our social systems fractious and chaotic, we still make mistakes. The result of this progress, unfortunately, is that much of Western civilization teeters precariously at the top of a technological pyramid. Remove the non-stop infusions of energy and goods, add a little natural or man-made disaster, and that balancing act rapidly devolves into chaos.
In this, the fourth installment of this series, we will discuss the material preparations required to support your emergency plans.
Yes, people, that means it's time to talk about MREs, radios, and guns. (Actually, guns will be covered in part 5, but you get the idea.)
This is the fourth installment out of five in a multi-part series on personal disaster preparedness. Your humble correspondent is a Silicon Valley technical executive with both professional and personal experience in risk assessment and disaster-readiness planning. Links to reference materials, including planning guides and reference information, will be posted at the end of the final Diary in this series.
Series Index: Are YOU ready for disaster?
When disaster strikes, will you be prepared?
Despite what you may have gathered from reading guides to readiness from the government, the Red Cross, or other organizations, you should not begin with a spending spree at the local hardware store. When you strip away all of the bureaucrat-speak, there are three basic steps you must follow to be ready for disaster:
1. Assess
2. Plan
3. Prepare
In this installment, we will discuss emergency gear, supplies, and other preparations for disaster including training and community organization.
Material Preparations
Even the most ruggedly self-reliant wilderness survival types will tell you that material preparations are critical to putting your plan into action. In this section, we will review categories of material preparations you may need to support your plan.
Batteries, chargers, and adapters: stop the insanity
As you plan your various preparedness kits, take note of everything you want to include which uses batteries or an external power source. Now, look at all the chargers, connectors, adapters, and battery types required to support your gear.
Whoa.
Wherever possible, reduce and consolidate the number of dependencies you have on different types of cord, adapter, and battery. See Active Communications below for suggestions on how to standardize on USB power for charging phones, PDAs, and other pocket electronics. Minimize single points of failure wherever possible.
Your communications plan
In previous installments, we have discussed the requirement that each plan include a rendezvous point at one or more safe locations. After all, communication doesn't get much more direct and reliable than talking to someone face-to-face.
Before everyone in your group has made it safely to the rendezvous point, though, there's no substitute for a solid communications plan. Here's where you get to benefit from some of your correspondent's hard-won arcane knowledge of telecommunication systems in North America.
Quick, name the public voice communications service that will be brought online first after a major disaster. Home phones? Nope. Business lines? Negative. Cellphones? Not likely.
Give up? The answer: pay phones. Yes, that dying breed, those dinosaur relics of the pre-cellphone age will be a shining beacon of civilization in the aftermath of a disaster.
Recommendation: All emergency kits should include a $10 roll of quarters and prepaid phone cards from two major long-distance providers.
Why two major long-distance providers? In the chaos following a natural disaster, especially an earthquake, it's hard to predict which portions of the phone network will be reliable and which will fail.
Having two different long-distance providers gives you a much better shot at getting a call to go through.
Recommendation: Take one of your city/region maps and go on a payphone hunt. Find at least two payphones within walking/biking distance of home and work and mark the locations of each on the map. When you're done copy those locations to the map in each of your emergency kits.
Next quiz question: are you more likely to be able to complete a call to a local number, a number in a different part of your state, or a number in a different state altogether?
The answer, surprisingly, is that interstate long-distance calls are the most likely to go through in an emergency. This is because these calls are handed off from your local phone company to the long-distance networks at special "tandem" switching locations in every city.
Recommendation: Each family member and each emergency kit MUST have a durable card (i.e. laminated) with comprehensive contact information, including multiple out-of-state emergency contacts. Enlist the help of distant friends or relatives to act as a message switchboard in a crisis. This is a proven, reliable technique for reuniting separated family members when local communications are degraded or offline. If you take away nothing else from the recommendations in this series, for the love of Bob take this one and run with it. Take care of it today. Now. Go! LATOC will still be here when you get back. (hopefully)
Finally, let us speak for a moment of the oft-overlooked capabilities of our mobile phones. As mentioned above, making or receiving voice calls will be bloody near impossible in many disaster situations. However, I'll let you in on a little secret:
If your mobile phone can register with the network, it is very likely that you will be able to send and receive text messages even if you can't make a voice call.
