12 Home Essentials You Need For Survival

12 Home Essentials You Need For Survival. Graphic © myfamilysurvivalplan.com. Background image – Unsplash

With so many daily works, family, and personal distractions, it’s no wonder so many of us remain unconcerned and unprepared for a potential disaster to strike. But they do strike often, all around the world, and assuming you and your family will be exempt could endanger your lives.

Even though it takes thought and investment, preparing your home and your family for unexpectedly harsh conditions is well worth the sacrifice. In fact, the peace of mind alone might be worth it. If you don’t know where to get started, Modernize offers up a list of home essentials to build off of as you collect survival supplies.

Flashlights, Lanterns, and Backup Batteries

When anticipating a disaster, the last thing you should rely on is electricity. And there’s nothing more frightening than thinking of trying to keep your family safe in total darkness. Make sure flashlights and lanterns are handy in several rooms of the house, and always keep a good stock of backup batteries and bulbs. Solar flashlights are also a great addition, especially if you’re going to need to be on the move.

Hand Crank Radio

Staying tuned in to what’s going on could mean the difference between life and death. Procure a solar hand crank radio that will keep you updated on the news and weather while you keep your family locked up safe.

Solar Oven and Freezer

Nobody hopes that the aftermath of a disaster will be long-term. But it’s best to prepare for a longer time without electricity than you would like to imagine. Solar ovens are simple, effective, and can cook food in a variety of ways. Ready-to-go, just-add-water meals are very handy for a short-term emergency. But a solar oven and a solar freezer to store your food stock could work in tandem to keep your family eating well in spite of the circumstances.

Coats and Boots

Being prepared for inclement weather is essential. Heavy-duty raincoats, winter coats, hiking boots, and rain boots will help keep them warm in dry in case of flooding or freezing weather. It will also help them travel more easily if traveling becomes necessary.

Water Purifier

Aside from shelter, water is the most immediate and vital need in many emergency situations. If you are not prepared to convert unsafe water into potable water, you’re not truly prepared at all. You need to both have ways to filter and purify it. While you’re thinking of your water needs, it never hurts to set up a rain catchment system that will allow you access to running water—though you will still need to treat rainwater to make it potable.

First Aid Supplies

A well-stocked survival first aid kit will include gloves, surgical shears, antiseptic wipes, bandages, pain relieving medication, antibiotic ointment, cotton-tipped applicators, sterile gauze pads, a thermometer, tweezers, and several other items.

Make sure to thoroughly research and go beyond the basics for your first aid kit.

Pet Supplies

No one overlooks their kids when they plan for a disaster, but a pet isn’t always foremost on everyone’s mind. Pets need their own survival supplies including food, blankets, bowls, a leash, their own first aid supplies, and anything else you determine your individual pets’ need.

Sanitary Supplies

While weather disasters are more common in America these days, epidemics also pose a danger—as do unclean condition potentially caused by natural disasters. Supplies that would come in handy during a dangerous outbreak include adhesive sealing masks with eye shields, anti-bacterial and anti-virus lotion, anti-bacterial wipes, biohazard bags, biohazard suits and gloves, and a supply of antibacterial soap.

Hygiene Essentials

Comfort and cleanliness isn’t usually the first thing on your mind in a survival situation. But if you prepare ahead, you can be more thorough about what your family needs and wants. Items like soap, toilet tissue, toothbrushes and toothpaste, feminine products, deodorant, and razors will come in handy even after just a day of relying on your survival supplies.

Sleeping Bags

Reflective sleeping bags that are cushy and can withstand harsh weather could mean the difference between a safe and good night’s rest and many sleepless, anxious nights. To protect your family from hypothermia, select sleeping bags that offer heavy insulation, fully waterproof materials, and low-temperature ratings.

Emergency Preparedness Guide

No matter how much you prepare yourself and your family, any type of emergency or disaster is bound to come with surprises. Instead of relying completely on your supplies and knowledge, make sure you have the educational resources anyone in your family would need to know how to deal with in difficult disaster-related circumstances.

Multi-Tool Knife

Weapons are certainly an important aspect of a home survival kit, as are tools. Combine them into one item for optimum efficiency and ease of use. You never know when a screwdriver, pliers, or a mini saw could come in handy.

These are simply the foundational items for a home survival kit. Build off of your family’s anticipated needs and show them how to use the supplies in case of an emergency.

By Mary Saurer

Mary Sauer is a writer who has been published by Babble, Mom.me, and What to Expect. She lives in the Midwest with her husband and two young daughters.

