I talked a little bit the other day about my start into the prepping life and today I’m going to cover what really pushed me right over so to speak. As I mentioned before I started building out by creating my lists and list of lists and still more lists. Clearly having a sustainable supply of water is going to be pretty high on anyone’s list. At the time I got started I was 100% dependent on city provided water. Not a good place to be when everything stops working. I did at least have two 50-gallon hot water heaters which would provide some water for a while, but my first priority became to increase my on hand supply of water. After a lot of debating with myself I ended up going with the Water Brick storage solution.
For me it was ideal because the smaller form factor (3.5 gallons each) meant I could easily stack and store them around the house and individual ones were portable to take to events (ballgames, camping, etc). It was one of my earliest prepping purchases. And it turned out to be VERY timely.
About three months later, we woke up one Saturday morning to no water. Only the tiniest drip would come out of any faucet. We did a quick check of the neighborhood website and found that many of our neighbors where having the same problem. We didn’t know it yet, but a pipe had burst in the main water tower and in the process had flooded the main control room (destroying everything) and taking out two of the water pumps as well. The end result was no water for our entire neighborhood. It took about 16 hours for them to determine there was no quick fix and shift us over to using water from another source. But then we were on a “boil notice” for the next two weeks.
Not at our house though. Thanks to my water bricks we just placed one on the kitchen counter and we were good to go. It was easy to swap them out when they ran out and we never had to boil any water during the event (which would have been a pain trying to boil water for kiddos to brush their teeth).
After that, I never looked back. I was going to be a card-carrying Prepper from then on.
I learned several important lessons that day:
- Prepping doesn’t have to be only about the end of the world. There are all kinds of “normal” life events where they come in handy. This resulted in adjustments to my lists as I expanded my thinking on the subject
- The doom and gloom stories about grocery stores being empty in three days are probably true. This event was local to my neighborhood. Not the whole state, county, or even city…one neighborhood. And by Sunday morning (24 hours after the initial event) you couldn’t buy bottled water anywhere within miles of my house….and thankfully we didn’t need it.
- You actually need to use (or practice as appropriate) with your preps. You don’t know when you are going to wake up and the “event” is going to have already happened. If your preps and skills are not already set up…it’s too late.
