Tag: emergency preparedness

Post #1628: More on making a bug-out bag

 

Background:  Chump change.

After Post #1620, and Post #1625, I’ve followed through on stashing a few emergency-use items in my wife’s Prius Prime.  This follows the realization that if there is any sort of mass evacuation in my area, the inevitable result is that we’ll end up living in the car for a day or two, as we negotiate the resulting traffic jam.

This is, in effect, my quick-and-dirty emergency #vanlife kit.  I need to be able to drink, eat, excrete, and stay warm, in the car, for a day or two.

The trick here — as in so much of life — is not to be an idiot.  Don’t spend a ton of money.  Don’t interfere with day-to-day use of the car.  Make it easy to maintain.

But don’t skimp, either.  Keep this in perspective.   This is just another bit of of insurance, in a world where you already buy insurance.

Insurance?  For private insurance, I currently pay roughly:

  • $14,000 a year for high-deductible (“never-pay”) health insurance.
  • $1,500/year car insurance, two vehicles.
  • $1,200/year homeowner’s insurance.
  • $300/year for general liability (“umbrella”) insurance.

And I would guess that 35% of my federal taxes support Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid, and other government-mandated forms of social insurance. Most of which boils down to a subsidy of the less fortunate.  But some of which may benefit me.

It’s no exaggeration to say I routinely pay $20K per year for insurance.  That I hope I never get to use.  Hence the title of this.  (Which I stole, by the way, from a friend who was, at the time, the U.S. Assistant Secretary for Health, who used that line when people started talking about health insurance providing poor value.)

In that context, a one-off expense of $150 worth of stuff, for the car?  That’s not exactly rounding error, in terms of my overall insurance expenditures.  But it’s close.

Without further ado.

Water.

Below:  Vacuum-packed four-packs of half-liter bottles, hanging at the back of the cargo area.

 

Sure, water is more-or-less required for long-term survival.  But bottled water sells out rapidly in any U.S. evacuation.

You can buy bags of emergency water supplies, but they seem a) ridiculously expensive, and b) too small.

And yet, off-the-shelf bottled water comes in rather fragile packaging. Even off-the-shelf gallons will eventually leak, in my experience.  How can you take that cheap grocery-store bottled water and carry it safely in the car?

My solution is to seal four half-liter bottles inside a gallon poly bag, then hang those bags behind the back seat of my wife’s Prius Prime, hung off the rear headrests, over the all-weather floor mats.  If they leak, they’ll leak into the bag.  And if the bag leaks, it’ll leak onto the weatherproof floor mat.

This gives me 6 liters (1.5 gallons) of single-serving water bottles, with minimal risk of damaging the car interior via leaks.

Too much water?  Too little water?  Beats me.  Looks like a lot to me, but seemingly reliable sources say that you need to consume about three liters of water a day, in all forms (Reference:  Mayo clinic). More for men, less for women.  Given that everything else in the car is dry food, by that standard, this is a one-night supply of water for two adults.  I guess that’s about right.

Cost, if you have a vacuum-sealer already, is maybe $3.  If not, use zip-locks.  So, no problem if I have to toss these every couple of years.  Also uses space that doesn’t interfere with the everyday use of the car.  I might add a piece of black plastic over them to slow any UV damage to all that fragile plastic.

 

Sanitation. 

Well, there’s a reason they’re called SHTF bags.  God willing, I will never see this again in my lifetime.

Source:  Amazon.  References for other supplies are in prior post.

After looking at my off-the-shelf options, I decided that a stainless steel bedpan was my best choice for sanitation.   It’s a tried-and-true design.  And I’m fat enough that plastic likely wouldn’t do.  I bought one with a lid, and stuffed it with the items listed below.  Note that this takes up no useful space in the car.  It sits under the front passenger seat.  And, God willing, it will never come out from that hidey-hole.

  • Lidded stainless steel bedpan, containing:
    • Short bungee to anchor back of bed pan to seat belt.
    • One roll TP, compressed
    • 4 potty liners (blue, absorbent fill)
    • 3 urinals (pink, absorbent fill)
    • 8 small trash bags
    • Sanitary wipes
    • Disposable gloves
    • Water purification device
    • Water purification tablets

This is probably $85 worth of stuff, all told.  All of which should be a once-in-a-lifetime purchase.  And should never have to be touched, short of an actual emergency.

Seems like a lot, but when you gotta go, you gotta go.

Food 1:  Emergency rations.

Source:  Amazon and Amazon.

This is a brick of emergency food, plus some individually-wrapped emergency food bars, from Amazon.  Stuffed in a bag, to sit under the driver’s seat.  The main point is that you’d only eat these out of a total sense of desperation.  Ideally, these need to be replaced no more frequently than every five or ten years.  If then.

Cost, about $25. Should last anywhere from half-a-decade to a decade.  Call it insurance at five bucks a year.  Hope to see it again a decade from now.

First aid.

