Any preppers on here?

[integrale_evo]

Just curious, there’s a lot going around about the government suggesting we have a few days of food, wind up radio etc, what have you got?

We’re not ‘preppers’ like the yanks with a huge store of MREs and a couple of guns, but having grown up in towns/ villages / the countryside it’s always been pretty normal to have a modest stock of tinned and dried goods, and a decently stocked freezer which would probably last a while even without power during winter,

There’s a camping stove and gas canisters in the shed, at least one car always has a full tank of fuel, and I’ve got usb adapters for my decent stock of power tool batteries - which are usually charged when I’ve finished using them.

I’m sure we’d be fine for several days with no effort. I think the biggest issue would be having no heat if the power went out, we’re on oil but the waterpump is electric. If it came to it I’d probably bodge something up using a cars heater

[DeskJockey]

We're building a reasonable stock of things to see us through a couple of days if the power goes.

Nothing excessive, just a sensible amount of things.

[dinny_g]

A little bit yeah but almost be accident rather than design.

I always keep stocks of canned and dried food and buy more when I get down to 4 cans, than than when I run out etc.

We only drink bottled water (Milton Keynes council juice isn’t the best) so there’s always a weeks supply minimum in the garage.

Back during Covid, I bought 4 x 50 l tanks when there was concerns over supply. This will keep the toilets flushing and could be used for washing etc.

I have plenty of gas and a stove, battery packs etc and, from camping, we have enough fleeces, Down and sleeping bags to ride out the coldest weather.

The only thing I’ve bought is a wind up radio.

But as I say, I have most of what people say we should have without prepping it…

[IanF]

How many wars last 3 days?

[mik]

A freezer full of Greggs wonders, a 3kw generator, and a Jerry can….

[Jobbo]

My wife likes Costco so we have plenty of toilet rolls in stock and various other household bits. Some Fray Bentos pies and other tins. I reckon we could survive for a couple of weeks without going out. But by chance rather than design.

[Mito Man]

I’d like to know what we’re prepping for. If it’s a 3 day power cut then yeah, I think I’ll be ok just with the random food I’ve got in my cupboard. If it’s a longer term war I don’t think there’s much you can do.

[GG.]

No.

That said our new house has a pantry so, er, yes? But inadvertently.

[dinny_g]

I do t think recent advice is aimed at surviving WW3 (which, if it kicks off, I don’t want to . Land a nuke in my head and be done with it)

It’s about reducing the inconvenience and impact of short term disruptions to the supply chain ( fuel issues, problems with access to Seuz or Panama Canal etc) or issues with essential services - cyber attacks etc.

Sad that it’s got to this but there you go…

[V8Granite]

A couple of kg of beef in the freezer, and frozen fruit chunks.

Everything is cooked fresh here, so once we run out of a weeks worth of baking supplies we will have to go out with the dog hunting rabbits.

4 or so months of firewood, lots of battery power, minimal toilet roll.

Dave!

[dinny_g]

Don’t you go in the woods anyway???

Plenty of leaves to use…

[Explosive Newt]

I've never got out of the covid habit of having 14 days of supplies: tinned and frozen... and admittedly a lot of it Branston Beans with Sausages (but honestly that is probably my favourite food).
But
a) I don't know what we would do if the power went off
b) I don't know what we would do if there were no water supplies

[Nefarious]

I'm very much emotionally divided on this.

On the one hand, the messaging has some face-value legitimacy - if power/water supplies fail it's far better if, say, 50% of people aren't reliant on bottled water distribution or emergency shelters. In pretty much all scenarios, people being able to look after themselves for a day or two is *far* better than having to wheel out disaster mitigation stuff nationwide on day 1. On a personal level, I'd rather not be forced into fighting out a 3 hour queue for half a dozen bottles of water.

On the other hand, as others have pointed out, what does 3 days actually buy you in most of the scenarios imagined? I struggle to whip up the enthusiasm to make significant preparations for living in a post-apocalyptic total societal collapse world.

So, the compromise I've settled on is a few tweaks to otherwise normal running:
- One extra box to the pantry cycle (no weird emergency rations, just a little bit extra of the normal stuff)
- Refreshing the 2nd propane cylinder cylinder at the workshop
- Rejigging the solar setup so it can provide 5kW per day (sun dependent) without mains power
- Filling the 2 50L water drums I keep at the workshop anyway
- Extra 1000 rounds of shotgun ammo at the next order

[Gavster]

The main reasons behind this is because the last 8 years have proved how woefully fragile the UK's food supply chains are in the event of disruption. From Covid onwards we've seen empty shelves as a result of supply chain shocks that keep on happening, such as Ukraine war, erratic weather in West Africa or Spain, Stait of Hormuz and most recently hundreds of supermarkets in France had to dispose of tens of millions of euros worth of food due to a cyber attack on their fridges and freezers.

The UK's civil resilience is woefully inadequate and has been systematically handed over to supermarkets et al without the government really doing anything themselves. This is the result of 50+ years of highly efficient digitisation and just-in-time supply chains where everything arrives when it's needed and is remotely controlled. As a result, the smallest shocks (on a local level, that could be a lorry breaking down) results in empty shelves in a local store. Let alone a major cyber attack or weather event genuinely bringing down a larger part of that supply chain.

The idea is that, aside form the disruption in the wake of this announcement right now, this should reduce the level of panic in the future should a cyber attack, for example, take down some major part of our utilities or supply chains. Many EU countries advise between 3 to 30 days (Slovenia IIRC) worth of food should be kept at home.

It's not really about coping in event of a war or land attack, it's more about pandemics, geopolitical shocks, climate change and cyberattacks.

ETA: I helped produce the report that advised telling households to prepare back in 2024 https://nationalpreparednesscommission. ... ience-gap/

[dan]

I'll just pop round to my parents, there's always enough food to feed the entire street there.

[Jobbo]

I'll just pop round to my parents, there's always enough food to feed the entire street there.

Next Midlands meal at their house in the event of an apocalypse, yeah?

[duncs500]

Probably similar to others, we'd probably be fine for three to five days or something just with all the rice, pasta and canned veg we have. Without knowing when something might happen and what might be affected we simply don't have the space to store or the headspace to manage a larger supply.

I do think that we should have a cross-party long term goal to improve our national resilience though, that means doing a lot more to make farming (and selling locally) worthwhile, not allowing developers to build over all our farmland, etc.

We have the global political and economic elite to thank for making it very clear just how vulnerable we are to their whims, so we should be using it as an opportunity to do something better.

[Gavster]

That's the thing, there's a complete lack of structure from COBR all the way down to local community groups that doesn't know how to mobilise in the event of shocks. It does require a lot of action from the government, and most of that work is totally invisible until something crappy happens.

[GG.]

Yes and really all this "you should be prepping" crap from the government is to try and push off some of the duty they have onto others. Its sensible in and of itself but you obviously get the feeling that they will not be doing their part.

Some part of it such as the tenuous nature of the electricity supply is completely a function of successive governments own infrastructure failures (and them allowing the planning system to become such a mess that anything that is built costs 3x what it should).

[duncs500]

Come on @Gavster, you're the only one who can save us, force the government to make some good policies!

I think the immediate aftermath of a major event is always rough, but in the medium/longer term supply chains and ways of life do adapt. If that means not eating bananas and tomatoes all year round, then I think people will soon get used to it, but for me there needs to be a level of basic production that (if we can manage the issue of getting it to hungry mouths) there is fundamentally enough to go round.