Recommendation: Everyone named in your emergency plan should have a mobile phone capable of text messaging, and should know how to send and receive text messages. Using a single network provider for the whole family will further increase your chances of getting text messages through quickly during a crisis.
Here's another one:
Wireless data services offered by the mobile network operators will frequently be available even when voice calling is severely degraded or offline altogether. Exhibit A: the bloggers roaming flooded New Orleans this week, filing reports and pictures using laptops with access to the Verizon wireless data network.
At the time of this writing (Sep 2005) this is still a relatively expensive proposition for most people, at $40-$80/month. However, most mobile phones available in the US offer browser-based access to online services via those same wireless data networks. In addition, network operators are beginning to offer mobile email services at very low cost, with email programs that run on
your phone and integrate with major service providers such as Yahoo!.
[Disclosure: your correspondent is co-founder of a company which makes email products for many mobile network operators.]
Recommendation: Familiarize yourself with the wireless-data capabilities of your phone. If you have an free email account with a major service provider, look into whether access to your email account is available via the browser on your phone. Consider signing up for a service which will give you direct access to email on your phone.
Let us say a few things about a few things you might need
To a certain extent, training and planning can compensate quite a bit for failure to plan for your physical needs in an emergency situation. However, it would be foolhardy to expect that you can get through a week of widespread municipal service outages and civil disturbance with nothing more than a solid plan and pure thoughts.
We have now come to the point in this series that everyone was eager to get to when Part 1 was posted -- what emergency planners call "logistics", and you, dear reader, might call "gear, goods, and guns".
The Part 3 section entitled 'Key planning considerations for your preparedness plan' breaks down material needs into a list of categories. Your correspondent is a firm believer in breaking down intimidating problems into manageable, logically organized chunks. The hope is that by considering each separately, it will be for the reader easier to understand the requirements and trade-offs for each category, and then fit that into the reader's larger understanding of preparedness planning.
Each requirement category includes solutions in three categories:
Best-of-breed options are, generally speaking, commercially
available but you'll pay for the convenience
Cheap-and-cheerful options are alternative solutions for
emergency needs which may not be as polished or neatly
packaged as commercial products, but are generally much cheaper
than best-of-breed choices
Improvised solutions are what you can fall back on if, for
example, the best-of-breed gear you bought is destroyed or taken
from you
We will begin by discussing the individual categories, and then proceed to assembly of these items into preparedness kits. In [Part 3], your correspondent shared his pragmatic view of the correct way to approach disaster preparedness. In particular, plans which rely on rotation of supplies on a frequent basis are vulnerable to failure. It's just human nature. This must be balanced against the need to exercise due care in maintaining your preparedness plan and supplies, hence my clear policy on this issue:
"Material preparations MUST NOT require inspection more than
once per year, and MUST still be capable of meeting minimum
safety/usability requirements if left unattended for FOUR YEARS."
Without further ado, let's get down and dirty. I fully expect some of my suggestions to spark debate, and likewise, I expect to learn more about effective preparedness solutions from the comments. Please keep in mind that budgets and urgency levels do vary, and try to respect the limitations some of your fellow Kossacks may have in preparing for disaster.
Water, water, everywhere but not a drop to drink
Water is heavy, bulky, and absolutely vital to human survival. The so-called "standard human" can survive for up to 30 days without food, but even under the most favorable conditions will die after 5-7 days without water. That number decreases precipitously in adverse circumstances such as high heat and/or high levels of exertion. In a crisis, safe drinking water is a precious commodity, more valuable than you can imagine.
Quantity: One gallon per day per person, half that for portable water rations. While waste should be carefully avoided (see Sanitation, below) each person should drink as much as they need to stay hydrated. As soon as you tap into your stored water supply, you MUST begin working to identify additional sources of drinkable water. In some circumstances, this could mean preparing to evacuate.
IMPORTANT TIP: all-in-one powdered drink mixes such as Gatorade, lemonade, etc. are wonderful for breaking up the monotony of drinking plain water from your emergency supply. They're also good for covering any taste left in the water after filtration and/or purification. Be sure to store some in each of your long-term preparedness kits.
We will discuss three subcategories of water supply: bulk stored water, portable stored water, and clean-water production from available supply.
= Bulk stored water =
There are many ways of ensuring that you will have water available when your life depends on it, but only a few will meet your author's demanding standards for longevity and safety.
