Are you ready for 72 hours?

Are you ready for 72 hours?

72hoursKit.jpgHave you checked your emergency kit in a while? Back at the turn of the century, lots of people built survival kits in preparation for the excitement of Y2K. Perhaps you have moved since then, or maybe you never made one. After a natural or manmade disaster, the magic window is considered to be 72 hours for surviving the initial impact. Having a kit at the ready might increase your chances. Certainly while traveling, you can have a plan agreed upon with all of your group.

After a major disaster, it is unlikely that emergency response services will be able to immediately respond to everyone’s needs, so it’s important to be prepared to take care of yourself and your family. Plan to be on your own for at least the first 72 hours.

Do you have an emergency kit or plan? What does it consist of? Show us some pictures or tell in the comments what you would do in a sudden emergency.

12 thoughts on “Are you ready for 72 hours?

  1. Cabe says:

    …that Zombie Apocalypse isn’t one of the options. Or does that come in under contagious disease?

  2. Bill Marcy says:

    How about self defense? Where are the firearms on that list?

    Once people get done singing a few choruses of Kumbayah, they are going to start looking at your stuff and they will figure out a way to make it their stuff. Shouldn’t you protect yourself from that happening?

    Or is that considered bad form and not being neighborly?

    1. wonko says:

      Agreed. It is well known that it takes less than 72 hours for society to break down when one of these events happen. Part of any food storage or preparation should be the means to protect it. Without the means to protect it, you become a target rather than a survivor.

      Are there options other than firearms? Certainly. Are they as compact, efficient, cost effective, user friendly, and readily available? Probably not.

      What are the down sides? Well, a firearm is only as effective as the user. If you don’t take the classes to learn how to use it, and regularly keep yourself familiarized with it, it becomes far less valuable.

      More importantly a firearm should never be presented without the ability to use it. That means that the user must have gone through the mental exercise of deciding whether or not they could use one to protect their family, friends and sustenance. If not, even in those extreme conditions, having one can be more dangerous than not. All you do is arm your enemies.

      So the answer is not that everyone should have a gun, but everyone should at least work through in their mind how far they would be willing to go in an extreme circumstance and prepare accordingly. This thought process can also be illuminating in other areas regarding your preparation, but is particularly useful in regard to firearms.

      Pandora’s box is now open. Flame away.

  3. Al says:

    72 hours is a minimum – particularly with the water and heating needs.

    I wouldn’t expect Seattle to be able to find its backside with both hands for at least two weeks. They’re relying nearly entirely on on-the-payroll first responders – who mostly commute in across bridges that aren’t prepared for the one major disaster Seattle is actually destined to receive: MAJOR 8+ earthquake.

    Think “Katrina Leadership” – but where everyone involved is convinced they’re the smartest fellow in the state.

  4. Wonko says:

    They Should Make An Issue of Make: About This.

    In the event that there were some kind of national emergency that put everyone off grid, what kinds of machines would Maker’s work on to improve things first?

    The generator from an alternator, lawnmower engine and inverter in a recent issue? A water pump from a bicycle, an engine’s coolant pump and some sprinkler pipe? There are a myriad of situations where something vitally needed could be Macgyvered up from the things that would be readily available.

    It would be really cool to see what other ideas people have come up with in actual situations and theoretically. What better use of maker skills?

  5. rahere says:

    You can contrast the Haitian situation, where determined subversion of the infrastructure from the centre of government has destroyed the entire economy by failing to react within 72 hours, with the European 2010 bug, an unforeseen example of the Y2K syndrome, where big chunks of the electronic banking system failed in Germany and with Citibank in Belgium because nobody foresaw that simply recording the year as a single digit would cause a dispute between 1.1.2000 and 1.1.2010. Sure, it shouldn’t have happened, but it did, and was sorted out within 72 hours. To some extent it depends on whether you trust your administration, an increasingly open question as the depth of the labour pool decreases with the retirement of the baby-boomers, being replaced by fewer of the 1980s generation.

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