3 Day Survival Kits

3 Day Survival Kits

Latter day Saints Families Visitors Welcome

Latter day Saints Families Visitors Welcome Meet with other members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints here to discuss parenting and lifestyle issues. Share your insights and advice! This group is filled with members as interesting as they are diverse. From women to men, veteran moms to the newly pregnant, pioneer decendants to not members, we've got it all, and we enjoy being this way! This board is a great place to meet friends, get advice, and share the complexities of LDS life. Anyone have a good resource for these??? I need to make them for my family and I am not sure where to start (first I need bags!!! LOL) but I want to make sure I have all the right stuff in there for everyone.

I'm almost looking for a checklist type thing. Also, where would you suggest getting some bags for everyone?? I was thinking backpacks because they will be easier to carry but they're pretty expensive. Anyone have any tips on what kind of bag is best and where I can find cheap ones? tips/advice would be great. You could even tell me what's in your bags too.

Get a $10 ish backpack from Target or Walmart or where ever you can find them cheap for each family member. They don't have to look good or be cool so something in the clearance bin is fine. You don't need a huge backpacking into the wilderness kind of pack, although you might get ONE of those if you think you might need to take quite a lot of things (diapers, etc.). Go Kit should include things that your family personally needs. Start with extra medication, extra pair of glasses, can of dry formula bottle, diapers. copies of insurance information and ID. some cash.

Then add in some bottled water and snack foods. Keep in mind that water weighs 8 lbs per gallon so a couple of sports bottle sized bottles are probably all you can realistically put in. Do not store dehydrated foods since you may not have sufficient water to rehydrate them. Go with snack foods like energy or granola bars instead. change of clothing (something like sweats are best), an emergency blanket, a few pens and a pad of paper, box of crayons for the kids and/or some simple card games or small toys.

Also, find out where your closest shelter would be in case of an emergency so that you know where you're going to when you go.

One thing my family used to do is once a year we would go through our 72 hour kits and pull out anything that was expired or close to expiring. We'd eat the stuff that was still good then for family home evening we would go shopping to replace needed to be replaced. Another thing is to actually plan if I have 5 minutes what do I grab? If I have 10? 15?1 hour? make a plan then test it to see if it is feasible. The 72 hour kist are menat to be a 30 second grab and go type thing. If you have more time though what else do you want to grab? Als think if you will have to walk or drive. They seem expensive but you don't actually need nearly as much food for a day as they say you do. I can do with 2 MRE's a day EASY and that was while I was in the field working hard. would probably eat less than 1 a teenage boy however. lol. Unless you're really familiar with things like MRE's you just won't deal with them. During the 1989 earthquake in San Francisco during the World Series, most of the people at the shelter in the Marina district didn't eat anything for the first 24 hours or so. in mind that the earthquake hit right about 5pm, so they hadn't eaten since lunch. MRE's were brought out to them and even the Red Cross nurse (who was very experienced with disasters) took hers and tossed it aside. She told me later that it was in a package that you couldn't just easily open, everything was green (the cans), the ones that were open didn't look like "food" (cans and pouches), etc. and she was too overwhelmed to deal with it. Of course if you're starving, you'll eat anything, but before that point, you get lots of low blood sugar, crabby, cranky, etc.

So, especially with your kids, (but grown ups too) I recommend "comfort foods". Peanut butter, crackers, canned Vienna sausages or other canned meats, granola bars, raisins low salt/sodium varieties when possible, and things packed in water or juice when possible too. For a kit you might have to carry, small packages, lightweight, easy to carry is of course best. The bottom line is that if your kids won't eat tuna today, they're not going to eat it just because you went out and organized a disaster for them!

Tess, That Earthquake was crazy! I felt it in Sacramento and I was at work and pg with dd1. My boss was on the phone with a friend who was driving down the highway that was turning to mush. She swore she wasn't drunk! LOL.

If you make a 10 can 72 hr kit, you need to have a can opener. DUH.

You can package your food items in a food saver bag and then it is waterproof. You will need to have scissors to open (scissors should be in a first aid kit anyway).

You might want to make up little 1st aid kits for each family member's backpack, include bandaids, alcohol wipes, etc. Also include some hard candy (age appropriate) and paper, crayons/markers and something to do like a card game.

Make sure you have copies of birth certificates, deed to house, car info, insurance info, contacts out of area, medical info, marriage certificates, family pictures or cd's with all the pictures downloaded, banking info, etc.

One of the boys in my ward made up an emergency book that has forms to fill out and place to put ALL the paperwork. You are to take the book with you when you leave/evacuate.

Yep, it was definitely crazy. In San Francisco, the Red Cross often contracts their services to provide first aid for large public events. We had the contract to do the first aid for the World Series. We figured it would be really simple, a few bandaids and get to watch the game! Instead, we ended up with 60,000 of our closest friends having an earthquake! From there I went to running the shelter at Moscone Center with 1000 people in it (an interesting combo of homeless and businessmen), then ran the shelter at Marina for the next month (another interesting combo once we combined the Moscone people with the multi millionaires in the Marina).

For the family picture thing the easiest thing to do is be sure that some other relative (hopefully one that lives in another state) has copies of family pictures or you've stored them on something like photobucket or snapfish. You can get a replacement birth or marriage cert or deed, etc. (although it will really help to have a copy of your insurance info) you can't replace the only picture of your son that died in WWII.

The kit lives in our front closet by the door, right under our coats. I debated storing it in our bedroom, but it was too bulky for that closet, and with our apartment it is easily accessible even if we have to exit through the bedroom window.

We also keep water storage in two large containers on our back porch.

In my opinion, the most important thing is to know what you do have and know how to use it. An emergency is not the time to find out all your food has gone bad, your batteries are flat, and you have no idea how to use the equipment in your first aid kit. This is why I think it is important to put your own kit together, even if you're following a list, at least you know what's going in there and (hopefully) take the oppurtunity to decide if you really want to eat it later and if you really know how to use it.