Emergency Preparedness - Home as a Storehouse

Tim MacWelch: Hi! I am Tim MacWelch of Earth Connection School of Wilderness Survival and Ancient Skills near Fredericksburg, Virginia. This is our video clip series on emergency preparedness. In this clip, we are going to talk about how your home is a store house. Now let's say we are in an emergency situation. Our power is out, we don't have lights, so we have our candles lit, our water was on a well. It was depended on electricity, so we have no water. If we had gas appliances, their electricity would be out and they would not be able to operate. So all we have is just what we have normally in our home.

So we should have some candles, some flashlights to some basic things for lighting, maybe a lantern, some lamps, different things like this so we can see what we are doing in the home, particularly at night, you should have enough life coming through your windows during the daytime to see to do most tasks. But the candles at night will be extremely important so you can see what you are doing. So even in emergency, all the stuff that was still in the cabinets is still there. But we might want to consider as an element of emergency preparedness to have lots of foods and drinks on hand that are easily prepared with minimal heat and/or no power whatsoever. So we could still have lots of soups and pre-prepared dishes that simply need to be heated up a little bit to eat them or we can have instant foods that just require a little bit of hot water or we could have plenty of things that we could just eat right out of hand. Peanut butter and crackers still works when the power goes out. Sandwiches still work when the power goes out, lots of different things can still be put together as far as food and different meals when we have no utilities.

Now other things we may want to consider for our store house would be things to help us with our water. These are iodine purification tablets, they allow you to sterilize water from viruses, bacteria, protozoa and other pathogens by placing these tablets in the water, letting them dissolve, shaking the water up and letting it sit for 45 minutes. We could also have the same stuff as we have when we go camping like a water filter. This is a Katadyn water-purifying pump and with this pump we can suck up contaminated water with this receiving end, pump it through a ceramic filter in the housing and shoot out clean, safe, stir water from this little port right here. So this will work on any water source, except for saltwater. This will not get rid of the salt in saltwater. So if we live by the way or by the beach, and our water goes out, then we have got a little bit of a problem. Saltwater is not that easily dealt with, we can't put tablets in it and make the salt go away, we can't run it through a pump and make the salt go away. But what we can do is actually boil the water and collect the steam, that steam is pure water, its distilled water. The salt is too heavy to go up in the steam. So it stays behind in the vessel. So by using a teapot and letting that steam shoot out into some type of cloth, we can ring the cloth out and collect that distilled water and that will have no salt in it.

We could also use a small coil of copper pipe that we might get as an ice maker line, so this type of malleable copper line can be used as a coil coming out of your teapot and that will actually behave like a small still. Water will boil inside of the tea kettle and the steam will go through the coils and then drop out the other end as liquid water.

Other things you may want to consider are some entertainment. Maybe a little something stashed away in the closet that the kids or other adults in the household don't know about to something for a rainy day that could even be something useful like wild edible plant books. Your yard maybe filled with wild animal plants that could be an emergency food supply to you. Now in our next clip, we are going to talk about the fact that your bathroom and your kitchen still kind of work in an emergency.