Recommendations:
Best-of-breed: Brand-new, food-grade FDA-certified water storage barrels; water treated with 5-year preserver concentrate.
Required accessories:
-5-year preserver concentrate
-new siphon pump
-new water-grade siphon tube as backup to pump (store
separately from pump, in household emergency kit)
-bung wrench for installing/removing plugs
-waterproof tape & permanent marker for labeling barrel with date
filled/refilled
-5-to-7 gallon container with on/off tap to hold water pumped
from barrel
Recommended: tamper-evident seals.
Store barrels away from direct sunlight, in a cool location if possible. If you live in earthquake country, your correspondent strongly recommends storing your supply in two separate barrels, with one barrel located away from your home or residence. If you do not have a shed or other shelter, consider storing your outdoor water barrel in a large UV-resistant garbage can, which should be hidden and/or locked.
Water stored in barrels should be replaced every 3 years, at a cost of approximately $15 for water preserver concentrate and barrel seals.
Cheap-and-cheerful: Water in plastic bottles will generally 'keep' for up to a year. Because this is a commodity that is consumed under normal circumstances, care must be taken to maintain adequate stock on hand. Define your minimum level of safe inventory and DO NOT GO BELOW THAT LEVEL.
While any good preparedness plan should include some bottled water, as it is highly portable and the bottles are reusable, your correspondent is NOT a fan of this as your main water-storage measure. You need to rotate it too often, you're likely to drink your reserves by accident, and it's MUCH more expensive than barrel storage.
10-year cost comparison:
55-gallon barrel, all accessories including preserver: $150
55 gallons of Trader Joe's bottled water in 1L bottles: $1100
Improvised, part 1: If time is more available than money, you can maintain an emergency water supply by dumping/refilling clean and sterilized 2-liter bottles with tap water every 3 months.
Wash the bottles with a weak soap solution, rinse thoroughly. Rinse bottles with a solution of diluted unscented bleach (pure 5% sodium hypochlorite), rinse until no chlorine smell remains. Cap tightly, apply tape label indicating date filled, store in a dark, safe location at/near floor level. Empty and refill (no wash/sterilization required) every 3 months.
Improvised, part 2a for house-dwellers: This should be your absolute last-resort backup plan. As soon as water pressure drops off, which generally indicates an integrity failure in the water supply, shut off the master water valve to your house. Your emergency water supply now consists of the 1-2 gallons of water in the flush tank of each of your toilets (NOT the water in the bowl!!!) and the contents of your hot-water heater. Make sure nobody flushes a toilet before you recover that fresh water from the flush tank!
Because contamination may have entered your water supply before pressure failed, this water should be considered suspect. At a minimum, either purify it (see below) or boil it for 10 minutes before drinking.
Improvised, part 2b for apartment-dwellers: Same basic idea as the previous measures. If you can, fill the tub and any available containers with water before pressure fails. If pressure fails, turn off the water supply to your toilet and recover the water from the flush tank as outlined above. Water stored in the tub or other open containers should be considered potentially contaminated and must be purified or 10-minute-boiled before use.
= Portable stored water =
While bottled water isn't recommended for long-term storage, a portable water supply is a must-have for vehicle and work preparedness kits. At home, you will want to be able to take a supply of water with you if you need to evacuate, and a full 55-gallon barrel weighs around 465 pounds.
Recommendations:
Best-of-breed: Aqua Blox or equivalent 5-year-stable "juice box" style water. Ignore the outrageous claims and treat each 3-pack as a minimal one-day supply for one person. Supplement with an additional 750mL of bottled water per person per day, rotated at least yearly.
Cheap-and-cheerful: Just buy the damn Aqua Blox. Seriously. They're around $1.09 for a 3-pack. If you insist, you can go exclusively with bottled water in rotated yearly, but this is cheap peace of mind.
Improvised: Any clean, watertight container can be used to hold or transport drinking water for a few days. If your only means of storing a temporary supply of water is a (very clean) bucket, cover the bucket as well as possible and subject it to purification, filtration, and/or 10-minute-boiling before use. If you have a sufficient supply of unscented bleach drops or other means of chemical purification, consider adding it to the container at fill time as a preventive measure.
