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 Emergency Test Plan 
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 Emergency Test Plan
by Ray and Sally Strackbein
www.EmergencyKitchen.com

If you think your emergency preparations are complete and you haven't tested your plan, you are in trouble.

Begin testing long before your preparations are complete. Testing early reveals flaws in your plans and assumptions while you still have time and resources.

Our first test last winter opened our eyes to a number of areas that needed more attention in our home. Your test will do the same. Here are your choices:

Find out early - avoid foolish, wasteful or impractical preparations.
Find out now - while you can still take care of the problems and get what you need.
Find out later - when your choices are non existent.

Ray and Sally's Suggested Emergency Test

1. Do not turn your electricity, water or gas off. There is no reason to lose the food in your refrigerator or freezer. Just don't use them. Notice how many times you are tempted. You may want to tape them closed.

2. Do your test on a weekend or other 2-day period when you do not have obligations which require you to use your car or public transportation.

3. Record a message on your answering machine stating: "We are testing our emergency plan and will not be answering our phone until [your day and time]." Pick up or return calls only if it is an emergency. If you don't have an answering machine, ask the caller if the call is an emergency. If it isn't, state the above message and ask the caller to call back after your test is over. Do not allow yourself to be drawn into a long conversation. Let the most assertive family member do "phone duty."

4. Do not open your refrigerator or freezer. Eat only non-perishable foods.

5. Unplug all televisions, clocks, radios, stereos and anything with digital displays or cover them to reduce the light in the house at night.

6. Do not use electricity for light. Keep track of your lighting supplies and how much is used up in your test. If you have bright street lights, or other outside light, cover your windows with black plastic. You need to see how your lighting plans hold up in total nighttime darkness.

7. Use only water you have stored, unless you have an emergency compliant water supply. Keep track of how much you use for each purpose.

8. Do not use your toilets or unless you have emergency compliant ones (composting, septic, etc.). Most people have not spent much time on this topic. See the paper on waste at: http://www.EmergencyKitchen.com/html/wa ... posal.html

9. Do not use your sink drains and do not use your garbage disposal. Sink drains may be used if emergency compliant (septic system or other non-municipal waste system).

10. Do not listen to radio or watch television or participate in any gatherings that would be unlikely in an emergency scenario.

11. Pay close attention to your interaction with those around you. Do not use television, radio, computer, Internet, telephone or Nintendo. People, books, games, housework and emergencies may be your only relief from boredom.

12. Keep track of fuel usage on your alternative cooking sources. This will help you gauge your needs.

13. Cautions: make sure you have fire extinguishers, battery operated smoke and carbon monoxide detectors. Clear any flammable items away from any area where you plan to burn anything for light or cooking (or anything else).

14. Do not use your regular heater or air conditoner unless they are emergency compliant.

15. Keep notes about what you need to do to make your plan complete and do what needs to be done to be prepared.

Remember that this will only be a drill and a drill is not the real thing. The psychological reactions to the drill may be significantly different than the reactions to the real thing. For example, when our power failed because of the ice storm, our resident teenager was ready and willing to chop wood or do whatever was necessary to keep us warm and alive.

You will probably have more people in your home if there is an emergency. Your relatives and friends probably will not come to participate in your drill, but they will come when they need to. You may want to use your drill time to plan strategies for maintaining healthy relationships.

Good luck in your emergency test. Do it soon!

http://www.emergencykitchen.com/html/emergency_test.html

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The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little. - FDR


Mon Nov 16, 2009 3:20 pm
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Post Re: Emergency Test Plan
This is another one that i found on GLP...
(1)
Quote:
In this post I’d like to begin by talking about things that can go wrong. We’ve touched on this subject before but it is really worth several long essays. Here I will just stick with the basics, ie., bugging out, travelling, hiking, camping etc and all the things we are likely to do in almost any scenario.

Sometimes it’s good for us to realise, that even though we are survivalists, there are things we can overlook that might bring a sudden, or not so sudden, halt to our plans. I know from my own experiences that it is often the trifling detail that can make a success or failure of an operation, and when we are talking about survival ATSHTF there may be no second chances. The things listed below do not just happen to newbies, they can happen to all of us if we don’t think them through well beforehand and gain at least some experience in doing the things that we might be called on to do ATSHTF.

There are several good exercises. Eg., wait for a stormy night and take a bus 40 kilometers away and walk home through the rain. Take your rain gear with you and your webbing kit if you like, and take note of what happens eg., what vital piece of equipment didn’t you have? was your gear up to the job? what were the unforeseen events that you were ill equipped for? There will be a few surprises.

I’ve done this exercise in suburbia and here are some possible notes you might make after completing the above exercise.

1. Your boots had never been tested in the wet before. After five kilometers you have serious blisters and the skin has rubbed away on the heel of one foot. You have to terminate the exercise.

2. Your wet clothing causes serious rashes, especially to the groin area and make progress very painful.

3. Your webbing pack doesn’t have a drain hole and water sloshes around inside, ruining some food and a map.

4. Your route is too dangerous. There are places without footpaths or other safe routes away from speeding cars.

5. You can’t walk 40 kilometers. You are not fit enough.

Others might include.

