When it all goes down

Planning for the long one

Most emergencies end in days: the power comes back, the roads reopen, help arrives. Most of our guides are built for those. This one is for the rare, serious event that doesn't end quickly, such as a regional grid failure, a severe pandemic, an economic collapse or a war, when you may be on your own for weeks or months.

Nobody can prepare for everything, and you don't need a bunker. A household with water, food, a way to stay warm and clean, basic medical skills and good neighbors is far ahead of most people.

Priorities: the rule of threes

Survival instructors use a rough rule to keep priorities straight. A person can survive about 3 minutes without air, about 3 hours exposed to severe cold or heat, about 3 days without water and about 3 weeks without food. The numbers are rough, but the order matters: shelter and warmth before water, and water before food.

• 1. Safety: get away from immediate danger such as fire, flood, gas or violence.
• 2. Shelter and temperature: stay warm and dry, or cool in a heat wave.
• 3. Water: safe water for drinking and hygiene.
• 4. Food: enough calories to keep working.
• 5. Health and sanitation: stop disease before it starts.
• 6. Security and community: protect the household and work with the people around you.

Sanitation: the danger nobody plans for

In long emergencies, disease spread by human waste and dirty hands has often killed more people than hunger. When toilets can't flush, you need a plan from the first day.

• Don't flush if sewers or septic systems may be backed up. Line the toilet bowl with a heavy trash bag, or use a 5-gallon bucket with a toilet-seat lid.
• The two-bucket method: one bucket for urine and one for solid waste, covered after each use with sawdust, cat litter, peat or dry soil. Keeping them separate cuts the smell dramatically.
• Seal full bags and keep them in a covered bin away from the house until they can be buried or collected.
• For a longer stay, dig a latrine at least 200 feet (60 meters) from any water source, well or garden, and cover waste with soil after each use.
• Handwashing with soap is not optional: after the toilet, before food, after handling raw water. A jug hung on a string and tipped with a foot loop, often called a tippy tap, saves water.
• Stock bleach, soap, trash bags, toilet paper, menstrual supplies, diapers and disinfectant.

Staying warm, or cool, without power

• Pick one room, ideally small, interior and on the sunny side, and live in it. Close off the rest of the house.
• Insulate it: hang blankets over windows and doorways, roll towels against drafts, and lay rugs on the floor.
• Dress in layers, wear a hat indoors, and sleep in warm sleeping bags. Sharing a room shares body heat.
• A wood stove is the best long-term heat. Indoor-rated propane or kerosene heaters must be used exactly as directed, with a window cracked and a working carbon monoxide alarm.
• In summer heat, stay on the lowest floor, open windows at night, close windows and curtains by day, and wet skin and clothing to cool down.
• Know the signs of hypothermia (shivering, confusion, slurred speech, clumsiness) and heat stroke (hot skin, confusion, collapse). Both are emergencies.

Cooking and fuel

• Store fuel you can use safely: propane for a camp stove or grill, charcoal, and dry firewood. Keep it away from the house and rotate it.
• A rocket stove, a small insulated L-shaped chimney you can build from bricks or cans, cooks a meal on a handful of sticks.
• Retained-heat cooking saves a great deal of fuel: bring the pot to a boil, then wrap it in blankets or set it in a cooler to finish.
• A solar oven cooks on sunny days with no fuel at all.
• Keep a fire extinguisher near every cooking spot. The fire department may not be able to come.

Health and medicine

In a long emergency, hospitals and pharmacies may be overwhelmed or closed. Small problems, like an infected cut, a bad tooth or dehydration from diarrhea, become serious ones.

• Take a first aid and CPR course now. A Stop the Bleed class teaches how to control severe bleeding in about an hour.
• Build a real medical kit: bandages and gauze, tape, antiseptic, a tourniquet, gloves, a thermometer, pain and fever medicine, antihistamines, anti-diarrheal tablets and oral rehydration salts.
• Ask your doctor about keeping an extra supply of essential prescriptions, and keep paper copies of them.
• Know how to make oral rehydration solution: 6 level teaspoons of sugar and half a level teaspoon of salt stirred into 1 liter of clean water.
• Look after your teeth now. A toothache with no dentist is miserable. Store spare toothbrushes and floss.
• Keep a paper medical reference, such as Hesperian's Where There Is No Doctor, with the kit.

Don't show your cards

One of the most important survival rules is also the simplest: don't let anyone know what you have. In a widespread shortage, when everyone around you, your neighbors included, is short of food and water, a household known to have food, water, fuel or medicine becomes a target.

Most people stay decent in a crisis. But as shortages drag on, some go looking for supplies and will take them any way they can: by begging, by pressure, by theft or by force. Desperate parents will do things they never imagined to feed their children. The safest supplies are the ones nobody knows exist.

• Start now. Secrecy works best before trouble starts. Don't brag about your stockpile, post photos of your pantry or buckets online, or talk about it at work, at church, at the gym or with delivery drivers.
• Make sure everyone in your circle does the same. Teach children not to talk about the food at home, and agree on a simple answer for anyone who asks: we're getting by, same as everyone else.
• Bring supplies home quietly. Unload bulk buys inside the garage or after dark, and break down boxes. Don't leave empty buckets or food-storage packaging at the curb.
• Look like everyone else. During a shortage, don't be seen eating well in public, keep cooking smells to a minimum, and think twice about running a noisy generator when the rest of the street is dark.
• Black out at night. Cover windows so lanterns, lights and screens can't be seen from outside, especially if yours would be the only lit house on the street.
• Don't keep everything in one place. Split supplies between several hidden spots in the home, so if one is found you aren't wiped out.
• Keep a small, ordinary pantry in the kitchen. If anyone gets in or comes asking, a modest shelf is all they see.
• Be careful who you trust. Bring into your plans only people whose loyalty you are sure of. Every extra person who knows is one more person who can let it slip, especially under pressure.
• If you choose to help others, share quietly. Give modest amounts, as if from a nearly empty cupboard, rather than revealing how much you hold. Giving through a church or community group keeps your name out of it.
• Harden the home: solid doors, good deadbolts, door bars, window locks, and a plan for where the family goes if someone tries to get in.

Community beats going it alone

The people who came through long crises were rarely lone survivalists in the woods. They were families and neighborhoods that pooled food, skills and work: one neighbor gardens, another is a nurse, another can fix engines or keep a wood stove going.

• Make a list of useful skills nearby: medical, mechanical, farming, hunting, ham radio, carpentry.
• Know your neighbors without telling them what you have. Agree on how you will look out for each other: a street that watches together is far safer than one house alone.
• Set aside a few extra bags of rice and beans to give away quietly. It builds goodwill without revealing how much you hold.
• Join or start a local preparedness group, take Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) training, or join a ham radio club.

Skills that outlast supplies

Supplies run out. Skills don't. The best preparation is learning now, while mistakes are cheap.

• Growing food: start a garden now, and save seeds from open-pollinated (heirloom) varieties so you can replant.
• Preserving food: canning, drying and root cellaring.
• Cooking from scratch with basic staples, including baking bread from stored wheat.
• Making fire, purifying water and giving basic first aid.
• Basic repairs: plumbing, carpentry, sewing and small engines.
• Finding your way with a paper map and compass, and communicating by radio.

Morale, routine and information

Long emergencies test the mind as much as the body. Keep a daily routine with set times for meals, work, rest and checking the radio. Give everyone, children included, real jobs. Keep books, cards and games, and protect everyone's sleep.

Stay informed with a battery or hand-crank radio, and be wary of rumors. Decisions made in panic, like leaving a safe home because of a rumor, can be more dangerous than the crisis itself.