Wednesday, September 22, 2010


So, what did I learn from our recent flood? (hm I am grumpy with you all that you didn't leave a single comment after that post. grr.)
  1. Do not procrastinate. Guess what was on my to-do list? "Put bags of wheat etc into Mylar bags." I lost 50# of wheat, 5# oatmeal, 12# salt and 25# of rice in our flood because I hadn't checked this off my list yet.
  2. Move fast. In a crisis, moving fast instead of just staring can make a difference. I put all our scrapbooks up from the water level and moved most of the (un-Mylared) food staples off the floor and onto the piano and table, so they were safe from the flood water.
  3. Maintain a sense of calm. My kids were not crying as they huddled with the dogs. "It was the middle of the night, water was coming in, but mom and dad were holding it together, so it must not be so bad."
  4. Maintain OPSEC as much as possible. I had volunteers over within 3 hours helping us recover from the flood. In those three hours I had moved 90% of the "prepper" foodstuff out of the house. What remained was mainly our grocery store food, and I just said I had 4 kids, like, you know how much they eat!
  5. You never know how you'll meet other preppers. Cleanup came to the point where everything had been done, except to my pantry room. I had cleaned out most of the "strange" supplies (10# cans, wheat, etc) but it was time to let someone rip up the carpet... it turned out that the man who did that job was a closet prepper too, and was excited to see that there was another one out there like him! God works, huh.
  6. If it's you that needs help, accept it. We always envision it is us on the porch with the shotgun, turning away people who want out preps. It's not always the case.
  7. Don't put all your eggs in one basket. Mere days before the flood, my husband and I discussed moving our food boxes to the kid's closets. The top shelves in their closets are unused, and we thought that mislabeling the boxes and storing them up there would be a good way to spread our supplies throughout the house so that it didn't seem to be quite as much as there actually is, if "the wrong person" saw it. In addition, if this had been a disaster such as a hurricane, we would have been less likely to lose all our supplies if they were spread out. As it was, if they had been stored up there, the flood water wouldn't have ruined my boxes.
  8. There are benefits and drawbacks to most setups. We chose to put food in boxes and not buckets because they are more low-profile and easy to mislabel and store unobtrusively. However, the boxes (that were on the floor) were ruined in the flood. (Our food was fine, because it was packaged for long-term storage)
I had an epiphany as the water rose and my four kids were huddled on my bed with the dogs. My son had his "camping backpack" (ie, BOB) on his lap and was eagerly asking me "Can I eat this beef jerky, Mom? Can I put the flavor in my water?" I said Yes! this is what we practice for! I was so glad to be a prepper.

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