The Food Storage Blog

Imagine a worst case scenario, something you would read in a Michael Crichton novel.  After coming out of a period of minimal solar activity, the sun erupts with a solar flare of unimaginable magnitude.  From this flare comes a silent, invisible Super-storm, called a Coronal Mass Ejection.  This CME speeds towards the earth at over 500,000 miles per hour and washes across the earth’s magnetic field a mere 18 hours later.  50% of the satellites in orbit, those not protected by the body of the earth, shudder with the geomagnetic storm and then go silent, disrupting cell phone traffic across the globe end rendering much of the GPS network inoperable.  On earth, the storm causes Aurora, much like the Northern Lights, that are visible as far south as San Juan.  Energy is almost visible to the human eye as the atmosphere literally hums with the power.  As the pulse touches down on the world’s electrical grids, no one can imagine the speed at which our fragile wire-based infrastructure collapses…a massive chain of transformer and power station explosions rock the country.  The energy companies tell us it will take 20 years to restore power to 90% of the planet, due to the complexity and lack of capacity to build new transformers, if the parts can even be fabricated in our sudden electricity-less world.

Geomagnetic Storm Headed Toward Earth

Of course this scenario is unlikely, farcical even…or is it?  The exact event I described, minus the effects on our current world, occurred in 1859, and is called the Carrington Event.

On September 1–2, 1859, the largest recorded geomagnetic storm occurred. Aurorae were seen around the world, most notably over the Caribbean; also noteworthy were those over the Rocky Mountains that were so bright that their glow awoke gold miners, who began preparing breakfast because they thought it was morning.^[4]

Telegraph systems all over Europe and North America failed in some cases even shocking telegraph operators.^[5] Telegraph pylons threw sparks and telegraph paper spontaneously caught fire.^[6] Some telegraph systems appeared to continue to send and receive messages despite having been disconnected from their power supplies.^[7]

While I preach that our preps should be based real-world likelihoods, the fragility of our electrical grid would make a storm of similar magnitude to what occurred in 1859 a catastrophe of Biblical proportions.  Most areas of the world in the 1800’s knew at least something about food production, carpentry, cobbling, coopering and a hundred other skills that we have lost in our specialized societies.  While specialization has led to booming living standards, it comes at a cost…brittleness.  Meaning, if everyone knows how to farm, the loss of any particular farming area or piece of equipment, while tragic, would likely be insignificant to the world’s food supply.  However, imagine that our entire method of farming, from industrial fertilization to high-capacity farm machinery, is rendered a total loss to the collapse of our electrical infrastructure.  That is another story entirely, and would require the remaking of our world.

Most here by now know I’m not a fatalist.  I prepare for things like tornadoes, job losses, and floods, not for EMP’s, nuclear war, or Zombies.  However, there is always a little tickle at the back of my skull that whispers of my lack of preparation in one particular area:  water, and what would occur if something truly monumental occurred.   You all know the deal with what I consider the 5 musts of preparedness:  Water, Food, Shelter, Fire, Light.

However, while I’ve harped to my preparedness group (I affectionately call it SurvivalClub) for over a year about our lack of water preps, they are woefully inadequate.  We have over 10 person-years of food stored, multiple locations we could head to for shelter (plus a dozen tents and tarps), 50 ways to make fire, probably 500 flashlights, candles, lanterns, torches, flares, glowsticks and headlamps.  All that, and we have less than 10 days worth of stored water, and very little planned in ways to get more.   Sure, we have water filters, ways to boil water, iodine, bleach, pool shock and several other ways to make water pure.  However, unlike the other areas, we don’t have a real plan.

So, having gotten tired of listening to me, our group has finally taken the first concrete steps toward a real water solution.  We came up with the SWP, the Survivalclub Water Plan.  The plan had several requirements:  it needed to work without electricity, had to be able to support 20+ people, and had to run with a minimum of moving parts that could break or wear down.  I don’t remember which of us actually first read about a ram-pump, but when we all saw it, we knew that was the solution we were looking for.

Tomorrow, we’ll discuss the ram-pump, how it works, and the components of our complete system.

