When I wrote the email back in early April before anyone knew that “pigs flew”, I was simply making a statement that our family would be simulating an emergency, not calling upon Dante's friends from the underworld to spew forth a new strand of virus. So I surely hope that I had nothing to do with the CDC and WHO now threatening to call a global pandemic due to H1N1, swine flu or what ever you call the weee beastie!So here is our report of our findings from the 3 day simulation.
Firstly let me just say that for those that may have doubted our stamina and ability to overcome the insurmountable odds of having to stay in our cozy home with out electricity, gas, running water or any of the finer luxuries of life. Well, you were right. We couldn’t wait to get into that shower Friday afternoon and rinse off the grime and smoke smell. No really, we actually, based on our schedule, before we even started had decided it would be a 2 ½ day event not 3 days. So we ran from Wednesday to Friday Afternoon.
Day 1)
We set the stage with the kids by telling them about swine flu (wasn’t that just wonderful timing. I couldn’t have planned that better myself) and that last night I heard on the radio that we had to stay in our houses and not leave our property until they say we can leave. Despite the kids knowing we were going to have an “electricity day” (a day without electricity) they took my story every bit. Quite trusting our little munchkins!
We started by getting out our flash lights and beginning to prepare where we could. Emma still being asleep at this hour, we decided to carefully, without waking the water nazi, drain all the water from the pressure system at the tub before she got to it. One of her favorite past times when she has finished dumping the freshly filled bird food, or taking a hand full of charcoal from the fireplace and covering her body, is to turn on the bath tub and not let you know she has done it. She takes great delight in running the water from the HOT tap, not the cold. You see, in the mind of a “nearly 2 year old” she is contriving ways to make us suffer all sorts of pains of body and mind. In her highly developed melon, she realizes that the cold is just an annoyance, but
running the hot, now that disrupts the mental equilibrium of dad when he goes to take a nice hot shower and there is no hot left!
We managed to get about 7 gallons of water out of our house system before the system lost all pressure. We found that the white storage containers we use for storing grain etc worked real well.
We instructed the kids on toilet and water usage requirements. We designated one Loo as a number 1 spot and then decided that we had 4 other Loo’s to use as number 2 spots. A 2 loo would be flushed after using it. The 1 loo would sit until the end of the day and then be flushed, thus helping to not use so much water.
Just a hit for those thinking of trying this at home! DON’T! Just get more water! The lovely aromas from 4 people using the same loo with no flush just aint quite what you want in your home when you are quarantined.
We provided baby wipes for hands and then after the baby wipe, a bottle of hand sanitizer. Some habits die hard I guess because I came to figure that I am some what of a neurotic hand washer and still had to use some rinse water to rise my hands.
KeriLyn is still very involved with feeding, changing poop, feeding and then changing poop again. This little Olivia, she has had a wonderful way of coloring our house mustard color since coming and joining us. So KeriLyn’s job has been very full on.
While KeriLyn was taking care of the two littlen’s, with the help of the kids I was busy in the kitchen working on keeping dishes clean and the place tidy to some extent. It wasn’t until day 2 that KeriLyn made the wonderfully enlightening suggestion to just do the dishes once a day and save on all that water and heating up hot water that I was doing 4 times the day before. She is a clever cooking my wife, can’t say the same for the neurotic hand sanitizing dish washing nit wit of her husband.
It was about lunch time when we were about out of water. 7 gallons in about 3 hours. Scary!!! I must point out at this stage that the water I am referring to is only for rinsing, flushing and…. Rinsing! We had other drinking water that we have on storage and go through on a monthly basis from the
So come lunch time there was a need to get more of that high quality H2O! So we decided that we’d break into our water holding tank (for those that don’t understand what this is, we live of a well that pumps into a 1700gallon holding tank. When the house calls for water the pump in the house pulls from this tank and wahla! Water at the tap). So we unscrewed the 5-6 screws that hold down the lid and rigged up one of our white buckets for dipping.
Using a knife I drilled a small hole in the rim of the bottom of the bucket. Tied string to the hole and then another 2nd string to the handle. The one on the bottom (if you get my picture) was used to tilt the bucket so we could fill it up, then pullerup and we have water! I filled 2 more buckets this way and called it good for the day! We had now enough until day 2.
One last point on water for now, we would heat our water on the BBQ. I found that using a lid helped it to heat and boil much quicker than no lid. Just in case you hadn’t figured that one out!
So dinner that night was a dutch oven veggie and potato meal. Very tasty once done.
Another tip, Keep kids away from the top of dutch ovens. No matter how many times you tell the “nearly 2 year old”, “hot don’t touch”, their superior mental capacities must show you just how wrong you are and that they are invincible. Yes Emma now logged away another tidbit of information in that melon of hers about dutch ovens, along with a little blister on her pointer finger.
Dylan was soooo excited. Soooo doesn’t quite describe the level of excitement. Let me try to conger up in your mind just how excited the lad was. Imagine a massive wale being washed up on shore and then a bunch of people that really thought the process through long and hard, deciding to just blow it up with dynamite (yes this is a great youtube video for those that want to watch it you can follow the link here ).
