I wonder if all the beans and rice I bought in preparation for Y2K are still good?

There's one thing prepper fantasies have in common... the impending doom never comes. It's fun to think about. But, real honestly, if the survivors at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were able to get by in the days after their tragedy, I bet I could figure something out on an ad-hoc basis.

If you want to take this seriously you should be rotating all canned goods every few years. You're basically trading off the tiny cost of canned goods with a small risk of getting a disease from bad food (well-stored cans should be fine for 5 years, any bulging cans should be discarded), which isn't normally a huge problem, but during emergencies, could be.

If you look at history, a lot of wars were won or lost based on how well a city prepared for a sustained siege.

in the case of hiroshima, water pumps were restored 4 days after the bombing, but of course the story is more involved (http://www.hiroshimapeacemedia.jp/?p=47988)

>I've lived for 30 days in alaska on a glacier

> devolved into small groups of people who didn't share food.

In what context did this happen? Doesn't sound like a fun camping trip

I was on a course from something like the Wilderness Education Association- basically training to be a "wilderness leader" (but the instructors were pretty clueless). Some things I learned: While in most places if it rains you will dry out after a few days, but it's so humid in alaska the only way to dry clothes is to wear them at night in a wet sleeping bag (it dries by morning). Glacier runoff rivers are no joke, we almost lost an instructor and a student while crossing. If you don't manage your food properly, you will end up subsisting on things like cake mix(!) for the last few days. When supplies get low, people act different (greedy).

There's a saying: "civilization is only three meals away from anarchy", that only made sense to me after day 28.

Cool. Thanks for answering

I'm pretty sure storing 30 days of water would violate my lease. That's its own disaster waiting to happen.

Actually, it's not as bad as you think.

tl;dr - All you need is a bathtub, a WaterBob, and 10 teaspoons of bleach.

The average bathtub holds about 80 Gallons of water, that's enough for two and a half people for 30 days. The rule of thumb is one gallon per person per day. See: https://www.beprepared.com/blog/18680/much-water-store/

I always have a few of these things called "The Water Bob" stored in a closet, a few cause QC isn't that great. Its like a giant plastic bag that sits in your tub and holds water.

You can add 1/8 teaspoon (or 8 drops) of household bleach per gallon to get potable water. See: https://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/pdf/emergency/09_202278-b_m...

I only know this cause I lived over seas during the first gulf war, and we had to have prep stuff for scud attacks. We didn't have the WaterBob, but there were plenty of 50gal plastic storage containers. When the sirens went off, we set the jugs to fill in the showers, and hid in our inner most room. Fun times all around really. Free gas masks though! So that was nice.

Why should I prep for a disaster? The odds of needing those supplies is effectively zero, and I don’t have the storage space for them.

You should only prep for disaster if you want to survive a disaster, which is rare for more people. I live in earthquake country, and though I have not experienced anything larger than M4 in the past 28 years, stochastically we can expect a very large ($BILLIONS, with massive short term problems) quake at some point in Northern California in the next 50 years.

The items I describe fit on a single shelf (except the water; I have a water filter and a nearby stream, so I only keep a few liters on hand).

The stuff described would mostly fit in a backpack as it's all backpacking gear to begin with. The only thing that wouldn't would be 30 days of food and water which is probably overkill. A reasonable food supply would fit in a couple cubic feet and multiple redundant water purification options could fit in a pocket.

I'm just a backpacker though not a doomsday prepper, the stuff we carry isn't always appropriate for an emergency situation and is generally geared towards being very portable rather than robust/100% reliable.

Because there is an ongoing disaster?