When the power fails, prepared families settle in, stay warm, and eat well. With careful planning, organization, and a detailed assessment of the needs of each family member, it is possible for every household to survive at least several days with no outside services. A sensible home system will take over the work of providing warmth, shelter, and nutrition.
Author Kathy Harrison guides readers through the empowering process of setting up such a home system with her OAR method — Organize existing supplies, Acquire additional necessities, Rotate everything for freshness. Her comprehensive coverage of emergency preparedness includes food storage, alternative heating sources, personal supplies for every family member, entertainment ideas, toiletry and proper clothing, pet supplies, emergency family communication plans, and neighborhood cooperatives.
In addition to preparing the home for extended periods without electricity, Harrison also discusses evacuation plans — where to go, how to meet up with family, what to pack, and how best to protect all that’s being left behind. Self-sufficiency at home or in a temporary safe haven takes away much of the fear and helplessness associated with disasters. Just in Case puts the power back in the hands of individuals who are equipped and ready to take over when public services fail.
Disasters can strike an entire region or a single unlucky family. They can be brought on by weather (hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, wildfires, severe heat or cold, landslides) or by man (terrorism, acts of war, simple human error). Whatever the cause, these catastrophic events have the potential to disrupt routines and cost money and lives. Why not be one of the prepared few? Just in case . . .
Review
With the assumption that "many of us have a false sense of security... assuming that technology will prevail or that some government agency will bail us out in a crisis," this extensive guide gives detailed, down-to-earth advice on what to do when disaster strikes, be it a house fire, an ice storm or biological terrorism. Aided by charmingly retro illustrations vaguely reminiscent of a 1940s air raid brochure, Harrison (Another Place at the Table) presents her "OAR" system for preparedness—organizing, acquiring and rotating supplies—and techniques to safely and even comfortably survive any kind of emergency. She shows how to prepare for a short-term crisis: building a supply of food and water; preparing first aid and evacuation kits; planning communication and a family meeting place in times of crisis. She also presents long-term strategies for self-sufficiency: "eliminating debt and securing a supply of cash in your home"; planting a garden, canning food and making cheese; replacing an inefficient fireplace with a woodstove; building a solar oven. Harrison shows that learning to do it yourself, besides providing some security in an increasingly insecure world, brings less obvious but perhaps equally important benefits: "an incredible sense of self-sufficiency and independence." And pointing out that family preparedness can build community, she reminds readers, "crisis can bring out the best in people, or the worst. Strive to be one of the good guys."
(Publishers Weekly, August 2008) |
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 Don't Be Scared, Be Prepared |
| Review Date: August 31, 2008 |
| Reviewer: Carolyn L. Baker, |
DON'T BE SCARED, BE PREPARED, A Review Of Kathy Harrison's "Just In Case"
[...]
As we mark the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and the horrors of a ravaged New Orleans and Gulf Coast and as the residents of those areas again wait breathlessly to see where the volatile Hurricanes Gustav and Hanna are headed, a review of Harrison's third book, Just In Case: How To Be Self-Sufficient When The Unexpected Happens is especially timely.
Kathy Harrison and her husband Bruce live in Western Massachusetts and have spent many years parenting hundreds of foster kids, and in fact, in 1996 were named by their state as Foster Parents of the Year. Kathy has devoted her life to caring for homeless, abused, and neglected children, and has written two other books before Just In Case entitled Another Place At The Table and One Small Boat. That's why, unlike most preparedness books, this one is supremely family-oriented, born in the heart of an ordinary mom who simply cares about the safety and well being of her family.
As we mark the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and the horrors of a ravaged New Orleans and Gulf Coast and as the residents of those areas again wait breathlessly to see where the volatile Hurricanes Gustav and Hanna are headed, a review of Harrison's third book, Just In Case: How To Be Self-Sufficient When The Unexpected Happens is especially timely.