Since the business has become our full-time gig, I had assumed we would be home-bound for years, or at least until we had an employee we could trust with the keys. In other words, years. However, several months ago my wife suggested we get a trailer, load it up with inventory, and go wherever. We mulled it over for a while, and finally for Memorial Day we went on the first Advice and Beans Road Trip. We didn’t buy a trailer for this adventure, but we did take the SurvivalVan, my wife’s Quest, which held enough inventory for a week and food and water for longer than that.

This time we didn’t go very far, to a lake house that a friend of ours owns about 3 hours away. (Well, we never saw the lake, so we could call it ‘the woods house’). We went over Memorial Day weekend and had a great time.

What I found is that my entire thought process around travel has changed. It used to be in my twenties and thirties I would throw a gym bag in the back of the car with a couple changes of clothes, a toothbrush and some Rush CD’s and I was off to wherever. While I don’t really stress about it today, I do put a lot more thought into traveling than I used to.

I am sure these concepts won’t be new to many people, but I prep for travel just like I prep at home. Even before considering what to take with us in order to conduct business on the road, I made sure to check off the 5 basics on the list:

1- Water
2- Food
3- Shelter
4- Fire
5- Light

While the 72-hour kits that we keep in our cars have all of those, when traveling out of our regular sphere of influence I feel the need to be a little extra prepared.

We actually overstocked our food; we had enough to feed 6 people and the 2 dogs for a week. We only brought about half that, but picked up a bunch more at the local Wal-mart and took a great deal home with us. For water, we brought a case of bottled water as well as our Nalgene’s.  For shelter, we had our REI Quarterdome Tent and several blankets and sleeping bags.  Plus, in a pinch the van is plenty good shelter.  In TN during late May, its likely we wouldn’t need anything but a pair of shorts, so that was likely overkill. I always carry a lighter and a fire-steel with me, but I added a couple more Bic’s just in case.   For light we brought our big Maglite and my wife’s headlamp, but I am mad at myself that I forgot our propane lantern, which would have been great on the porch.  It also goes to show that what you forget is what you’ll need:  the lights from the driveway to the house were all burnt out, so having the lantern would have been perfect.  I didn’t realize but dogs don’t like peeing when they can’t see, so I had to wander around in the dark with our 3-lb and 8-lb girly-dogs.

For extras, we had jumper cables, jack and spare, and a small medical kit, as well as a month’s worth of any medications we regularly take. I sometimes hesitate to mention this, but I think its important: we also carried a pretty good amount of cash. We use our debit card and online payments for pretty much everything nowadays, but in the past I’ve been in some situations where it was the only way to pay for something, such as during a power outage or if the businesses phone lines were down.  I think everyone should always have a couple hundred dollars hidden on when they are traveling, and even when they are not.  We regularly buy items off of Craigslist or at yard sales at big discounts, but 99.9% of the time you must have cash.

So overall the trip was pretty minor as these things go, but it felt good knowing that if we got lost, broke down, or something happened while we were actually there, we had enough to survive a week pretty easily, and more if we rationed.

Prior to leaving, I also checked that we had our licenses, insurance cards (both car and health), and let our family know where we were going and when we were due back.

I think we’ve decided that we will get a pull-behind trailer for the business inventory, so if anyone has any recommendations please let me know. It’s nice to think that we’ll get to leave the house before the next Winter Olympics rolls around.  Our next adventure will be a full-blown road trip to New England to see our families. Probably 10 days gone; I haven’t done the math on how many cubic feet of stuff we’d need to take, but its significant.

I still think there are probably a lot of things I missed, as I tend to be a homebody; drop me an email at admin@adviceandbeans.com with any tips you have for when you travel, or anything that I forgot.

A good bunch of information, provided via NASA’s new emergency preparedness push.  Now if only every federal, state and local municipality made it a similar priority, we’d be getting somewhere!  Though, of course, it always comes down to each of us, as individuals and family members, doing what we know is right in order to be able to protect our own and attempting to not be a burden on the system should a disaster occur.