How To Survive A Permanent Power Outage

Even though most of us are familiar to short-term power outages and would easily make it without electricity for one or two days, most people don’t even consider the possibilities of going their entire lives without the commodity of electrical power. And why would they? Power is plenty and is available everywhere apparently. But the infrastructure on which it was all built is crumbling, in dire need of modernization. Electricity may well be the first commodity to go! Surviving such rapid turns of events will be trickier than you can imagine. What I’m talking about here is pure survival in the absence the most defining power source of our modern society.

It’s not about managing day by day without entertainment (tv, internet, cell phones etc.), it’s more than that: it’s about preserving and cooking food, it’s about communicating over long distances in cases of emergency, it’s about keeping your house lit at night and your family warm during cold seasons. We’ll need to “downgrade” in lifestyle in order to stay alive, but that’s a small price to pay for the opulence and decadence of this past century. Let’s have a look at what can keep us going during the hard times that lie ahead.

How To Preserve Food And Cook Without Power

If the power dies and your fridge is full, you got about two days until the contents start spoiling. Don’t panic and don’t throw the food away. 48 hours is plenty of time to act and save most of what you have in the freezer. You’ll need to act quickly on preserving foods like meat, eggs, dairy, fruit, and veggies. There are plenty of ways of saving your food and keeping it fresh and edible for long periods of times, be it meat, potatoes or easily pickled vegetables. Also be aware of the fact that many of the products that people tend to keep in the fridge don’t necessarily belong there in the first place. Stuff like ketchup, sauces, mayonnaise (maybe), jams and spices will be just fine outside as long as they’re not directly exposed to high temperatures (room temperature will do).

If you have your mind set on keeping your food in freezing conditions, there are alternatives that are easy to make and will get the job done. The Zeer pot is a natural refrigerator (based on evaporation), excellent when it comes to cooling. You just need to pots, one smaller than the other, so that it can fit right in. Place sand in the bigger pot, so that there’s no free space left when you place the smaller pot in. Make sure the big pot is unglazed. After doing so, pour cool water on the sand so that it’s nice and moist. Place the food in the smaller pot, and cover the top with a wet cloth. Once the water begins to evaporate, it will escape through the unglazed pot, producing a cooling effect which will keep your food 3 times fresher then if it was left out. This method is perfect especially for dairy products, but not only.

Cooking on a normal barbecue grill in this scenario might be a valid solution, but not for long. As gas and charcoal will become less and less available, your best option is to build yourself a rocket stove. It’s very fuel-efficient, due to the fact that it can generate a high amount of heat for a minimum amount of fuel. It does so by moving large amounts of air through its body, ensuring that the fuel is completely burned. This keeps the flame burning rapidly and maintains the high temperature constant. And it’s very easy and cheap to put together.

How To Heat Your Home

Once the power failures strike, common heating sources (electric radiators, central heating, and even gas stoves) will become obsolete. The best option is installing a fireplace or a wood burning stove. Special precautions need to be taken first though: ensure that it’s completely sealed and secured (so that noxious CO2 or fire embers can’t escape). CO2 can be fatal if you’re exposed to it for long periods of time (especially if it starts leaking while you’re sleeping) and burning embers might land on flammable surfaces and cause fires. So install your stove correctly! The chimney doesn’t have to be anything fancy; you can simply run it through a window. Simply remove the pane of glass and run the chimney through the empty space created. After you’re done, just cover the exposed area with plywood.

Alternative Power Sources

I know what you’re thinking: a gas-powered generator is the best solution for this type of scenario. It is, but for how long do you think gas will be available after the power grid gets shut down? As long as you’re good on gas provisions, these types of generators are more than useful. But once the gas is out and getting it will be dam near impossible, you’ll need to find other ways of generating power. Solar panels or wind generators are the best options available and will provide you and you’re family with at least some energy, in order to ease everyday life as much as possible. Upon purchasing such a system, make sure that your investment will fully accommodate your needs. Alternative energy systems are way more efficient if they come with a battery storage unit, in order to stock power that can be used at any time of the day. So if you invest wisely, you can have more than enough energy throughout the whole day in order to power a mini-fridge, a radio, a laptop or even an energy-friendly air conditioner. It basically comes down to how much you’re willing to spend.

Useful Items To Have

Here are a few basics items that will be very useful if you find yourself in a no-power scenario:

• Extra candles, matches and a couple of candle lanterns. This can be purchased or improvised

• Get a couple of flashlights. The LED ones are more power-efficient, but crank flashlights are the better option

• Get a solar-powered radio or a crank radio, so you can stay informed at all times

• Manual can openers are easy to use and to procure

• Always keep your car’s gas tank at least at half capacity and store some gas canisters for emergency situations

• Keep ice in the freezer; when the power goes, the ice will prolong the coolness for as much as possible

Just follow these simple rules and you should be ok when the power gets eventually cut off. Based on visible signs, we’re not far away from facing the end of civilization as we know it. Don’t wait for disaster to strike, get ready in advance and hope for the best. As long as you’re prepared, everything should play out just fine.