If you’re shopping for a first-aid supplies, it’s important to judge whether or not you have the moxie to deal with what I would term a trauma kit.  Something  for major injuries.  As opposed to first-aid kit, which is basically for minor injuries and common maladies.

I think the upper limit of what I can plausibly handle is a butterfly closure.  Maybe some gauze and tape.  And, e.g., aspirin, Tums, and similar off-the-shelf remedies.  So that’s what I pack.  If I manage to sever a major artery, I’m out of luck.  I think that’s the nature of insurance.

Tourniquets?  Sutures?  Splints?  Do you know you to use them?  If not, buy a first aid kid, no matter how appealing a trauma kit might be.

I have no clue what my first-aid kit cost, because I repackaged a bunch of first-aid supplies that I’ve had sitting around for years.Some elements (e.g., OTC medications) will have to be replaced every couple of years.  This sits under the driver’s seat, alongside the emergency rations.

 

Emergency tools.

The Prius Prime has one narrow, deep compartment under the floor of the trunk.  This is a place for storing (e.g.) tools for changing a tire.  I am adding, in one small bag, all the tools that might be useful in an emergency, and will never need to be refreshed or updated.  These include:

  • Multi-tool
  • Can opener
  • Space blanket x 2
  • Emergency poncho x 2
  • Compass
  • Work gloves, handful of misc car-related tools.

Note that this isn’t at all what is normally sold as a vehicle emergency kit.  Those kits focus on having a breakdown in your vehicle.  That’s not what I’m worried about.  I’m more worried about a breakdown of civil society.

In any case, despite having worked on a lot of cars over my lifetime (e.g., replaced the engine on my first car), the idea that I could diagnose and fix a serious problem on a modern fuel-injected computer-controlled engine is just laughable.  Maybe if I win the lottery, I’ll throw a high-end scan tool in that bag.  That way, if I’m stuck, at least I’ll know why.

Food 2:  Routine long-trip stuff, including snacks and the tools required to eat them.

Finally, in a small bag sitting in a little alcove in the trunk, I’m putting all the stuff that needs to be refreshed roughly annually.  That boils down to food and batteries, and a few pieces of equipment that might come in handy on any long trip. Things that you might just routinely tap into, on a long trip.  Or need to grab in a hurry.

  • Flashlights x 2
  • Spare batteries
  • Water heating device, insulated mugs
  • Tea bags x 10, other hot drinks
  • Ramen x 6
  • Plates, cups, utensils,
  • Misc dry food snacks (e.g., peanut butter crackers)
  • Cash.

The last item, because I’ve never been in a situation where having some money around made it worse.

The water heater, discussed in an earlier post, is about $30 and will take like-onto half an hour to boil a cup and a half of water.  Such is the tyranny of physics.  Otherwise, this is maybe another $10 worth of food.

Summary.

I’m not a nut.  I think. 

I’m just a fairly prudent guy.  Who, as a self-employed person, got used to paying for all of my insurance, including health insurance.  And once you’re in the habit of shipping off $1K+ per month for health insurance, while simultaneously fervently hoping that you are pissing your money away (because if not, that’s not good) …

Maybe out of all that, I ended up end up with a different attitude toward small insurance expenditures.  Which is, at root, what this is about.  This is about fitting out my wife’s car with a bit of insurance against (e.g.) what happened this past January, on I-95, in Virginia.  Let alone some greater catastrophe.

So the goal is to set up some supplies that:

  • don’t cost an arm and a leg (appropriately amortized over their expected lifetime).
  • don’t interfere with the day-to-day use of the vehicle.
  • cover the basics of existence (water, food, sanitation, light, warmth)
  • in a way that is easily maintained.

I think I’ve hit the brief on this one. 

I’ve made a one-time investment in sanitation supplies, packed so they’ll easily fit under the front passenger seat.

Thrown in some food and water, some first-aid supplies, and a few tools.

Separately, all the stuff that’s likely to need to be refreshed annually is in one bag, ready to go.

In the end, this is like having a will.  You aren’t buying happiness.  You are buying peace of mind.  If the unthinkable happens, you’ve done what you can reasonably be expected to do.  Having settled this, there’s no sense worrying about it further,  Just get on with the rest of your life.

Post #1625: Tyranny of physics, or still more on a bug-out bag

 

Background:  Emergency preparedness.

I’m in the middle of repurposing some old backpacking equipment into a set of bug-out bags (Post #1620).   To me, the big surprise is that mass evacuations in the U.S. almost always generate horrendous, days-long traffic jams. 

You can pretty much bet on it.  Which means that you ought to be prepared for it.  Which I was not.  As a result, my most pressing need wasn’t for camping gear per se.  It was for the supplies that would allow me to live in my car for a day or two.

Basically, to be prepared to bug out, in an urban area, I need a mini-#vanlife kit.  Ideally, without spending a fortune, and without having to replace critical supplies every year.  (Because I’m not that organized, and I’ll forget to do it.)