= Clean-water production from available supply =
The lightest water of all is the water you don't have to carry. There may be situations where you are unable to transport sufficient water, but will have access to some form of fresh water. In a disaster, the only water you can trust is water that you've stored yourself, and water in a factory-sealed bottle or jug. Any other water must be considered suspect.
There are three main methods for making water safe to drink:
Purification through chemical treatment or 10 minutes of boiling. The downside is that chemical treatment may make the water taste anywhere from barely tolerable to horrible, and may not be effective against some microorganisms. Boiling uses up valuable energy resources. The upside is that either one can generate enough clean water to keep you alive if you have the resources to purify suspect water.
Filtration can be extremely effective, especially with today's incredibly advanced filtering technology. However, filtration may not remove viruses (depends on filter in question) or chemical contamination (requires an activated-charcoal filter). Your correspondent considers filtration the minimum safeguard for drinking water from any source (even barrel-stored water) in a disaster.
Distillation is energy-intensive, but yields clean, safe water that generally tastes better than purified water. Chemically contaminated water should be run through an activated-charcoal filter before distillation. (If the water has any sort of smell, assume that it requires filtration and proceed accordingly.) This is not generally a viable method in a disaster.
Recommendations:
Best-of-breed, personal: Exstream Orinoco or Exstream Mackenzie water bottle purification system, hands down. There may be others out there, but these beasties are amazing. Works with any freshwater source, regardless of organic contamination or virus load. Deploy minimum one per preparedness kit, especially vehicle and work kits. Spare filter and cleaning materials recommended.
Best-of-breed, group: First Need Deluxe Portable Water Purifier/Filter, recommend one unit with spare filter catridge and cleaning materials for each group preparedness kit.
Cheap-and-cheerful: One Exstream bottle purifier as a backup to stored and bottled water supply. Alternatively, Aqua Mira water treatment solution will kill viruses and microorganisms but will do nothing for solid contaminants.
Improvised: In your correspondent's preparedness kit, you will find a zip-lock bag containing an empty water bottle, a dozen 6" paper laboratory filters, a funnel, an eyedropper, and a relabeled medicine bottle containing pure 5% sodium hypochlorite bleach. If you take the bottle out of the bag, the whole thing fits into a cargo pocket. This is my last resort for clean drinking water, and you shouldn't consider it if there are ANY other options. One drop of bleach per 16oz filtered water, let stand for 30 minutes before drinking. See above for much better alternatives.
OK, we're not going to die of thirst - got anything to eat?
As the machines said to Neo in The Matrix: Revolutions, "There are levels of survival we are willing to accept." You need to decide what your priorities are when it comes to emergency nutrition. In a nutshell: long shelf life, tastes good, cheap... pick any two. Dehydrated food generally tastes much better than long-shelf-life MRE-type food.
As with water supplies, there are different trade-offs for stored food vs. portable rations. The storage space required, increased weight, and decreased packaging efficiency of stored food can be a good trade-off for lower per-meal costs and better-tasting meals. On the other hand, portable food needs to be light, resource-efficient (no dehydrated stuff!) and extremely convenient.
Rough order of priority for consuming food stores
1. Fresh foods on hand
2. Frozen foods on hand
3. Canned food with low water content
4. Canned food with high water content
5. Shelf-stable prepared foods (MREs)
6. Shelf-stable rations (ER food bars)
7. Dehydrated/dry foods (backpacking meals, pancake mix,
etc.)
If dehydrated foods are part of your nutrition plan, and water is not an issue (all water supplies intact/known-good and water for rehydration included in planning) then move "dehydrated/dry foods" up to #3.
= Stored food =
Best-of-breed: Mountain House Easy Meal Security-Pak, will feed a family of 5 for 9+ days. NOTE: Requires water for preparation, budget 25% additional water supply for food prep. Hot water not required for preparation, but highly desirable.
Cheap-and-cheerful: Once your stock of fresh & frozen food is exhausted: canned foods (rotate regularly) supplemented with instant noodles, etc. as water supplies permit. Keep in mind that all of the water used to prepare a cup of instant noodles ends up in you, albeit with some salt. Not very calorie-dense, however.
Improvised: There's not much substitute for being prepared when it comes to food. If your issue is money and/or storage space, consider supplementing your normal stock of food with some Emergency Ration food bars, which are shelf-stable for 5 years and very affordable.
