Personal reaction

Those are always good exercises to make us think! Maybe we could start with the first one first?

What plans do you have in place to deal with no hydro and no communications? Does that sound OK Henry??

Makes no different which scenario.The main think is we review our own preparedness and may be get some good ideas from others.
HENRY

During the 1998 Ice Storm, we woke up one morning with no electriciy. After a while, we wondered what was going on so we phoned around (anyone who had an old fashioned corded phone was okay) and discovered that nobody had any electricity. This was before the 'terroriest attack' mentality of 2001. And before Y2k. We just didn't know anything or what happened or when the power was going to come back on. We drove into the nearest town to try to get some information but nobody knew anything either. No information. No communication. We were on our own. "Chance favours the Prepared mind" was certainly true. If a family had a wood stove and firewood to keep warm then you'd be able to live in your home. If a family had food stored, you'd be fine since grocery stores had to close. If a person had some cash, you could buy gasoline, batteries, and candles - banks were closed and bank machines don't work without electricity. You see how it works? I have to say, it was REALLY HARD not knowing what was going on. Communications. We had a warm home, food, some money BUT no information.......and no power for 2 weeks.

The longest I've gone in a power outage is three days here at the farm. Here's something I wrote a few years ago.

My List told me a long time ago that if we had a power outage we were going to have a few major problems. My DH - The FreeSpirit (Dave Ramsey) says ahhh-honey-quit-worrying-about-it. Yeah he did.

A few days ago we were sitting together having morning tea as we usually do and I brought up the subject again by saying: Honey I wonder if it would be a good idea to do a 48 hour No-Power test to see where the potential problems might be.

NO JOKE - I finished the sentence and the power cut off. He looked at me gasping like I actually had something to do with it. As he sputtered that maybe I should have just SHUT UP I backed quickly out of the room and said: TALK FAST HONEY - you've got about two more minutes till the basement starts flooding.

I already have a history with our not-so-beloved sump pump. He (it looks like a he) and I have come to terms about a few things. First off I had never seen a sump pump in my life until it malfunctioned about two months ago. First the pipe to the outofdoors froze. The the pump quit. Then we went to seven stores in one night to buy another pump. Sucess at last or sort of anyway. We had to run a hose out the basement door in the dead of winter - it was a long winter! So, I had some idea of what was going to happen and HAPPEN it did.

One pail. Every seven minutes. For 33 hours. Oh yes. It was fun - NOT! I lugged water up the basement stairs for hours since no one was home with me for most of the day. By the time they got home I was delirious and ready to stomp on the timer which beeped at me every seven minutes with-out-fail for hours!

Thankfully two of my kids who are night hawks stayed up most of the night with my DH as cheerleader to bail while I got a few hours of sleep. Then they went to bed and I continued.

This of course says nothing about making tea over a fondue burner, not being able to have a shower for TWO days (egads!) or the worry about the freezers defrosting and Jacob dying for no purpose. (A story for another day!)

We went to look at generators today. One more thing off My List.

ok, wow, what would happen if you didn't take out the bucket of water every x min, does it flood to a certian point and then stop? can you plan around it?

And what happened to Jacob?

The reason I ask is that the first time we had flooding, (we need a sump as well) I let it go for a bit, as I wanted to see where it would go and when it would stop and while I would never want to do it again, I do have a rock solid base line on if I didn't have power for the sump pump what we would need to do in regards to move things to safety, dealing with the resulting drying is a different matter..

You can get a 12 volt battery backup sump pump. A 1000 gallon per hour pump at 6.5 amps will give you about 12 hours continuous pumping. That will be about 3 - 4 days depending on water flow rates. If you have any solar capacity you can keep your batteries charged and functional.

JAB

Also a bilge pump for a boat (available at Canadian Tire) hooked up to a (car) battery will work to pump water out, in a pinch. JAB, good idea to have a solar panel to charge up that battery!

We had just butchered our first ram. He was in the freezer and all we could think of was the mental trauma of what we had to go through to get him there and how it would all be wasted if the freezer defrosted 🙂 We have a powerbox and a generator for backup but we haven't needed since that incident thankfully. I'm not sure how deep it would have gotten if we hadn't bailed and I'm not sure I want to find out! Everything is at least 6 inches off the floor so we'd be ok for a short outage in the spring time but we'd be hooked up the genny pretty soon.

Some people prepper for one particular event.With a little variations you can be prepared for many different happenings.Nobody can predict what or when will happen.But most of us agree we are heading towards disaster one way or other.
From life experience and seeing disasters in USA I learned that you have to be ready for anything that happens because you are the only one that can take care of you and your family.That why I learn from whatever i can as much as possible . My belief is -knowledge is power.Constantly qualitatively and quantitative upgrading my readiness.It is very critical for me to know as much as possible about home food production, storage and preservation.In most cases scenario we will not have power, that means no gas ,no groceries,no driving- in short chaos and lawlessness.The whole goal is to be prepared and refuse to be victim ,refuse to be dependent on government.
For medical trying to to have the basic item in larger quantity but also learning a lot about natural remedies and cures.
I am ready to defend my family but would not discus guns in public.
If i had to "bug out" I plan to camp on my property.Water is readily accessible,fire / warmth,security,shelter,food all easily accomplished.
That my thinking.
Henry