It’s not rocket science.  You need to take care of water, food, warmth (maybe), and sanitation (maybe).

In my last post, when I looked at options for the critical sanitation category, I found plenty of good choices for #1, but not such great options for handling #2.  In both cases, I’ve gone with some version of special-purpose plastic bag lined with super-absorbent gel.  I picked this and this, for starters, both of which I expect to last indefinitely and be once-in-a-lifetime purchases.

Research reveals some constraints on food choices for an emergency kit kept in the car, driven by the harsh environment of the car’s interior. Some mainstays of camping (e.g., chocolate bars) are obviously inappropriate.  Less obviously, experts frown on most canned foods and high-fat foods because the heat and freeze/thaw lead to rapid deterioration.  Even foods packaged for stability, like MREs.  In particular, the “best used by dates” of those foods cannot be trusted, if kept in a car, because those dates assume the foods were kept at normal room temperature, not at the often blistering-hot temperature of a car interior.

So I’m putting together a little kit of dried foods.  Starting with a brick of true emergency rations and some emergency food bars.  Both of those ought to last five years, even if kept in a car.  And then I’m adding things any camper would consider, and that have exceptional shelf life.  Or at least won’t kill you, even if they don’t taste so hot after a decade in the car.  These include ramen noodles, oatmeal, dried potato flakes, maybe some tea, and coffee, hot chocolate, and other dry foods.

But this brings up a new need.  My ability to eat anything tasty, out of that emergency stash, depends on my ability to boil water in the car.  I expect that the emergency ration bars taste awful, and while you can, in theory, just cold-soak ramen noodles and potato flakes, nobody claims that the results are palatable.

And that’s when I started running into the tyranny of physics.

Pick an option for boiling water in the car:  Asphyxiate, spend tons of money, electrocute, void your new car warranty, or wait a really long time.

The task is to come up with a modest amount of boiling-hot water, on demand, as the car is creeping along the freeway.

Seriously, how hard can that be?

Asphyxiate. First, I’m going to rule out any traditional flame-based camp stove.  Even clean-burning fuels like butane.  Burning anything in an enclosed space is just a bad idea.  Couple that with notion that a) you’re going to be doing this while in dense traffic, and b) whatever fuel you use, it’s going to get stored long-term in the car.  Aside from Esbit — of which I am a fan — I can’t think of a refined stove fuel that I’d even consider keeping in a hot car in the summer.

Spend tons of money.  Second, there are cooking systems that rely on exothermic chemical reactions.  You chuck a packet of chemicals into water or salt water, and the resulting chemical reaction generates the heat to cook your meal.  These include Army MRE heaters as well as commercial systems such as Barocook.  The only downside here is the expense.  Near as I can tell, it would cost me a $2 disposable every time I wanted to heat up a cup of water for tea.  And you should ideally buy the right equipment first, the sole use for which is to heat foods with these chemical heaters.

So, those would work, and those will keep indefinitely.  But there’s a lot of dedicated equipment and expense, and I would never get any utility out of them except as a component of this car emergency pack.

Third, seriously, it’s an electric car.  The motor/generators can put out tens of thousands of watts of power.  Why not just plug in an electric kettle/coffee pot and be done with it?  That’s where the choices boil down to electrocution, voiding the warranty, or waiting a long time.

Electrocution:  Although the Prius Prime can literally run on electricity, Toyota didn’t think to bring much of that inside the cabin.  The power sockets (“cigarette lighter sockets”) on the Prius interior are rated for a maximum of 120 watts.  The upshot is that if you plug in an inverter and a typical home electric kettle, you’ll instantly blow the blow the fuse on the power socket.  A typical US home electric kettle draws 1500 watts.

In fact, that’s so little power than you can’t even run this device:

Source:  Ebay.

The Kenner Easy-Bake toy oven above draws way too much wattage to be used inside a Prius Prime.  “The original Kenner Easy-Bake Oven was heated by two 100-watt incandescent light bulbs, …”  (source:  Wikipedia).

Heck, I already own one of these little immersion heaters:

 

And even the lowest-power version of that device draws far too much power for the Prius power outlets to handle.

Void your warranty.  There’s an obvious way around this, which is to wire up a socket or an inverter directly to the battery (fused, of course).  That way you could use much heavier wire, draw more current, and use an electric kettle capable of heating a pint of water in a reasonable amount of time.  Even then, as discussed in Post #1020, you probably wouldn’t want to exceed 1000 watts.  That’s the size of inverter I hook up, when I used my older Prius as an emergency generator.

That said, on an almost-new car, still under warranty, with a rather delicate 12V electrical system, I’m not sure I want to attach cables to the battery.  Let alone try to find a way to get them through the firewall.  For fear that if something goes wrong in the 12V electrical system, the deal will point to the modifications as an excuse not to fix it under warranty.