= Portable food =
Best-of-breed: MREs or canned food. MREs have the advantage that you can get cheap just-add-water chemical meal warmers to heat them up, whereas canned food needs a backpacker stove if you don't want to eat it cold.
Cheap-and-cheerful: Emergency Ration food bars. You don't have to like them, you just have to survive. Packaging says you can live on 1200 calories/day, but I don't call that living. Figure 1800 calories/day minimum per person, 2400 calories/day for a male engaged in heavy activity as the worst case. Remember, everything tastes better when you're hungry and there's nothing else to eat.
Improvised: Candy bars and cookies will keep you going for a few days, though you'll feel like crap a lot of the time. Sealed packages of trail mix keep pretty well, but rotate them every 6 months. Avoid caffeinated soft drinks if water is in short supply, as they have a dehydrating effect. Beyond that... does your neighbor have a dog?
Food preservation
While we will be discussing ways to power your refrigerator and/or standalone freezer in an emergency later on, you need to plan for the possibility that you may not have that option. The recommendations are the same regardless of circumstance:
Buy one or more of the new "5-day" super-insulated coolers, sized appropriately for your household. If you have an older cooler, replace it with a new 5-day model. Tip: get one with wheels. If you need to relocate on foot, this will make it much easier to take your cooler.
If you have room in the freezer, freeze a number of water bottles and keep them frozen. Be sure to freeze bottles capable of expanding; Trader Joe's 750mL and 1L bottles are perfect for this, and cheap.
If the power goes out and stays out, unload all of your ice and frozen food into the bottom of your new 5-day cooler(s).
Transfer only those refrigerated items that will actually be consumed to the coolers. Anything that goes unused wastes ice.
Keep the cooler(s) closed as much as possible
Keep the cooler(s) in a cool location. If you are sheltering in your back yard or similar location, consider digging a hole for each cooler; line the hole with a tarp and shade the cooler if possible
One final note, for households who depend on refrigeration to keep medication from going bad: your priorities for any capacity to keep things chilled will be quite different. In addition to prioritizing medication over food in the cooler, you might also consider getting one of the small car-sized mini-refrigerators which runs off 12VDC.
Food preparation
You can certainly survive indefinitely eating cold prepared foods, but that doesn't mean you're going to like it. For many people, the lack of a hot bitter caffeinated beverage in the morning represents the true end of civilization. With a little planning, this can be avoided. Note that all of the options here are dual-use equipment, and are useful in an emergency and at a campsite.
Best-of-breed: In this writer's opinion, it's difficult to beat the versatility of the Coleman Roadtrip Grill with dual burners and interchangeable griddle, grill, and stove inserts. It will run off of 16oz propane cylinders (expensive, but easy to store) or, with an accessory hose, the more economical refillable propane cylinders. At the risk of sounding like a Coleman shill, your correspondent also heartily recommends the Coleman Hot Water On Demand. If you happen to have some non-potable water in addition to an ample supply of drinking water, you can even use it to take a hot shower. Note, however, that the Coleman HWOD does use a rechargeable battery, so plan on having access to an AC power point to recharge it every 40 gallons or so.
Recommended fuel for the above: one 20lb propane cylinder with adapter hose, plus 12 1lb disposables as a backup. Double the number of 1lb disposables if you get a Hot Water On Demand.
Cheap-and-cheerful: It's hard to beat the good old basic propane stove -- but a dual-fuel stove that will run on unleaded gasoline is a better choice for emergencies. Another popular option is the good old outdoor grill -- if you're creative, you can warm or cook just about anything on the grill. Some grills even have an accessory burner which works great for making soup or hot beverages.
Improvised: Well, not truly improvised, but the most frugal option for cooking heat is military-surplus trioxane bars burned in an Esbit mini-stove. While trioxane is supposedly non-toxic, you should plan on using it with at least a little ventilation.
One final note: if you wander the aisles of camping gear at your local outdoors or sporting-goods store, you will see many zero-power alternatives to familiar kitchen gear. Camping equipment is a particularly good source of food-preparation gear for your preparedness kit.
Sanitation -- what's that smell? Ew!
You should assume that, in an emergency, there will be no water available to wash dishes or flush toilets, and minimal (if any) water available for personal hygiene. This will be a challenge for most Americans, who are accustomed to taking a nice, hot shower or bath at least once per day.
