Anyone stockpiling food?

[SaintsManiac]

Every statement someone makes doesn't need to be dissected, debated and corrected.

Someone made a post about why people are buying water. I inferred that people are fearing water would unavailable. So I said China didn't lose power or water. That's all.

Sorry, but sometimes it feels as if posters need to debate everything or are contrarian just to be contrarian and it's exhausting (which is my own fault as sometimes I follow them down that rabbit hole when I should just ignore it)! (Not you specifically)

I kind of regret putting the question out there.

We buy water if we are in the path of a hurricane. It never would have occurred to me to buy it for this.

 

[Tigerlulu]

Funny you should mention that..my Mormon conscience has been nagging at me about my lack of food storage. Maybe because of all the coronavirus stuff? I'm planning a Sam's run for some water. Just in case anyone doesn't already know, 4 bottles of water is a day's worth for one adult person.

YES!!!
I’ve taught those Mormon emergency prep classes and I’m a little ashamed to say I’ve let our prep go by the wayside over the years. We cleaned out the deep freeze the other day and I’m confident we have two-four weeks of normal food and medicine...need to buy some water and we’ll be fine. But it’s also hurricane prep for us, so something we need to do anyway. I’m feeling pretty confident we can get through a longer quarantine with the amount of beans and rice we have stored—we could host some neighborhood dinners! Lol

 

[tasha99]

No, we all are not going to get COVID-19.

It's highly contagious, and new. "All" was hyperbole, but I'm pretty sure most of us will get it eventually. The idea that they can contain something with such a long incubation period seems impossible to me. Right now, it's like a flu/cold of varying intensity that no one has immunity to. It won't be like current flus because of its newness. In a few years, it will be less common because it will have already passed through and there will be some herd immunity as well. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think it will be both worse and better than most people think

 

[Searc]

i don't think it will be an issue either but if a household drinks exclusively bottled water it wouldn't be a bad idea to calculate how much would be needed to cover the 14 day quarantine period entire households w/a diagnosed case undergo b/c it's not like the diagnosis happens and medical staff gives you a window of time to run to the local grocery store to stock up w/provisions.

Again, the world is not going to stop around you. You'll still be able to get supplies if you are quarantined.

 

[MrsCobraBubbles]

I’m curious about the water? Is there a reason to think running water would cease?

Water authority workers can get sick, just like anyone else. It's unlikely that the entire water department would shut down, but it's possible, in theory. I do have relatives with well water, but now that I live in a neighborhood that is on the city water system I feel more vulnerable to running out of water than I did when I lived on a farm with a well, cistern, and a spring.

 

[GaSleepingBeautyFan]

I hadn't planned on it but just last night my husband told me to start so we have enough of everything for a month just in case.

So I'll start this week I guess. I need to clean out the small freezer space of all that is unusable to make room for more things. I've not cleaned that out in a year so I'm sure I'll find stuff to toss.

We also have 3 cats so I will need to make sure they have enough cat food too.

My daughter is in college and lives on campus so if they close the college and she comes home, I'll need to have vegetarian stuff here too.

 

[MrsCobraBubbles]

4 bottles of water is a drink for me, LOL.

I "LOL'ed" but also serious. My body is burning up internally. I find 65° sweltering if I'm not just sitting around. Some people don't drink any water, I down 3-4 gallons a day. Even watching TV in the evening, I have a 36 oz. Ozark Mountain insulated bottle that I down at least 3 of them through the evening. I need the ice water to keep my core temperature from burning me up. Wish I knew a way to fix that as I also tour on bicycle and I really suffer doing outside activity.

When I was displaced and sleeping at my mother's for 2 years after divorce a few years ago, the bedroom didn't have heat. It was 59° in the winter and overnight while sleeping, I would heat up the room 5-6°, LOL. Yes, even at 59°, I slept with a 16 inch pedestal floor fan blowing.

I really suffer at work. 115°+ at work. Even in the winter, this past week on night turn, 12° outside, 90° inside and the office/control room I am in and out of I have sweat pouring from me because a new girl is working the production equipment and she kept turning off the AC. I can't sit in an 80° room and work on a computer.

Curious where you live? Lol, I work in a school building that was built in 1950 and the heat is wacky but the hottest they get is usually in the 80s, I can't imagine working in 115 degrees! When my ex-husband and I were newly married, we lived in his family's old farmhouse for the first year and a half before we got our own place and there was no heat in the upstairs of the house. My nightstand was by the window and if I left a glass of water close to the window (they were those old single pane windows) overnight in the coldest part of winter it would ice over. We had SO MANY blankets on our bed, plus an electric blanket. I spent 2 Pennsylvania winters there!