So while I have no problem hooking up a 1000-watt inverter to our long-out-of-warranty 2005 Prius, I’m not quite comfortable doing that with my wife’s 2021 Prius Prime.  Particularly not as a permanent install, to be ready in case of emergency evacuation.

Wait a really long time.  At this point, all remaining electrical solutions fall under the tyranny of physics.  If you input few watts, the water heats slowly.  And there’s no way around that.  That’s just basic physics.

If you want to heat a pint of water from room temperature to boiling, using the limit of 120 watts, assume zero losses, and assuming you don’t blow the fuse on the power socket, that will take you 22 minutes.

That said, of all the ways I could heat water in the car, a little low-powered cup-sized electrical heater seems to make the most sense.  For one thing, if I’m using it while stuck in a traffic jam, I’ll have nothing but time.  For another, I can actually use that on normal road trips to make a fresh cup of coffee or tea.  So I will get some utility out of it, beyond its value in an emergency.  For a third, they are designed to fit in a car’s cup holders, which would be handy if I’m going to use one while stuck in traffic.

When all was said and done, I ordered one of these:

Source:  Amazon.

This is an 80-watt device that should be able to bring 12 ounces of water to a boil in about 25 minutes.  That’s far enough below the power socket’s limit that I don’t risk blowing a fuse.  That’s enough boiling water to cook at least a single serving of ramen noodles.  And if I’m stuck in the car for 24 hours, the 25 minute wait will just give me something to look forward to.

Conclusion

For emergency rations to be kept in the car, experts say that a lot of your normal choices for emergency food are off-limits.  Canned foods, high-fat foods (including nuts), and MREs are all poor choices due to their rapid and unpredictable spoilage rates when subject to high temperatures and freeze-thaw cycles.

For my car kit, I am going with some ultra-stable commercial emergency foods, and a selection of dried foods and beverages.  The latter require me to boil water, in the car, possibly while moving in extended stop-and-go traffic.  After looking over my options, to boil water I’ve decided to go with the simplest plug-and-play setup I could find.  For the Prius Prime, that’s a small (12 ounce) low-wattage (80W) water heater built to sit securely in a cup holder.  The sole downside is that, assuming it works perfectly, it’s going to take roughly half-an-hour to bring 12 ounces of water to boiling.

Seems like a lousy choice.  Until you realize that all the other choices involved significant risks (flame-based cookers), expensive disposables (MRE heaters and similar), or blown fuses or possibly a blown warranty for higher-powered electrical devices.

Post #1620: Musings on putting together a bug-out bag

 

This is a lengthy set of ramblings.  There's a conclusions section at the bottom if you just want the bottom line.

I continue in my quest to Get Rid of Stuff, a.k.a., Swedish Death Cleaning.  At present I’m wondering what to do with four decades’ worth of camping gear.  Most of it is lightweight gear for backpacking.  My answer is to repurpose it into a couple of bug-out bags (or SHTF bags).

For those unfamiliar with the term, a bug-out bag is set of emergency supplies packaged so you can easily pick it up and carry it away.  Typically, it’s a backpack full of stuff.

Many responsible entities suggest that every citizen have one of these on hand.  You can get guidance on what ought to be in a typical bug-out bag from, among others, FEMA, the CDC, the Red Cross, the U.S. Army, the Commonwealth of Virginia, and Fairfax County, VA.  I’m emphasizing that because having a bug-out-bag or emergency kit isn’t something you should associate with end-times preppers.  It’s a completely prudent thing to have and maintain.

Though I have to admit that all the loose talk about nuclear war and dirty bombs does not exactly reduce my anxiety level, given that we live about 15 miles from the Pentagon.  Plus, all the anti-democracy craziness at play in the coming elections suggests a non-negligible chance I might end up on the wrong side of a armed mob.  And then there’s always the odds of the next Carrington Event.  Which, while maybe not quite as destructive as an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) from a high-altitude nuclear explosion, could wreck the power grid, with all that implies for ensuing long-term lack of water, food, fuel, and commerce in general.  But let’s keep it mainstream.  Think blizzard, hurricane, or similar natural disaster.

To be clear, for almost any conceivable emergency, I’m going to shelter in place.  We’re never going to get hurricane-force winds this far inland.  I’m never going to have to go on the lam to avoid arrest.  And in the event of nuclear war, the last place I want to be is in a multi-day traffic jam on I-66.  I’m going to stay where I have a comfortable bed and flush toilets.

At-home preparedness really isn’t the issue.  Almost everyone who lives in a big suburban house pretty much has that covered.  E.g., every person with a standard hot water heater is already storing 50 gallons of potable water.  For us, with a modern wood stove and a car that serves as an electrical generator (see Post #1020), we’ve got heat and light.  We’d suffer no hardships to speak of in (e.g.) a prolonged winter power outage.

