When All Hell Breaks Loose (55 page)

In general, canned foods are great for food storage plans as they are widely available, durable and portable, cheap, easy to open with no preparation or cooking required, and store well for up to two years.

How much food to store is dependent upon the intention and needs of each family. Keeping track of consumed food is helpful for purchasing larger quantities. As an example, a family wishing to store six months of food can estimate the amount of food required to purchase by keeping track of all food eaten within a one month period and multiplying by six.

For maximum storage life, foods should be stored in a
cool, dry, dark
location in food-grade,
oxygen-free
containers. The containers should also keep stored foods protected from rodents and insect infestations. All food should be dated and faithfully rotated.

When purchasing bulk grains or legumes, buy only from reputable dealers who quickly sell large volumes of quality product. The more they sell, the fresher the product will be and the less likely it will have an insect problem.

Insects, and their larva and eggs, can be destroyed with sufficient heat or cold. Keep food storage areas clean to avoid attracting pest problems in the first place.

Some molds in foods produce dangerous mycotoxins that are toxic to humans. These toxins make their way deep into foods, last for long periods of time, and are
not
destroyed by heat.

Warning!
All "wet foods" such as canned goods, whether home-canned or commercially canned, that are
bulging, leaking, smell bad, or squirt fluid when you open them
should be safely discarded out of the reach of children and animals. Deadly bacterias such as botulism can quickly kill your loved ones.
If in doubt, throw it out!

The easiest way to prevent decreased nutritional content and spoiled food is to faithfully rotate your stored food using the "FIFO" method,
first in, first out
.

I
mproper sanitation is directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people worldwide every year. Some slum settlements today in Africa require up to 150 people to share a single toilet, forcing many to defecate in plastic bags, known as "flying toilets," which are thrown on the roadside. Disease from improper sanitation has at times proved just as deadly as the wars which provoked the situation. During the American Civil War, more than 70,000 soldiers died from dysentery. The same plight killed more soldiers than bullets during the Spanish-American War. Currently, more than 2.6 billion people live without proper toilets or drains, leaving ample opportunity for disease. Should an act of devastation take out your town or city's sanitation system, an alternative means for dealing with human waste should rank high on your list of survival priorities.

Early efforts at sanitation, at least for the wealthy, have been traced back as early as 3300 BC to the Mesopotamians, with the Greeks, Romans, and others following suit. For the "common man," going to the john usually meant something different. For early Romans, it was routine to throw the contents of the chamber pot out the window and onto the street the next morning. Countless supposedly advanced civilizations had for the most part no clue about proper sanitation. Many cultures simply pooped in unhygienic pits or threw the contents of their primitive privies over the walls of towns and cities. Medieval Paris had to extend its protective city walls as the pile of poop had grown so tall outside the original wall that invaders could climb the pile and attack the city. The thousands of pounds of excrement dumped into rivers even stopped some of them from flowing. Needless to say, the smell of many medieval towns and cities was totally obnoxious and dangerously unsanitary. It wasn't until the mid-1800s with the likes of potty pioneers Thomas Twyford, Thomas Crapper, and George Jennings that improvements in the toilet and sanitation started to create less of a stink.

A lack of sanitation facilities following a major disaster can quickly create disease epidemics unless basic guidelines are followed. Unfortunately, modern urbanites have an "out of sight, out of mind" mentality regarding the aftermath of going to the bathroom. We have grown accustomed to doing our duty, hitting a lever, and letting someone else deal with our shit, literally and figuratively. Sooner or later, however, similar to one who blames other people or circumstances for his or her troubles, our waste products will catch up with us to be redeemed.

The average person produces two to three pints of urine and one pound of feces every day. Imagine your family's toilet after one day of use without the ability to get rid of its contents. Besides rating high on the gross-o-meter, it's a great way to get your entire family sick, especially during the warm season. As clean as your family might be, the truth is, flies, pests, and pets love poop and will stop at virtually nothing to partake in the feast. After dining on your turd, flies won't think twice about landing upon your sandwich or whatever survival cuisine you may be enjoying at the moment. The ensuing results from fecalborne pathogens can be disastrous to you and your loved ones' health.

P[ee]P[ee] and D[oo]D[oo]: Decisively Dealing with Dangerous Dung

Over the years I have ushered hundreds of people into the wilderness for survival and primitive living skills courses. Within hours of our arrival at our backcountry home, we discuss the nature of doing one's business in nature. These helpful hints are just as applicable in your backyard as they are out in the woods. Use the "PPDD" formula as ground rules for the toilet options discussed later in this chapter.

PPDD Stands for Privacy, Proximity, Depth, and Drainage

Privacy

Unless your potty plan produces privacy on the part of the participant, you will quickly fall from grace within your family. The last thing that anyone needs during a survival scenario is to be stressed out about where to go to the toilet. Undo stress and concern about being seen while going to the bathroom can psychologically and physiologically cause a person to "bind up" inside, preventing a bowel movement through constipation. Unless this is remedied, your loved one may become impacted, forcing a kind of kinship better left to the imagination and the virtues of a rubber glove. Along with providing privacy, tell your loved ones to RELAX and consciously think about the process while doing the job. If they are tense or strain, the sphincter muscles contract and make evacuation more difficult. This, along with squatting to keep the sigmoid colon properly aligned (outlined later) and adequate roughage in the diet should do the trick. Once again, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of. . .well, you get the picture. A simple tarp or other barrier might be all that is required to have your family pooping in peace.

