Mr B and Midwest Chick
stoped by to drop off their leaf vac, which they were so graciously loaning me, and show me how it is properly used. We all expressed astonishment at how anyone can be so unprepared as to not even have three or four days worth of food. I guess the idea of not being prepared is utterly alien to me; I grew up in a house where, if someone had some extra green beans in their garden or field, free for the asking, we would go pick them and can them. We had a pantry and a freezer that could sustain us for AGES.
In 1977, a month to the day before my 18th birthday, a lightning strike caused a chain reaction of circuit failures thatplunged NYC into darkness and chaos. Looting, arson, and lots of other nastiness took place, even though power began to be restored as early as the next day.
Thirty five years later this still takes them by surprise. Talk about a “Confederacy of dunces”. A “Dunce” is defined as someone incapable of learning, and as Oscar Wilde famously said, “Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching”
The intelligentsia in NYC want to tell the rest of the country how to live, eat, act, etc.
Few of them could find their asses with a CDV-700 if shit were radioactive.
Like I said though….I have 4 days worth of food in the *truck*. At home, the pantry is good for about 100 meals BEFORE we have to go downstairs for the preps.
Hell, you can live for a week on just the candy and beer and pop in the garage fridge.
How people can be out of food at any time after three days confounds me, especially when you know at least a week in advance an 800 mile wide storm is bearing down on your gps coordinates.
Much less fail to stock gasoline (pumped by electricity!) for your generator in case there is a power outage due to the storm…..
enjoy the suck
lol. I have four days worth of food in my small intestine, I think!
Up until the turn of the century,21st people in the countryside in the old Warsaw Pact lived off the grid, and were clean and fed. No central heating meant if you weren’t in front of the fireplace, you were under 6 inches of covers in a freezing bedroom, and lived fine.
The people whose homes were washed away, all the prepping in the world couldn’t help, with their canned goods, Esbit kits, and water drums in the Atlantic. The others have spoiled water with diesel and other chemicals that can’t be just boiled off or run through a rag to filter.
But for the people back from the coastal destruction, who doesn’t have at least a week worth of canned and dry goods, and some water, just as normal stock? My mother even kept Carnation powdered milk to have milk when she was snow-bound and not able to go to the store. I was snowed in during the Ground Hog Day blizzard in 2011, and lived like a king. My father was stuck home with no power for a week from the March 1998 ice storm, and made it fine.
All these folk lined at the fuel stations; first, where had they been driving to blow through their tank of fuel (they had 5 days of advance warning to fill-up), since all the roads were blocked? And where were they in a hurry to go if they were stuck in their neighborhoods?
The Axis were 50 years ahead of themselves. If they wanted to defeat a fat and lazy America more concerned with ball games than defending the country, they should’ve waited for the 1990’s onward, and not hit us right after we lived through the hard days of the Depression. 50 years of Democrats softened us up enough. Just flash an EMP and you won’t have to fire a bullet. Without iPhones to FaceBook each other clever meme photos about the invasion, we’d be lost.
We all knew to get the heck away from the cities if the law collapsed anyway; this was just a reminder why.
Talking with a neighbor today. His sis is in Long Island and was panicked and had no idea what to do. I said, she can get her cell phone to work, but can’t find water? Tell her there’s 8 gallons in the toilet tank if she’s had the good sense not to flush. Take a bucket outside and get flood water for that. There’s also 50 or 60 gal. in the water heater if she’s got the sense not to shower or bathe. Just shut off the inflow taps and take water out of the drain. For food, she’s shit out of luck, but won’t do worse than lose a few pounds over the next week. After that they can go back to living in the clouds, eating unicorn farts and drinking unicorn kool ade. There’s never going to be another problem.
Gerry N.
I boggles the mind sometimes. I am looking forward to some quality time in the stand and maybe sticking bambi’s big brother. Good eating there.
If your house is torn off your foundation you might have an excuse, but there were people that KNEW this was coming and only had food for 3 or 4 days and no water but what they put in their bathtub.
Sorry, unless they are elderly and totally bedridden, there’s no excuse.
Exactly, Brigid. As I said, this has a HISTORY of happening, and the morons feel as long as they have properly BLAMED someone, it will never happen again.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Ike we had Red Cross food packages pressed upon us by a roving Red Cross van. We found other people we could pass them on to that needed it far worse than we did.
We were also without power for 18 days. Was it fun? Hell no, particularly not waiting in line for three hours for gas for the generator.
But you do what you have to do when you have to do it.
I’ve read that over 50% of the gas stations are out of service in NY/NJ. Well, for the first 5 days post Ike we had exactly 3 stations open in a little city of 75,000. And we were grateful for those.
davek
PS Never ran out of water either. Between the bathtub and the ice chests we poured water out when it was over.