When you step back from it, the question isn’t what to put in a bug-out bag. You can get lists of suggestions anywhere.  Heck, you can buy them ready-made on Amazon.  The basics are pretty obvious:  Water, food, shelter, light, sanitation, medicines.  And batteries.  Lots and lots of batteries.  It’s just another version of going camping.

The key question is why have a bug-out bag?  Given that I have all the basics of existence covered at home, why would I even want something I can pick up and carry off?

Let me defer an answer to that for the moment.  Because if you carry through on that thinking, you will immediately arrive at an even more basic question for which — around here at least — there is absolutely one correct answer. To get oriented, all I really need to ask myself is this:  What am I most likely to be facing, if I’m picking up those bug-out bags and heading out of town?

Around here, the answer is obvious.

Scenario 1:  Three-day traffic jam.

Northern Virginia is pretty much one big traffic jam on the best of weekdays.  If there is some general reason to evacuate this area, by far the most likely result will be a multi-day traffic jam.  Similar to — possibly worse than — the Houston evacuation prior to hurricane Rita, or the Florida state-wide traffic jam for the evacuation for hurricane Irma.

Once I started looking into that, it seems that more-or-less every modern mass evacuation in the U.S. has generated horrific traffic jams. So an epic traffic jam isn’t just likely, it’s more-or-less guaranteed in any large-scale emergency evacuation situation in the U.S.  No matter what the underlying reason, if a lot of people around here suddenly decide to go elsewhere, a massive traffic jam will be the inevitable result.

In addition, recall the earlier this year, a snowstorm broke I-95 in central Virginia, leaving people trapped in their cars, in the middle of nowhere, in the snow, in central Virginia, for more than 24 hours (reference).  My point being that you don’t necessarily even need a mass evacuation to find yourself trapped in your car for a day or more.

Accordingly, the first thing I really ought to prepare for, in a set of bug-out-bags, is spending a few days in the car.

A typical evacuation traffic jam.

Traffic jam, Florida, Hurricane Irma.  Source:  Accuweather (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert).

Let me briefly see what I can learn from recent U.S. hurricane evacuation experiences.

Here’s one first-hand account.  Some takeaways:

  • Stores were still open, so if traffic was stopped, you could hop out and use the restroom at local commercial establishments.  Plausibly, you may or may not need a porta-potty or urinal in the car, depending on whether traffic is literally stopped.
  • Once the traffic jam got started, it snowballed due to people running out of gas.
  • That then littered the road and shoulder with stopped cars, which made access for emergency equipment far more difficult.

Here’s a good scholarly article on traffic and hurricane evacuations.

  • Basically, nobody does anything to manage or stage the traffic load.  In most modern instances, while evacuation routes are identified ahead of time, once the evacuation starts, it’s just every man for himself, with the resulting chaos.
  • Roads rapidly fill past the optimum point on the K-Q curve  — the point of greatest throughput — and that throttles down the number of vehicles able to leave an area.
  • This due, in large part, because everybody waits until the last possible moment.
    • Elected officials, hoping that (e.g.) the hurricane will go elsewhere.
    • Residents, ditto
  • If I get one takeaway from that, it’s that if you are going to evacuate, do it as early as possible.

One other takeaway from that one is that people spend a lot of time farting around as they prepare to evacuate.  That adds to the chaos and further slows traffic.  They don’t have a plan, they need to hit the stores for supplies and so on.  They don’t even have a preferred route.  That strongly suggests having a preferred evacuation route in mind, and having your supplies ready to go.

Here’s a weird little tidbit, from this analysis of Florida evacuations for hurricane Irma.  So many people chose Orlando as their destination that you didn’t just have traffic jams on the gulf coast, you ended up with massive traffic jams around Orlando.  The authors described the results as “catastrophic traffic jams throughout the state”.   The clear takeaway there is to avoid what you believe will be the most common destination for people leaving your area.  In fact, the Irma evacuation caused massive traffic jams in Atlanta, Georgia.  I can only guess that was mostly people who couldn’t get a hotel room in Orlando.

This scholarly analysis adds another helpful hint.  When everybody in an area goes out to gas up the car and pick up bottled water, hey, guess what happens?  Gas and water get scarce.  The clear implication there is that you should consider keeping supplies of both water and gasoline on hand.  If nothing else, you won’t be adding to the chaos in the run-up to the evacuation.  (Although, admittedly, stockpiling a bit of gasoline involves some risks and difficulties.)

For my part, given that the Prius Prime has a 640-mile range at the stated EPA mileage, and that traffic jams actually increase your mileage, my guess is that all I would need is a full tank.  I can’t imagine the scenario where I’d have to run more than 700 miles.  I mean, I’m only 400 miles from Niagara Falls, so that range gets me well up into Canada.  So I shouldn’t need to take gas cans in the car.  Just have enough on hand to be sure to be able to fill the tank.

