Natural Disaster/Doomsday. Are you prepared?

This may be a trifle cynical, however, if you stock up to FEMA standards or better, I would strongly suggest you prepare to defend your stocks from your neighbors who did not stock up!

Look at the realities.

An average person needs approximately 1 gallon of water a day to drink. For a family of four for three days, you need 12 gallons of drinking water.

The average toilet requires 3.6 gallons per flush. One flush per day per person requires 14.4 gallons per day for a family of four or 43.2 gallons for three days.

For three days, you can survive on cold food, save your propane for HEAT!

Actually, for most of us, for three days we can survive with very little food.

I have 5 acres with trees for fuel source. A wood burning stove. A standard pantry with canned goods and almost always keep a decent supply of bottled water - because I like to drink it not because I think we're all doomed. My biggest problem over the long haul would be a protein source.. but we have some deer roaming around and I have a hunting rifle although I haven't used it on an animal. A large lake is on the St. John's River and within about 15-20 minute walk from my house - gator tail, bass, carp, blue crabs, and freshwater mussels would all be available until the masses depleted them.

A great book to read is called the Disaster Preparedness Handbook by Arthur Bradley it is a great book and more practical. You should really shoot for a 30 day supply of food you eat and simply rotate. 3 days simply is not enough. I like Arthur B's book because it is so practical. Many of the survivalists like James W Rawles and others promote having a whole compound and the cost and time to build it are simply not realistic. 

For most people just having 1 month of food on hand would be a huge step. Try it. At first it is like trying to do your first budget in that you have no idea how much milk you use in one month etc. There are some great options for milk and eggs in that there are powdered versions. But try to stock up on things you use everyday.

As for us, I feel that we are fairly well prepared for what ever may come along. 

I did do a quick check of my pantry and storage cabinets in the garage and we could use more bottled water for drinking and canned veg/fruits. 

I've gotten our family by for over a week with very little to go on and no power or water.   

Having lived in the middle of the Pacific Ocean most of my life, you learn inherently to be prepared, or should I say be able to survive. 

Hurricanes, etc…

I could use some kind of “camp fire” type of cookware. 

I use to have all of that, an old stovetop percolator and so on. 

All I have now is a cast iron pan, a covered pot would be useful. 

We live in the High Desert now, so I don’t think that we would need fuel for heat (it really doesn’t get that cold here anyway), just cooking. 

But as chef Pete made mention, you can eat foods cold. 

As for protecting our supply, well, it’s legal to carry a firearm here.