Anyway, the 4 bottles of water per day is just an estimate to help prepare for emergencies. I was raised Mormon so certain things have stuck with me Drinking water for one week for an adult is about 1 case of water. I used to have a full basement where I kept cases of bottled water that I rotated regularly, don't have that luxury in my apartment anymore.

 

[bakerworld]

Every year we go thru this 'The Sky is Falling' mentality - swine, bird, Miskito, now corona - so we're over it = no stock piling. Snow warnings come and I do not get while people have a sudden need for milk and bread, which I don't buy anyway. Now the cracker aisle is always full and those I do buy LOL. The last hurricane warning I was sitting in a car during my ride home = wasn't stopping for a JIC.

 

[Heather07438]

No more than normal.

My mother learned from her mother and taught me you can never have enough canned goods or salt, lol.

And we always keep a decent stash of water because we are on a well. With Hurricane Sandy the lack of power also cut off our well pump for 12 days. Luckily we had a pool outside to get water to flush the terlette.

 

[AlohaNow]

You don't think you'll ever be in an extreme situation, but your DH makes you use a 'bug out' backpack?

Yeah, Red Dawn kinda stuff.

 

[mom2rtk]

China never lost power or water during all of this, I think we will be fine!

I am stopping by our vet today to get another bag of Walnut's prescription dry food and order his meds (prednisolone and some liver meds) so we have enough. Hopefully after his check up next week we can actually stop the liver medication and reduce the pred, but just in case we will have a supply ready. He's what the two of us are most worried about! ❤

Same here. Prescription Diet is really the only item on my stock up list. And that’s good because after stocking up on that there’s no budget left for anything else.

 

[Colleen27]

I kind of am. We just got a new-to-us fridge (my mom actually bought it 2 years ago, when my brother moved back in with her, and then decided it was really too big for one person after he died and replaced it with a counter-depth model) and there was much uncertainty over the delivery date as we waited on her new one to be delivered and my husband to have a day off to install the water line for it. So I got into the rather bad habit of just buying a day or two's worth of meals at a time to avoid having a full fridge when the new one came. The grocery is less than a mile down the road, so it really isn't any big inconvenience to shop as needed, but we couldn't get through more than 4 or 5 days with what's in the house and some of those days might get a bit weird as we dipped into pantry stuff that doesn't necessarily go together. The warnings about the virus have prompted me to do a real shopping trip, to the bigger/cheaper chain grocery 15 miles up the road, so if someone in our household does get sick we wouldn't have to worry about running out of food or TP.

But I don't think we're likely to see the kinds of containment measures here that are happening in other parts of the world, even if a significant number of cases emerge. In fact, I doubt we'll even really know how widespread it is, considering the financial disincentives for sick people to go to the doctor for diagnosis. Crashing the economy in hopes of containing a virus that has already defied so many containment efforts would be politically disastrous. We just don't have the safety nets to justify that kind of action - imagine the foreclosures, the utility shut-offs, the defaulted debts if we tried shutting down schools and workplaces for weeks or months in a paycheck-to-paycheck nation! - so I expect we'll see far more moderate measures (platitudes about handwashing and staying home when sick) combined with a message that downplays the disease risk.

 

[barkley]

And we always keep a decent stash of water because we are on a well. With Hurricane Sandy the lack of power also cut off our well pump for 12 days. Luckily we had a pool outside to get water to flush the terlette.

when we put in a generator our well pump was a top priority because we had dealt with an outage of 5 days and felt the impact of that (can't imagine 12 days-kudos to you). we had a number of neighbors question the cost vs. value until a wind storm a few years later knocked everything around us out for a minimum of 8 days (there were some areas in the city that were out for multiple weeks)-around day 5 we had neighbors rolling up with containers for potable water (shelves were empty at the stores).

 

[kirstenb1]

No stockpiling here.

 

[mrodgers]

Curious where you live? Lol, I work in a school building that was built in 1950 and the heat is wacky but the hottest they get is usually in the 80s, I can't imagine working in 115 degrees! When my ex-husband and I were newly married, we lived in his family's old farmhouse for the first year and a half before we got our own place and there was no heat in the upstairs of the house. My nightstand was by the window and if I left a glass of water close to the window (they were those old single pane windows) overnight in the coldest part of winter it would ice over. We had SO MANY blankets on our bed, plus an electric blanket. I spent 2 Pennsylvania winters there!