It almost goes without saying that you are unlikely to be able to obtain a hotel room during a mass-evacuation scenario.  Just to put some numbers on that, in all of Florida, there are under 500,000 hotel rooms (reference).  On any given day, two-thirds of them are already occupied (same reference).  On a good day, for the entire state, you might have 150,000 empty rooms.  The Irma evacuation in Florida involved an estimated 4 million vehicles (reference).  In round numbers, for the entire state of Florida, there was at best one empty hotel room for every 25 evacuating vehicles.  So I’d say, plan for some alternative accommodation is good advice.  Barring that, book well in advance.

Floridadisaster.org puts it a bit more mildly:  ” … hotels and other sheltering options in most inland metropolitan areas are likely to be filled very quickly …”   So, in addition to urging you to leave sooner rather than later, they suggest that you identify someplace safe nearby, ” … minimize the distance over which you must travel in order to reach your intended shelter location. ”  All of that seems like sound advice.

The most important takeaway from that is the idea that you will have already identified your intended shelter location.  If you do it right, you aren’t just evacuating the area, you’re evacuating to a chosen destination.

I have not seen any advice or empirical evidence on whether or not it would be better to use secondary routes rather than interstates or primary highways.  In some places — and Florida comes to mind there — the only through roads are the primary highways and interstates.  But in other areas, you might have a fairly well-developed network of secondary routes.

So what I really need is an instant #vanlife kit?

Yeah, pretty much.  That’s my conclusion, anyway.  No matter what the emergency, if there’s a mass evacuation in this area, we’re all going to be living in our cars for a day or two.

In addition to what you’d put in a normal bug-out bag (water, food, light source, and so on), I should ideally have three more things on hand, ready to go, in case of an emergency evacuation.

Source:  Clipart library.com

First, pre-select a handful of potential destinations, at various distances, and store that list in the car.  Apparently, during many of out recent hurricane-driven evacuations, a lot of people wasted a lot of time trying to figure out where they could go.  This hesitation pretty much guarantees getting stuck in the worst of traffic. Even if you’ve picked a (one) place, there’s going to be a pretty good chance that there will be (e.g.) no hotel rooms or camping spots left.  So pick several.

As I would almost certainly be driving west, and have no relatives living west of me, that would almost certainly be a list of hotels and campgrounds along the interstate and primary highways leading west of here.  Write it down and keep that list in the car.

Source:  Amazon.com

Second, keep some gasoline on hand.  A second clear lesson is that any situation that would generate a mass evacuation will also generate panic-buying of gasoline.  And if there’s anything we learned from COVID, it’s that panic buying can clear out the local inventories in a flash.  In my case, I’d want enough to ensure that I could fill the tank of my wife’s car — about ten gallons.

This is a lot tougher to do well, because gas goes “stale” in a relatively short amount of time, perhaps as little as three months.  This is due largely to the loss of the most volatile components.  As they evaporate, it raises the flash point of what’s left and makes it harder for a spark plug to ignite it.

The upshot is that you have to rotate your stock.  You can’t just put some filled gas cans on a shelf and be done with it.  You need to transfer that stored gas to your car periodically and re-fill you gas cans with fresh gas.

Maintaining adequate gasoline turnover is already a minor issue for some PHEV owners.  If you do almost all your driving on battery, you might keep the same gas in your tank for a prolonged period.  That said, car fuel systems are sealed, so there’s relatively little evaporation.  I believe Toyota recommends at least half a tank of fresh gas every year.

Just by chance, I actually have the right equipment for storing modest amounts of gasoline.  That’s a gasketed metal jerry can, as pictured above.  Those have no vent, and they seal completely when closed, slowing the rate at which the gas goes bad.  I can’t recall exactly how I came to own mine, but I’m sure they can no longer be sold in CARB-compliant areas such as the DC metro area.

I’m undecided as to whether I’m going to store a can or two of gas.  The decision to store gasoline is a commit to the effort it takes to keep it fresh.  I’m not sure it’s worth the effort.

At this point, I think I have the inputs for this process down pat. 

My final concern is for outputs.

What are your alternatives if you’re stuck in the car and can’t get access to a bathroom?  I realize you can stop the car, run into the woods, and take care of business in some fashion.  The interesting question is, what can you do without getting out of the car?

And, in the modern era, well, of course there are multiple websites that will tell you just exactly how to poop and pee in the car.  Typically with some variety of D-I-Y receptacle.  And numerous vendors of commercial products for the same purpose.   And the inevitable YouTube videos.

After working through a considerable amount of that, I’ve decided to do two things.

One, I’m going to buy a pack of the “Travel Jane” brand disposable urinals above.  These contain a polymer that gels more-or-less instantly when it comes in contact with urine.  Apparently the shape is more-or-less female-friendly (but guys can use it too.)

Enough said about #1.

And then there are the various contraptions for an in-car #2.  Of which, none of them look like they’ll work for a fat guy in a Prius.  (And a standard steel bedpan won’t work, because it slopes the wrong way to be used in an already-sloping car seat.)  Instead, I’ll be cutting down a five-gallon-bucket-style emergency toilet, to match the dimensions needed to work with a car seat (3″ front, 5″ rear).