Proximity

I have had people get lost in the woods while looking for the perfect private haven to go to the toilet. They walk so long and so far that, upon their return trip, they become disoriented from camp—an embarrassing predicament at the very least. While this point might not be applicable for your situation, make certain that your place of business is located within the realm of your loved ones finding their way back to the house. Stress, fear, darkness, weather, or other variables might make your backyard or back lot trip a bit more challenging than usual. Having a designated place to go to the bathroom that is private will prevent a person's instinct to wander until they find a spot in which they feel safe.

Depth

According to the U.S. Forest Service, one should dig a small hole at least twelve inches deep to poop in. Doing so in most of the state of Arizona will require a backhoe due to incredibly hard desert earth. Sometimes, in remote areas during intense desert heat, I leave scat uncovered; it gets baked by the desert sun and decomposes much more rapidly than if covered. In this case, I am on a cross-country hiking course and am permanently leaving the area and the fly connection. For our urban/suburban purposes, plan on covering your poop. There are a few different applications in regards to the depth and the size of the hole, which I'll cover later in the chapter.

Drainage

Poor sanitation habits are stereotyped to be the curse of developing countries and their largely "uncivilized" population. Recent history has proved otherwise. The Serbian/Croatian conflict mentioned earlier is case in point. Unfortunate families downstream from the upstream poopers bore the brunt of the effects. Entire families became ill due to fecal pathogens as rampant dysentery ruled day and night. People tried to keep clean by washing themselves in the flowing water, further exacerbating the problem. Many babies, small children, and a few adults died as a result.

If a drainage or low spot on your property doesn't contain water, sooner or later, after a heavy rainfall, it will. Ample rainfall will cause drainages to flow, and the flow will be dictated by our friend gravity. Many dry washes or arroyos in the Southwest become dangerous killers as summer monsoon storms cause powerful flashfloods, washing away cars, cows, and campers.

It's tempting for some to go potty in drainages, as excess vegetation caused by extra groundwater enables one to squat with some semblance of privacy. Pathogens in fecal matter can travel more than three hundred feet through the earth, thereby contaminating above- and below-groundwater sources with a bevy of nasty things.

If you go potty in that private little wash in the back of your property, when it does flow you risk infecting your neighborhood with the gift that keeps on giving. Think like a raindrop when you decide where to station the outhouse—your family and neighbors will thank you.

Using Your Existing Toilet

If the water mains are broken, it's still possible to use your indoor toilet with no water in the back tank. Before doing the following suggestion,
make sure there is no problem with the local sewer mains!
Flushing your toilet when the town's sewer infrastructure is in pieces will further complicate your locality's sanitation emergency. Eventually radio or some other media will broadcast bulletins concerning the status of your sewer lines and whether it is safe to flush.

After going to the bathroom, pour water into the toilet bowl itself (not the tank in the back) from a five-gallon bucket or other large container and your toilet will flush. Obviously, use this method only if water is an abundant resource.

If for some reason your toilet cannot be flushed you can still use it for the seat that it is. First, remove the water from the bowl. Next, tape or otherwise anchor a heavy-duty plastic bag (I would double the bags) under the toilet seat and let the bag fill the cavity of the bowl. After the bag is comfortably full (two-thirds at most), untape the bag, add a small amount of powdered disinfectant like wood ashes or quicklime, tie it very securely, and place it within a preprepared slit trench or durable container such as a plastic five-gallon bucket (lined with a trash bag) or a trash container (lined with a trash bag) with a tight-fitting lid. Don't be cheap and have too much poop in the bag or it will be a living nightmare to tie up and dispose of.

The Five-Gallon Bucket

I love five-gallon buckets as they have endless uses. They are
containers
, and hunting and gathering cultures around the world evolved around the container and how it could be used, from carrying food and water to babies and bedding. Have several buckets on hand and keep the plastic ones out of the sun so they don't prematurely deteriorate and crack and fall apart.

Five-gallon buckets lined with a couple of heavy-duty plastic bags can be used as portable toilets indoors or outside. When the bag is too full for comfort, tie it off securely and dispose of it in a preprepared slit trench or secure container for disposal when your emergency is over. Some camping stores sell buckets complete with a toilet-seat lid, custom-made for going to the bathroom. Sitting on the uncomfortable rim of the bucket can be dealt with by laying a couple of boards across the bucket's top and pooping in between the boards. At the onset of an emergency, any container will do that has a cover and will hold the contents until you can dispose of it. Many varieties of sanitizing chemical packets and disinfectants can be purchased from camping and RV stores and can be added to the contents of the bucket.

Basic Backyard Bathrooms: A Potty Primer

You would be amazed at how many people have never gone to the bathroom outdoors. If you are one of those amazing people, no problem, there's always a new day and another opportunity! The following outdoor recommendations are basic, yet tried and true.