My family had to evacuate a few times due to fires. One of them, the National Guard was outside my neighborhood helping to coordinate the chaos. I'll never forget seeing Humvees right outside my neighborhood while the sky was blood red and full of smoke. It was like a disaster scene out of a movie, except real life. Not fun as a kid...
We barely were able to find a hotel to go to.
Afterwards, my dad kept 4-6 duffel bags full of water, first aid, clothes, MREs/dry meals, and other gear so if we ever need to get out of the place, we'd be ready.
So yes, it's a good idea to have some supplies ready because you never know.
It seems like a good thing to have in general. A few days of food? Good if society collapses… or also if you have a real bad storm. Having it in a bag, eh, well why not, right?
Earthquakes are a thing in California too, a very real threat. Flooding in Southern California is something that could happen too especially with climate change, and we live right next to a major waterway. We have our emergency kit in a very large thick rubber waterproof bag. We also have water filtration devices in there. Nobody I know is prepared as well as we are, not even a little bit prepared.
If society collapses, a few days of food is not going to do too much for you except maybe delay the suffering by a few days. If that's your intent for the bug out bag, you might want to reconsider. If it's for getting out to allow a natural disaster to subside, it's more than probably a good idea
We have prepared for disasters. 3 to 6 months of food fuel and water for every member of the house and livestock.
Everyone should have a week or two of supplies just in case. Look at what happens during large scale natural disasters. Prices go way up and supply goes way down. Why bother with that?
But in a real society collapse situation, our plan is much, much shorter term and much darker. That's just the reality of the situation. Why starve and suffer when you can just happily exit as a family in a way if your own choosing?
That’s true. I was being a bit tongue-in-cheek, but based on multiple responses it didn’t really go through. So, unclear communication on my part.
Society collapsing was supposed to be the unlikely and somewhat comical (in that it is a bit over-the-top) motivator for people to do something prep that we should do anyway.
there are all sorts of levels of society collapsing, probably the only ones where surviving the collapse means delaying the inevitable by a few days are fictional collapses, like Zombie apocalypse or similar.
A few days food is a normal kitchen cupboard — singular cupboard, not the whole kitchen.
A few weeks was what I kept ready during the pandemic, just in case I got ill and didn't want to go shopping for a fortnight. Plenty of natural disasters are in that kind of range, even outside the pandemic.
Civilisation collapsing needs a stockpile of about however many months it would take for you to turn your garden into a residential farm and get to harvest season, plus a bit for if that doesn't work… or if raccoons steal in the night everything the ravens didn't steal in the day.
> Civilisation collapsing needs a stockpile of about however many months it would take for you to turn your garden into a residential farm and get to harvest season, plus a bit for if that doesn't work
What I haven't even considered is that although there's a few cases where your immediate community can work together on stuff like this, an actual collapse leads to a power vacuum and breakdown of supply chains, so your immediate community needs to not only be self-sufficient for food but also defence from looting, and yet somehow also not important enough for to the original government to try to keep running, nor for any warlords who spring up in the vacuum to try to pillage, and also not for any foreign powers to peace-keep or annex.
Hmm, I wonder: if the USA suddenly collapsed as hard as the USSR, would Mexico and the Texas region start fighting? Or Cuba and the Florida region?
Have you personally been through a major disaster? Talking federal state of emergency declared, electrical grid is down for weeks, data networks overcrowded, shipments bottlenecked?
I ask because I see so much resistence to good prep online but never from people who've been through disasters.
That’s disaster prep. It’s rational. Preparing for society’s collapse is not. (If you want to prepare for society’s collapse, what this article’s protagonist trains for is closer to what you want to master than kitting out a glorified man cave.)
You might if you were already in the habit of taking them. Or if you were more worried about the quality of your future food than having any. They don't take much space or weight, so it's not that hard to include them.
We barely were able to find a hotel to go to.
Afterwards, my dad kept 4-6 duffel bags full of water, first aid, clothes, MREs/dry meals, and other gear so if we ever need to get out of the place, we'd be ready.
So yes, it's a good idea to have some supplies ready because you never know.