Then buying a box of disposable liners.

Then hope like hell I never have to use the thing.  And that’s that.

Some commentary on disaster kit checklists

There’s no point in my offering you a list of stuff to go into your own bug-out bag or disaster kit.  There’s no shortage of experts who will tell you what to keep on hand for disaster preparedness.  By and large, they all say the same things.  And those are pretty obvious:  Water, food, shelter, sanitation supplies, and so on.  I listed some references at the start of this post.

I will add just four refinements that you may not read elsewhere.  These are all about maintaining that emergency kit once you have put it together.

First, never leave the batteries in your devices.  Take them out, and put them in a plastic bag taped to the device.  Although battery corrosion is far less of a problem now than it was decades ago, alkaline batteries will eventually corrode.  And you’ll only find out that the device is ruined when it ceases to function.

Two, invest in a cheap battery tester.  Five dollars will get you a perfectly adequate tester on Amazon.  That will pay you back in terms of batteries that you don’t have to throw away, because they remain within spec even after sitting around for a few years.

Three, separate out all the items that need to be replaced periodically, and put them all in their own bag.  Food, medications, batteries, and so on.  Anything that has an expiration date.  If not, you’ll have to go rooting around in your kit, every year, to check for expired items.  Which means you won’t bother to do it.  Which means that when you go to use your bug-out bag, it will be full of expired items.

Four, use a sharpie to mark the purchase date of every food item.  And every other item that is in your bag of expire-ables.  This takes almost no time, and saves you having to squint at the various packages when checking the contents of your bug-out bag.

In terms of the standard lists of items, oddly, almost all of these lists not only have the same items, they have the same handful of items that I consider to be decades out-of-date.

Some common bits of bad advice

Surely the most out-of-date recommendation found on every list is to carry some travelers’ checks.  Travelers’ Checks?  Do they even make those any more?  (Answer:  Yes, American Express still offers Travelers’ Checks.)  I cannot imagine the situation in which cash would not be superior to Travelers’ Checks.

In the same vein, there’s a suggestion that you carry some change, in addition to paper money.  Maybe there are still vending machines that don’t require electricity and don’t take bills.  I can’t recall having seen one for a long time.  My guess is, that’s a recommendation that dates back to the era of pay phones.  Otherwise, if I’m in a situation, the last thing on my mind will be worrying about having to round up to the next whole dollar.

Arguably, the second most out-of-date recommendation is to carry matches in a waterproof container.  Don’t.  Carry a Bic lighter.  (What the heck, go crazy, carry two.)  Backpackers made that switch decades ago.  Bic advertises 3000 lights from its full-sized model, and most people seem to get a lot more than that.  And it’s inherently waterproof.  I can’t even imagine carrying 3000 matches.

Third worst recommendation is to include a bottle of bleach.  This was to be used to sanitize clear (non-cloudy) water for drinking.  But that’s a bad recommendation for a couple of reasons.

First, household bleach degrades rapidly.  Unless you are prepared to replace that every couple of years (or annually, per most sources), you’ll have no idea what strength the bleach is.  Standard household bleach is either 6% or 8.5% sodium hypochlorite.  Accordingly, use 8 or 6 drops of bleach per gallon of clean, pre-filtered water.  This, per the U.S. EPA.  In round numbers, to be safe, that’s a quarter-tablespoon per gallon of clear water.  Stir and let stand 30 minutes.

But that’s also a bad recommendation for drinking water purification because the technology has improved.  Back in the day, you had your pick of awkward ways to disinfect water.  Boil the water for one minute, or use water purification tablets (foul tasting and only partially effective), or use bleach (merely foul tasting).  There were also systems set up around the use of iodine rather than chlorine.

These days you have many better options.  There are microfiltration systems, such as the Lifestraw or higher-volume units that use (more-or-less) dialysis filtration material to filter pathogens out of the water.  There are systems that use salt and electricity to create chlorine for water disinfection.  There are systems that use battery-powered UV-C lights to disinfect water.  And so on.

For my part, I’m tossing one of the little Sawyer micro-filtration water filters into each bug-out bag.  Plus a handful of coffee filters for pre-treatment.  If I ever get to the point where I’ve run out of potable water, that’s going to be a lot more reliable than whatever happens to be left in an N-year-old bottle of household bleach.

Some good advice that I wouldn’t have thought of.

By contrast, here are some things I wouldn’t have thought to add:

A lot of lists recommend keeping a complete change of clothes in your emergency kit.  I guess, in the back of my mind, I figured I’d also pack a suitcase.  But if this really is for an emergency getaway, maybe a change of clothes in the bug-out bag is a good idea.  Particularly if you are making some sort of kit to reside in your car.

I would not have thought to include maps of my area.  But that makes perfect sense, as you could easily imagine a situation in which the cell towers are out.  Of course, if I’m traveling by car, I’ll have a set of maps already.