“Super EMP” Capable Of Disabling Power Grid Across Lower 48 States

For many years U.S. Intelligence agencies believed that North Korea’s nuclear weapons program was a failure due to the low explosive yield of their tests. According to EMPact America’s President and former CIA nuclear weapons analyst Dr. Peter Vincent Pry, this is not the case:

North Korea’s last round of tests, conducted in May 2009, appear to have included a “super-EMP” weapon, capable of emitting enough gamma rays to disable the electric power grid across most of the lower 48 states, says Dr. Peter Vincent Pry, a former CIA nuclear weapons analyst and president of EMPact America, a citizens lobbying group.

North Korea’s nuclear tests have been dismissed as failures by some analysts because of their low explosive yield. But Dr. Pry believes they bore the “signature” of the Russian-designed “super-EMP” weapon, capable of emitting more gamma radiation than a 25-megaton nuclear weapon.

Pry believes the U.S. intelligence community was expecting North Korea to test a first generation implosion device with an explosive yield of 10 to 20 kilotons, similar to the bomb the U.S. exploded over Nagasaki in 1945. He said, “So when they saw one that put off just three kilotons, they said it failed. That is so implausible.”

Source: Newsmax

Since EMP is a line-of-sight weapon, detonating one of these nukes about 300 miles above Nebraska could end life as we know it in America in about one second.

While North Korea may be the latest country to test such a weapon, it is clear that the technology has been available for nearly 50 years, and it has since been leaked to rogue nations, and perhaps rogue terror and shadow elements with the financing, capability, and wherewithal to use it:

Such a weapon — equal to a massive solar flare such as the “solar maxima” predicted by NASA to occur in 2016 — poses “substantial risk to equipment and operation of the nation’s power grid and under extreme conditions could result in major long-term electrical outages,” said Joseph McClelland of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in Senate testimony last month.

Pry said that a group of Russian nuclear weapons scientists approached him in 2004 when he served as staff director of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack, to warn the United States that the technology to make that weapon “had leaked” to North Korea, and possibly to Iran.

When we talk about potential terrorist action against the United States, we discuss this in the sphere of any organization, be it Al Queda, state-sponsored, or shadow government related. These weapons exist, and they are, without a doubt, the single biggest threat to the United States of America.

As we’ve previously reported, such a weapon, or group of weapons strategically detonated at lower altitudes, would completely wipe out the entire US power grid, vehicles, computers, cell phones, and anything else with an electric circuit.

The fall out would be nothing short of apocalyptic.

In July of 2010 EMPact America published an overview of the EMP 2010 Conference in which they discussed the threat EMP posed to the nation and the fact that very few people understand how great and imminent it is:

…An electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, is a super energetic radio wave that’s immediately harmless to people, but it’ll burn out all the critical electronic systems that sustain human economic activity and human life across vast areas, including the entire continental United States.

– Dr. Peter Vincent Pry, President, EMPact America

The Center for Security Policy, in a report issued last year, has estimated that in the event of a wide-scale EMP attack on the United States, as many as nine out of ten Americans would be dead within one year:

“Within a year of that attack, nine out of 10 Americans would be dead, because we can’t support a population of the present size in urban centers and the like without electricity,” said Frank Gaffney, president of the Center for Security Policy. “And that is exactly what I believe the Iranians are working towards.”

It doesn’t matter who it is. What does matter is that very few Americans are prepared for such an outlier.

The first 24 – 48 hours after such an occurrence will lead to confusion among the general population as traditional news acquisition sources like television, radio and cell phone networks will be non-functional.

Within a matter of days, once people realize the power might not be coming back on and grocery store shelves start emptying, the entire system will begin to delve into chaos.

Within 30 days a mass die off will have begun as food supplies dwindle, looters and gangs turn to violent extremes, medicine can’t be restocked and water pump stations fail.

Power outages happen all the time. But you’ll know an EMP has been detonated (or we’ve been hit by a massive solar event) if the power to your house goes off, cars are not starting, and your cell phone won’t turn on. If that happens, take a deep breath, say a prayer, and put the supplies and knowledge you’ve acquired to work, because it won’t be long before the golden horde wrecks havoc.

By SHTFPlan.com