= Kitchen sanitation =
Assuming that water is in short supply, kitchen sanitation can be a challenge. You may need to improvise. If you are being careful to prepare only as much food as people can eat, the task is simplified somewhat. Paper towels and sanitizing wipes can be an effective means of cleaning up pots and pans. Dry sand makes an excellent improvised pot-scrubber. Be sure that any cooking vessels, dishes, or utensils are clean and dry before storing them for the next meal.
= Personal hygiene =
For personal cleanliness in emergency situations, the author relies on a few common items: moist baby wipes, waterless hand cleaner/degreaser, and hand sanitizer. You can, in fact, get reasonably clean all over using only baby wipes. Your correspondent's preparedness kits include quite a few sealed "bricks" of unscented baby wipes stored in individual ziplock "freezer" bags. (As a side note, ziplock bags are one of the greatest inventions of all time. If I had to be stranded on a desert island with only three things, I'd take ziplock bags, a pack of cable ties, and my Leatherman.) Note also that baby wipes make a superior toilet paper substitute.
Likewise, alcohol-based hand sanitizer is quite useful. Keeping your hands and face clean can be difficult but is very important in avoiding infections and disease during a disaster. (See Medical below for discussion of various disposable gloves.)
Finally, all emergency kits should have a supply of feminine hygiene products. Many of these materials are dual-use for medical response in an emergency.
= Potty breaks =
And then there's the call of nature, i.e. the human need to eliminate bodily wastes. You MUST have a plan for dealing with this. Fortunately, this need can be met simply and inexpensively.
In my opinion, the best solution is the Reliance Luggable Loo. This is about as simple as it gets -- it's a toilet seat affixed to a 5-gallon bucket. Be sure to acquire a supply of Bio-Blue or similar product, and store it in your Loo along with toilet paper, baby wipes (see above) and a roll of thick, strong trash bags. You do NOT want these bags to break or leak, as they will be serving as the liner in your Loo, and then tied off for removal and disposal.
Electricity -- sweet, sweet AC current
Face it, you live an electricity-centric lifestyle. You're reading this very Diary on a computer powered by the stuff, connected to the Internet which depends on ultra-reliable electric power. If you've ever been in your house during a power outage, you probably noticed how much quieter it was without the humming and whirring of your electric lifestyle.
When most people think about electricity in a disaster, they immediately think "I gotta get me a generator!" Well, generators are nice, but for many people they're overkill. Let's look at some of the alternatives.
= Power generation =
Portable generator: Noisy, which can draw the attention of folks who, shall we say, didn't consider preparedness before the big quake hit. They can, however, be tremendously useful, and are relatively fuel-efficient if you keep the running load in the 50-60% range of the generator's rated capacity. Not normally designed to run 24x7, and a couple weeks of continuous operation will seriously shorten the time to rebuild.
Permanently installed generator: Convenient, can be set up to kick in automatically if the power goes out. Generally quieter than portables, but still noisy. Diesel units are available, which is nice because the authorities are much more amenable to you storing significant quantities of diesel fuel than, say, gasoline. (It's that whole explosion thing, y'know.) If you live in the country, LP-fueled generators may also be an option worth considering.
Solar array with battery bank: Dual-use, doesn't directly pollute, amount of energy available depends on size of solar array, size and number of batteries, etc. Expensive up-front costs, pays for itself especially if your state subsidizes residential solar.
= The inverter alternative =
As we discussed, though, for many people these options are either overkill or represent a serious financial burden. If you think about it, a generator is basically an internal-combustion engine attached to a device that converts the mechanical energy into electricity. Can you think of anywhere you might find a convenient, quiet, well-maintained internal combustion engine?
Yes, grasshopper, I'm talking about your car. With a DC-to-AC inverter, you can run your refrigerator, enough CFL lights to illuminate your main room nicely, a AA/C/D-cell battery charger, your laptop, and so forth -- all at the same time. In fact, you can get an inverter big enough to do this for under $200.
One word about running that fridge, though: modern refrigerators are fairly frugal in their steady-state energy usage, with two exceptions: when it first starts up (up to 2500W for 1-2 sec!) and when you open the door and all of those nice lights come on (700W). Consider disconnecting all the light bulbs and use a flashlight.
