After growing up on the East Coast in a small, but pretty densely populated area, and then living in a cookie cutter neighbourhood in Fort McMurray, I have always lived close to people and retail establishments. Now, we live in the "boonies" with very little retail around us and much more remote that I am used to. We get our water by well. I had no idea when we moved that if you loose power, you have no running water.
The first time we lost power, I woke up in the morning to my cell phone alarm, and to a semi-bright room (we have tons of windows). I quickly realized that the power was out when my alarm clock wasn't on. I very quickly realized that no power meant no water to shower. It also means that you only get one flush out of every toilet. I think I had maybe 1 bottle of water in the house as we aren't a family that normally drinks bottled water. Luckily we have 3 toilets in the house so I knew I wouldn't be in trouble bathroom wise. I could not however take a shower.
Since I had no water or power at home, I got as freshed up as I could with a bottle of water, I headed to town an hour early, hoping there was power there. Luckily there was and I was able to stop in to a Cora's breakfast to kill some time and to get something to eat.
I realized at that point that we needed to do something to ensure that we are prepared if some sort of disaster was to happen, or if we lost power again. My husband ended up buying a light tower which he is going to use for a home made generator, which is going to be set up eventually.
That day after work, stopped into a Safeway and grabbed 6 gallon jugs full of water. This water is not for drinking, it's for flushing toilets. I put two jugs of water near the three bathrooms in the house. If the power does go out again, at least we would have water to flush the toilets. Recently we started collecting 4L jugs from milk etc, and have been cleaning them and filling them with water to use for flushing when we do loose power.
I have also started collecting items for an emergency preparedness kit in case we ever hit a natural disaster. Having many friends and family who experienced the devastating Fort McMurray forest fire in 2016, I have been thinking about this more and more. I have been slowly starting to build a stockpile of stuff and build a mobile pack.
So far I have collected the following:
Drinking Water - They say you need two liters of water per person per day. Since there are two of us and a pup, we need 4 500ml bottles per day each, or 12 per day. They say you need to be prepared for 72 hours, so I have 48 pack of water from Costco in my basement at all times to make sure we have enough. You can also get "emergency rations" of water, which look a bit more "packable" than bottles, but are much more expensive. Check them out here: Datrex Emergency Survival Water Pouch, Pack of 64, 125ml.
Life Straw - I saw this product in quite a few blog posts about emergency preparedness. It's basically a straw with a filter in it. They say you can drink water out of a puddle with it and it will be safe. I will pass on that unless it's a doomsday situation. I purchased two of these so that we each have one. They will be going into our mobile kit so that we have them on the go. You can check out the Life Straw here: LifeStraw Personal Water Filter.
So far that is it for the emergency kit. My goal is to find something to put all of this stuff in, and to buy a new product for the stash every paycheque.
What kinds of things do you have in your emergency kit?
Jen
xoxo
No comments:
Post a Comment