. Face it. When a disaster strikes, you can't think like Steven P. 
Jobs. Abraham Lincoln must be your role model because when the electricity 
goes, all you have at your disposal are the things people of the 19th 
century got by on.

Two things that might help: get an e-mail account from Google or Yahoo that 
allows you access to e-mail from any computer you happen to find and buy a 
hand-crank cellphone charger.

EXTRAS. You cannot do without a first-aid kit, a radio and lots of 
batteries. The new flashlights that use light-emitting diodes will help you 
conserve juice. Camping gear - butane stoves, coolers and lightweight tents 
- easily doubles as survival gear. What else? An adapter that turns your 
car's cigarette lighter into an electrical outlet for any appliance could be 
a lifesaver. Consider sticking a can of fluorescent spray paint among your 
other supplies and then stash all this stuff in a plastic box that can serve 
to float things out to safety.

MEDICINES. Thanks to health insurance companies' rules, it is often not easy 
to get extra medicine without paying full price. But with a little planning 
it can be done. Ask your doctor for help. Or for several months in a row, 
start refilling prescriptions a week or so before they run out until you 
have accumulated several weeks' supply.

DOCUMENTS. Pulling together documents you need on the run may be the hardest 
thing to do. Financial planners have been after people for years to make a 
"beneficiary book" to help their heirs or executors more easily sort through 
affairs. It should hold copies of birth and marriage certificates, adoption 
papers, key identification numbers, copies of bank statements, deeds, 
titles, credit cards and insurance policies as well as passwords to online 
accounts. The same information would be useful to you in case you lose 
access to your primary records in a disaster. Just keep it in a secure place 
and grab it on the way out of the house.

GUNS. Some survivalists recommend a gun for protection. But if you haven't 
used one regularly, don't know how to store it safely and haven't made the 
moral decision that you could kill a person, forget it. Someone is just 
going to get hurt and it will probably be you. Your best protection is 
banding together with neighbors - and sharing that food all of you stashed.

E-mail: yourmoney at nytimes.com



Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company