If you go this route, keep in mind that your vehicle will probably be idling at least half of the time you're using the inverter so you can avoid killing your battery. You will need to figure out how much fuel your car or truck uses per hour at idle to plan effectively. This isn't too hard:
Fill up your gas tank and a plastic fuel can with graduated
markings on the side.
Drive directly home, turn off your car, and top off the tank.
Note the level on the fuel can. Write it down.
Turn the AC to full blast, and your headlights on high beam.
Leave the door open so the interior lights will be on. This is to
simulate the worst-case load of the inverter.
Start your car and let it idle for 15 minutes exactly, then turn it
off.
Top off your gas tank from the fuel can.
Note the new fuel level in the fuel can. Write it down.
Subtract level reading 1 from level reading 2, and multiply by 4.
This is the number of gallons per hour.
Keep in mind that once you eat all of the food in your fridge and freezer, or transfer it into a cooler (hint) you can greatly extend your fuel supply by only running this setup part of the day.
It's also a very good idea to keep one of those self-contained jumpstart packs handy in case you run your battery down too much to start your car. (Let's be honest -- those jumpstart power packs are a great thing to have in your trunk no matter what!)
The advanced electric-systems hacker might consider acquiring one or more large sealed lead-acid batteries and a DC-DC charger. Depending on sizing, this could enable round-the-clock power for your inverter when coupled with a couple of hours of charging off the car's power (or any AC power source) each day.
One final tip on this subject: consider acquiring a length of appropriately-sized flexible metal ducting to enable you to safely run your vehicle in a closed garage. (Obviously, if your exhaust system leaks this is a bad idea regardless of any ducting between the tailpipe and the outdoors.) Be sure to get a roll of high-temperature metallic tape (auto-parts store) to get a reasonably good seal between the ducting and the tailpipe(s). If you don't know how to do this safely, don't even try it. Run your vehicle with the garage door open, but post a guard the entire time it's running.
Transportation - the burden and blessing of America
For this section, we're going to assume you own at least one vehicle. (Sorry, city-dwellers, you already know what your options are. Consider getting a bike and helmet if you're worried about evacuating under your own power.) We shall also presume that your vehicle is reasonably functional and runs on gasoline. The type of fuel factors into fuel storage limitations.
Chest-thumping about "I never let my tank get below half-empty" aside, assume for a moment that the crisis hits and your gas gauge is near E. Even if you want to evacuate from the region in your vehicle, this is not an auspicious way to start your adventure. At a minimum, you should keep a 5-gallon reserve supply of fuel in an accessible location.
The Authorities, for good reason, frown on private citizens storing more than about 25 gallons of gas at home. Even that should be in securely sealed, high-strength 5-gallon containers. Your humble correspondent has found that surplus NATO 5-gallon fuel cans, suitably cleaned and painted with Rustoleum primer and red gloss, are excellent for storing fuel safely. These cans are quite possibly strong enough that I could use one hold up my truck for a tire change. Don't bother asking questions about how much fuel is stored at the author's home -- it's enough for my plans, and it's stored safely, and that's all I'm saying.
A couple of notes about storing fuel:
Gasoline requires a stabilizing additive to last more than 60-90
days. The most popular product on the market is Sta-Bil. Be sure
to check out the 'Lawn Mower Racing link at the Sta-Bil site. :)
TIP: A double dose of Sta-Bil (4oz per 5-gallon can) will keep gas
fresh for 24 months.
Every year, use half of your stored fuel to fill up your vehicle and
refill the cans with fresh fuel and more Sta-Bil. Put a piece of
tape on each can with the fill-up date.
TIP: Pick a holiday (e.g. Memorial Day) and rotate your stored fuel
on that holiday every year. It's much easier to remember.
IMPORTANT: Any significant quantity of stored gasoline should be
NOT be in your house, or in a building attached to your house. If
you don't have a shed, Rubbermaid makes inexpensive, durable
outdoor storage in a variety of sizes and shapes. Plan on adding a
hasp and outdoor-rated combination lock to whatever outdoor
storage you use. (Don't use a keyed lock unless you put a key
into a combination-access lockbox nearby, and even then it's not
a great idea.)
A few more notes about surplus NATO fuel cans:
Gasoline storage containers are legally required to be bright red in
color in the US and (I think) Canada.
Surplus 5-gallon NATO fuel cans MUST be cleaned and rust
-inhibiting primer applied before the bright-red paint goes on.