1. I thought that I had packed everything, but I left my tea bags at home.

2. I could have gone on if I had had a couple of Band-Aids to put over a blister on my foot.

3. Why didn’t I carry a spare strap support for my webbing kit? I had to carry the whole lot home slung over my shoulder.

4. A hat would have been nice to keep the rain off my head.

The above represents a simple exercise. ATSHTF things are likely to be more complicated. You might not only have to walk that same 40 kilometers, but take your family with you and fight off thugs and dodge police patrols and evade snipers, and do it all with a piece of shrapnel in your belly.

So the question is, how can survivalists increase their chances of things not going badly wrong? The answer IMHO is to look at detail. This is the thing that sets the amateur and the professional apart. Everything exists in detail - nothing exists in the form of a sketch. If you can say what you intend to do in one sentence, then you haven’t thought about detail, and there is a high chance that you will fail.

Here are some points:

1. Always check your facts. Most of us carry ideas in our heads which we assume to be facts, but they are not facts. I’ve learnt this the hard way on more than one occasion.

2. Try not to make any assumptions, whether positive or negative. We have to have a true picture of the situation. Assumptions are a condition of your consciousness and do not live in reality.

3. Always prepare for the big ones: cold, communications, food, maps, clothing, footwear and transport. These things, once organised, tend to be forgiving when other detail goes wrong eg., if a route is longer than expected, food and warmth will still save your life.

4. Always mentally rehearse all the details that can go wrong and prepare for these.

5. Try not to have too many elements in a plan - if one falls everything will fall with it.

6. Understand human nature. If your plan involves meeting someone at a crucial time, how do you know that person will turn up? If it involves calling a person on their mobile telephone at a crucial time, how do you know that they will have it switched on? Making assumptions here could cost lives.

... and never be under any illusions. Incompetent idiots are not the exception in any plan, they are the norm. A competent person is the extreme rarity.

ATSHTF there will be another element which is stress. Stress is an interesting thing which causes all kinds of bizarre behaviour. There will be complete personality changes in most people, mostly in a negative way. I’ve seen such stress aboard a motor yacht when it had gone aground at Stradbroke Island. The lesson I learned is that people do not behave the same way when they are under stress, and most often all their rational abilities desert them. Some freeze and are unable to do anything, others behave like madmen, others go into tantrums etc. This type of behaviour can be counted on, and any plan that may involve a future stressful situation must take this into account.

(1)
http://www.godlikeproductions.com/forum ... 968964/pg1

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Remember: this whole thing is about self-responsibility, self-rule and self choice.
Überm Sternenzelt richtet Gott, wie wir gerichtet.


Tue Jan 19, 2010 8:09 am
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Post Re: Emergency Test Plan
Yep, recall, the devil is in the details.

My experiences from Ike?

1. Forgot to store ground coffee. Our coffee pot grinds the beans first - beans only stored. A hammer and a ziploc bag work great to "grind" coffee beans. ;)

2. Dark in the house. It still amazes me how dark it got in the house and how quickly that happened. We now both have headlamps to use in the house.

3. Doing dishes in the dark is no fun at all! See #2 above re: headlamps. You may want to make your biggest meal at lunch instead of dinner due to the dish problem.

4. Garbage. Sigh! This was/is an ongoing problem. It was after Rita when so many folks stayed in my home and it definitely was after Ike. Can goods are great in a disaster situation. They are easy to open, easy to prepare (some ya just stick a fork in and go). Even military MRE's present a waste problem because each and every item is wrapped and then put in a box! :gah

And don't EVEN get me started on the dad gum water bottles and plastic ice bags. :headbang

So if you don't have garbage collection for a week or two - what ya gonna do? What ya gonna do when they come for you?

:embarressed Sorry! Couldn't help myself. :roflmao

We began rinsing cans (still need to get a can crusher), placing vegetable matter into the compost bin and were going to burn trash (you need a sturdy, metal barrel for this) when - voila - here came a garbage truck down our street. :heart

So I don't (yet) have a solution for this one. :dunno

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The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little. - FDR


Tue Jan 19, 2010 9:00 am
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Post Re: Emergency Test Plan
Quote:
We began rinsing cans (still need to get a can crusher)
There are many out there, but "powered", this one not !


Another for bigger cans


Quote:
were going to burn trash (you need a sturdy, metal barrel for this)


What about a Steam powered Babington Burner?

(1)
Quote:

Making a Babington Burner is faily simple, but there are a number of pieces that have to work together in order to do so.

Also, please note that I'm not a mechanical engineer (I'm a software engineer, actually), and playing with combustible fuels, while fun, can be rather dangerous. I highly recommend keeping a fire extinguisher close to your Babington burner at all times, especially while you're tinkering with it.



And i like Inner Circle´s music too:



(1)
http://www.aipengineering.com/babington ... HOWTO.html

_________________
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Remember: this whole thing is about self-responsibility, self-rule and self choice.
Überm Sternenzelt richtet Gott, wie wir gerichtet.


Tue Jan 19, 2010 6:16 pm
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Post Re: Emergency Test Plan
Thanks, recall!

Yep, I'm looking for a plain ole can crusher - no power needed!

_________________
The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little. - FDR


Wed Jan 20, 2010 7:29 am
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