Now picture a little kid that loves explosions! Ok, you can picture a dad also if you must, but here is this kid ready to watch the video on you tube and then you say, "wait on, we have 100lb of dynamite in our garage, how about we go and blow up our own wale"
How excited do you think this lad is going to be now?
Yeah! There you go, you have the picture!
So as I was saying, Dylan was excited! He was excited to go and light fires without matches. So I gave him the flint and steal magnesium block and off he went. This young man can get a fire lit in no time with that! He certainly has mastered that skill. Is there a badge for that? Sure there must be a merit badge or something?? How about for blowing up whale??
Dylan and Jess loved just burning sticks and playing with fire! Some parents sit there kids in front of a TV and let it baby-sit them. We give ours fire starters and gasoline! Just kidding. We don’t give them gasoline! That black smoke is…ah….well. Where were we?
I had anticipated that the kids would be tearing at each other if we had only one flash light between them so being the good hard working dad that I am, I provided them both with (here is the key, watch for it) wind up flash lights. There was no “turn that thing off your going to waist that batteries” ever! EVER! It was wonderful. They were cranking those things almost all day.
We actually sat down earlier in the morning and spoke about 72 hour kits and began to build them with the kids, explaining as we went why we might want certain things. We are still in the process of completing them and will have them done not this Monday coming but the next (05/11/09) feel free to call and check it you wish! It was a great opportunity to discuss various reasons why we’d need them and also talk about escape plans from the house.
So come evening time, we enjoyed washing and rinsing the dishes again. We also have one of the flashlights with a radio built in. We enjoyed listening to the swine flu updates on the radio each morning and evening. This helped to keep us in touch with what was going on in the world of disease and pestilence. Like I say, I couldn’t have planned that better. (For those that don’t really know me, I mean no disrespect to those families that are suffering from the illness or death of a loved one.)
We also busted out our little emergency 100 hr candle and popped up some tin foil and found it to be a wonderful light in our lounge room as we read stories and wound down for the night.
At this point I’ll mention that it was still cold in the evening. I can’t remember which morning but we had frost one of the mornings. So heating the house was essential. We have a great passive heat source in the winter time with our house facing due south, however, in the spring, the sun is often high enough that we don’t get it coming in the windows and doing it’s job. So we burned wood. A
As a side note, I am planning on doing a variation of this in the winter time to gage our winter preparedness.
Day 2)
probably the biggest lesson of this day was another water lesson! Having realized by this time just how much water we needed for all the rinsing, flushing and rinsing, I decided I would hook up the old generator to the pump in the house, pump away and have pressure at every faucet and outhouse in our house!
So down to the mechanical room I go, by flashlight I disconnect the power source to the pump, get extension leads and manage to rig up power going back to the shed where the generator is. I checked the pump, 13amps, the wire it was going though should be fine for up to 20amps, no worries right? Well, pull the generator power is running to the pump, flip the switch and I get a slight turn of the pump. Quite obviously I haven’t the current to turn the thing.
Having scratched my head for a few minutes (not deep in thought but because of the dirt and smoke and muck in my hair) I came to the realization that when we used the generator last, it did run the well pump but we ran it on the other outlet. The generator has the 110v or the 220v outlets. So I have to go and get myself a new male head for the wiring and then we should be good. In theory, at least last time it worked.
On day 2 we took a fun little hike with the kids. We ventured off the land and up into the mountains. We enjoyed throwing rocks in the raging spring river, looking at flying bugs, making maps for each other to follow and just having a great outdoor experience like you’d expect going on any other hike. We had the kids carry their 72 hour packs and weighed them down a little to make up for the things we don’t yet have. They were troopers and gained an appreciation for having to carry them.
Back from hiking, quiet time, more playing with fire, another dutch oven dinner and off to bed.
Day 3) See day 1 and 2 – take out hiking, add rain and there you go! Oh, i also gave the kids an assignment to find something with which to make a tent for rain protection. We found some old plastic and using bailing twine, t posts and the plastic we had ourselves a "not too shabby" tube tent.
I have to say this was a wonderful experience for our family. I feel soooo much more prepared now then I was before coming up with the hair brained idea. Prepared in some ways but now short on wood having burned it all the last few days. For the past 3 weeks or so we have spent our entertainment, babysitting, some of our groceries and other budgeted money in getting supplies like the flashlights, dutch ovens, more propane etc etc.
I am so thankful to my heavenly father for this wonderful world in which we live. Despite the difficulties I face in my own life and those that we face as a county, state, country and globe, I am so excited to live in this amazing time in the history of the world. I do feel greatly blessed in more ways that I can mention. Particularly right now I feel blessed for a prophet of God to guide us in these the latter days.
Education eradicates ignorance and spawns action. “If ye are prepared ye shall not fear”
Hope you are all well and happy!
Matt.