It's a steam molding plant. That was on the molding floor out in the open. I work in an alcove office/room built onto the main building with four 400° vessels 3 feet away from the 1 inch thin office walls. When our AC unit broke and they didn't care about us, it was 98° in the office every day for 4 years.

They constantly complained about it (production folk). I finally went to talk to my boss, who was head of all North American plants to see what he could do for us. I was told, "you're the only one who's ever complained about it." Really? Bobbi called her supervisor every single day every hour, "Ed, it's 7:00 and it's 80 in here. Ed, it's 8:00 and it's 83 in here. Ed, it's 1:00 and it's 92 in here." Every day for almost a year that she was in that job. One of the managers walked in from the floor and said, "Whew, feels good in here!" coming from the 110° it was on the floor. Dude, it's 95°! Only feels good for the first 3 minutes! Spend 12 hours in here!

 

[NYCgrrl]

I kind of am. We just got a new-to-us fridge (my mom actually bought it 2 years ago, when my brother moved back in with her, and then decided it was really too big for one person after he died and replaced it with a counter-depth model) and there was much uncertainty over the delivery date as we waited on her new one to be delivered and my husband to have a day off to install the water line for it. So I got into the rather bad habit of just buying a day or two's worth of meals at a time to avoid having a full fridge when the new one came. The grocery is less than a mile down the road, so it really isn't any big inconvenience to shop as needed, but we couldn't get through more than 4 or 5 days with what's in the house and some of those days might get a bit weird as we dipped into pantry stuff that doesn't necessarily go together. The warnings about the virus have prompted me to do a real shopping trip, to the bigger/cheaper chain grocery 15 miles up the road, so if someone in our household does get sick we wouldn't have to worry about running out of food or TP.

But I don't think we're likely to see the kinds of containment measures here that are happening in other parts of the world, even if a significant number of cases emerge. In fact, I doubt we'll even really know how widespread it is, considering the financial disincentives for sick people to go to the doctor for diagnosis. Crashing the economy in hopes of containing a virus that has already defied so many containment efforts would be politically disastrous. We just don't have the safety nets to justify that kind of action - imagine the foreclosures, the utility shut-offs, the defaulted debts if we tried shutting down schools and workplaces for weeks or months in a paycheck-to-paycheck nation! - so I expect we'll see far more moderate measures (platitudes about handwashing and staying home when sick) combined with a message that downplays the disease risk.

There are ways to get around the economic crash you've outlined (foreclosures, utility shut-offs, etc) but it requires the help and guidance of the government with a clear economic plan. I think public safety outweighs political cost ultimately. I don't think the entire nation lives paycheck to paycheck but am sure some do.

 

[mrodgers]

And we always keep a decent stash of water because we are on a well. With Hurricane Sandy the lack of power also cut off our well pump for 12 days. Luckily we had a pool outside to get water to flush the terlette.

Yes, we always kept some drinking water. I came home after work one day right before one of the hurricanes were to reach PA and she's filling up buckets of water in the tub. "It's for the toilet in case we lose power" she tells me. I asked, "ah, what's wrong with the 11,000 gallons sitting in the pool 5 feet on the other side of the wall?"

That doesn't work with winter blizzards though. Last big outage we had was in winter for 5 days which we could at least save all our food (several hundred pounds of beef from her father's cows) since we just put it out on shelves in the 10° garage.

 

[bgg319]

Nah, but we live in the country. Have plenty of deer in the freezer from the last two seasons.

 

[Heather07438]

when we put in a generator our well pump was a top priority because we had dealt with an outage of 5 days and felt the impact of that (can't imagine 12 days-kudos to you). we had a number of neighbors question the cost vs. value until a wind storm a few years later knocked everything around us out for a minimum of 8 days (there were some areas in the city that were out for multiple weeks)-around day 5 we had neighbors rolling up with containers for potable water (shelves were empty at the stores).

Lack of power seems bad until you deal with lack of water, right.

Around Day 8 we finally got a generator and our retired electrician neighbor helped us by hard wiring it right into our circuit box to run the house basics. Rest his soul; he was a fantastic neighbor.

 

[disneyworldsk]

i bought items for illness to have in case someone gets sick and i don't want to go to the store. crackers, gatorade, etc. i keep my gas tank filled just in case i have to pick up my kid in college for closures . i bought some pharmacy meds for 30 days of what we use on a daily basis.