A Weekend Emergency Ration...

I was visiting different blogs reading different ideas about creating light weight food stuffs to have in my pack as a just in case. MRE's can be had for 10+ $'s from various places. After reading and poking around I decided on a path to take. I would create my own version of an E-RAT. As a matter of fact I made two for each of the kids, son-in-law, and wife.
I used my Food Saver to create an air tight package. I suppose that a zip lock bag will work as well.

Here is what I placed in the pack:
2 - Cliff bars
2 - Lipton Cup of Soup, Chicken Noodle
2 - Instant Oatmeal packets
2 - Swiss Miss Hot Cocoa
4 - Jolly Rancher Candies
3 - Instant Coffee packets
3 - 4C Light powdered drink mix packets (100% vitamin C)

This very basic packet is good for one day or over night stay in the woods. If one conserves maybe two days. The packs the kids have contain items to filter water, start a fire, container to heat and carry water or eat from. The items will keep for sometime, well over a year if not left in the sun. All that is needed is a fire and little water to create the meal.

All of the items can be purchased at the local grocery.

Enjoy,

A Way to Store Food...

Many ways exist to safely store food stuffs for future or emergency use. Folks can purchase dehydrated food in buckets that are meals, there are MRE's, any number of combinations are out there in the market place. The price also reflects the quantity, but not always the quality.
Uncle Sam recommends that Americans have at least three days of reserve food and water on hand.

Starting off with food storage. One will need food grade storage buckets. A lot of folks sell them, but this place has the best prices as they are a manufacturer; freckleface.com. These five gallon pails will store plenty of beans, lentils, white rice, salt, pepper, sugar, and whatever else your heart desires.
I am not going into how to store the food. The internet has plenty of resources on how to store food. I am just putting up a link to the folks who had the best deal for me when I needed the buckets.

The Gamma lids are awesome and will not break you hands while opening them. A great find and worth sharing.

** Update 8 Feb 13
Here is a link(s) to some handy ideas for storing the food; Modern Survival Blog.com, Backdoor Survival.com. Plenty of other resources out there, these are just a couple I have visit from time to time.

Enjoy,

To Learn Something New...

I have decided to try and learn something new; Emergency Medical Technician Basic (EMT-B). So far so good. My class meets two nights a week for three hours. The instructor(s) include one paramedic and a few intermediate EMT's. All of the instructors are very knowledgeable concerning the subject matter.
One particular area of interest is the FEMA training courses available to the general public free of charge. These courses can be taken by anyone and provide introduction(s) to several different topics in regards to disasters. A test can also be taken upon completion of the course. If a passing grade is received a certificate of completion is e-mailed to the users.

Check out the courses here: FEMA Independent Study

Why are these courses useful? Well, you can help your community to prepare for emergencies as well as the arrival of resources to implement recovery. These courses all provide some insight as to what is expected in government response and how the organization is built to respond. If a community decides to handle the recovery without external help than these course will provide basic knowledge of what should be done.

What is unfortunate is that whenever the government gets involved the recovery effort is prolonged and drawn out. This was witnessed locally.

So, maybe folks should complete these courses on their own and be ready to help their communities and keep the inept government out.


Enjoy,