A final general item that I would not have included on my own is a selection of standard over-the-counter medications.  Things like antacids, anti-diarrhea medications, and so on.  I could see where (e.g.) a bad case of acid reflux or heartburn could be a real hindrance if you couldn’t get your hands on some antacids.

Otherwise, those lists are pretty much all the same.  And pretty much common sense if you have any camping experience.

A brief diversion on the space blanket.

Source:  Walmart

Everybody tells you to pack a space blanket.  Few people have ever tried (e.g.) camping with just a space blanket, nothing else.  (I have, and it doesn’t do much to keep you warm.)  Virtually nobody understands how space blankets actually work.  Yet that lack of understanding does not keep people from offering advice on how to use them.  As a result, much of the advice you will get about space blankets is wrong.

A space blanket is, first and foremost, a radiant barrier.  Without even attempting to get into the physics of it, I’m just going to tell you the rules.  It only stops radiant heat if there’s at least a 1″ air gap on at least one side.  It doesn’t matter which side — which kind of belies the use of the word “reflect”.  All that matters is that at least one side faces at least a 1″ air gap.

Ignore that rule, and it’s just a cheap, thin piece of plastic.

If you put one of these under your sleeping bag, it does nothing to reflect heat.  If you drape a regular blanket over it, it does next-to-nothing to reflect heat.  (It only reflects heat in the spots where there’s an air space under it.)

If you’re going to use one of these, put on whatever insulation you are going to use — warm clothes, blankets, and so on — and drape the space blanket over that.  So that that the entire top surface of the space blanket is open to the air.

Think of it as the (shiny) icing on the cake.  That’s how to use it properly.

Now you know.

Conclusions

It has been a long strange trip from “what do I do with my old backpacking gear?” to “how, exactly, does one poop in a car?”.  Let me summarize.

Every U.S. entity that is responsible for emergency management suggests that you maintain some emergency supplies, including but not limited to some form of a bug-out bag.  Something so that, no matter what the chaos is surrounding some unexpected evacuation, you’ll have some basic elements of water, food, light and shelter with you.

Practically speaking, if you are part of some mass evacuation in the U.S., you will be driving your car or other vehicle.  Along with absolutely everybody else.  In a major evacuation the odds appear overwhelming that you are going to be caught in a massive traffic jam.  You will likely end up spending 24 hours or so — maybe more — in your car.  That’s not some one-off mistake.  That’s not some rare occurrence.  That’s seems to happen, like clockwork, with each major American evacuation event.  And if history is any guide, nobody is going to be doing anything to (e.g.) make that go more smoothly, enforce traffic laws, and similar.  Chaos appears to be more the rule than the exception in U.S. evacuation traffic jams.

Plan accordingly.

First, decided on your likely destinations ahead of time.  Have a paper-copy list with (e.g.) address and phone of hotels and campgrounds along your likely evacuation route.  The less time you spend dithering, the earlier you get on the road, and the more likely you can escape the worst of the traffic.  The absolute standard advice is that if you think you may need to evacuate, leave as soon as possible.  The less time spent gathering supplies and pondering your destination, the better.

A lesson from Hurricane Irma in Florida is:  Don’t choose the same destination as everybody else.  If there’s an obvious place to get a hotel room (e.g., in Florida, Orlando), go somewhere else.  Otherwise you get caught in a second major traffic jam at your destination.

Second, don’t assume that you’ll be able to get a hotel room.  Even in tourist-rich Florida, evacuees outnumbered available hotel rooms about 25-to-1.  That surely requires having several potential destinations in mind, and booking early.

Third, keep some gasoline on hand, if you can.  Because gas and bottled water are the first two things to run out when an evacuation is declared.  Gas, in particular, is tricky, because it goes bad.  You need to store it in an unvented container and you need to replace it periodically.

Fourth, include some way to take care of all your needs in the car.  Inputs and outputs.  From shopping Amazon, it’s clear that there are many effective and moderately-priced products that will handle urine.  But poop seems to be a different story entirely.  Most of the devices sold for that would either require a lot of empty floor space in your vehicle, or would require you to stop and get out of your car. A standard bedpan is the wrong shape for use in a car seat — tall at the front, short at the back.  For my part, I’m going to cobble up something from a five-gallon-bucket-style emergency toilet, and then hope that I never have to use it.

Beyond that, you can get reasonably good lists of what to include or not in a bug-out bag from any number of sources.  Or simply buy a ready-made kit from Amazon.  I have nothing to add to those other than the handful of minor refinements listed above.

In summary, the real eye-opener to me was the auto-centric focus you need for your personal planning.  If you’re not going to shelter in place, and you live in the typical urban American setting, then evacuation means getting to your shelter by car.  For most of us, any evacuation event means that we’re going to get a brief taste of #vanlife.  And I judge that most advice for constructing your bug-out bag pays little to no attention to that basic fact.