Harrison notes that this book is not about long-term survival and emphasizes that her "objective with this book is to offer access to the kind of crisis information that will be helpful to ordinary families in extraordinary situations." Therefore, she hasn't offered directions for making shoes or clothing or hunting and skinning game animals for food. Consequently, her introduction asks some exceedingly practical but tough questions:
**Can you provide your family with sufficient food if the grocery stores are closed?
**Do you have access to safe, clean water if the municipal water system or you well is compromised?
**Can you keep your home warm if fuel supplies are disrupted?
**Do you have a source of light if the power grid goes down during a storm?
**Can you evacuate your home with three days' worth of supplies for each family member in five minutes?
**Can you shut down your home systems in ten minutes?
Many Truth To Power readers are also familiar with Sharon Astyk's Causabon's Book site and the Simply Living website which offer an abundance of suggestions for food storage and rotation and which I cannot recommend highly enough. Their emphasis, however, is a bit more long-term whereas Just In Case is specifically a family disaster prep tool intended to prepare folks for an acute crisis situation.
The book's first section uses the acronym "OAR" which stands for "Organize, Acquire, and Rotate". As we organize what we already have, we get clear on what we need to acquire, and then after acquiring it, we need to rotate those materials so that they do not become antiquated and therefore useless in an emergency.
In Harrison's Preparedness section, her "Personal Preparedness" chapter, addresses health, skills, bookkeeping and financial preparedness, and how to conduct "trial run" drills with the family once a month to practice for a quick evacuation of the home. Also addressed are: preparedness with children, pets, and preparing your car.
A section dealing specifically with disaster instructs the reader about what to do in an emergencies such as the loss of power, fire in the home, natural disasters, toxic hazards, pandemics, and terrorism.
Although Just In Case, as stated above, does not focus on long-term preparation, its last section offers skills for independence which indeed are useful for a more protracted descent away from the status quo as energy depletion, infrastructure, financial, and climate change collapses intensify. The skills section addresses water purification, cold storage, heating with wood, and gathering and harvesting wild foods. In addition, Harrison has included a section on wilderness survival.
Her "Food From Scratch" section offers in-depth instructions regarding canning and dehydrating food, as well as pickling and making yogurt and cheese. And for those wondering how they might actually prepare stored foods that would produce tasty, tantalizing meals from them, Harrison gives us an entire chapter entitled "The Stored Food Cookbook."
I must confess that Kathy Harrison not only captured my mind in this book but also won my heart. I feel her compassion and protectiveness of her readers and their families in every page. Here's one exemplary paragraph from her introduction:
We live in precarious times, with a looming specter of global warming and climate change, pandemics, terrorism, and food insecurity assaulting us every day. Many families live only a paycheck away from homelessness. Our fragile and interdependent system of transportation, communication, and finance leaves most Americans only a few days away from hunger. My intention is to encourage all families to become familiar with the basic goods and skills necessary for self-reliance should the worst happen.
While as Harrison notes, the world has always been a scary place, this is the first generation that has fallen into total dependence on a fragile network of vulnerable independent systems. Food, for example, as became so blatantly obvious this year, is inextricably connected to transportation and fuel. Those who occasionally shop at big box or chain stores have certainly noticed sections of shelves or entire shelves that are empty these days. When one inquires about where these items are, the usual response is, "Well, the trucks haven't delivered them yet" or "we were out of that item for weeks, and finally the trucks came and brought a shipment, but customers have cleaned them out already." All of these systems depend on the others, and as Harrison succinctly summarizes: "...the whole system will collapse in a domino effect that could bring our usual lives to a screeching halt. The shelves will be empty, the money will dry up, the lights will go out, the cars won't run, and people will stay at home."
The other possibility is that people won't stay home because they will no longer have a home to go to as a result of foreclosure or natural disaster. In that case, we would see massive homelessness, wandering, and migration, and then it would be crucial to have a variety of wilderness survival skills.
I haven't been able to put Kathy Harrison's book down and move on to another. I highly recommend your purchasing it sooner rather than later as an indispensable investment in your own and your family's survival.
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Planning for the worst without breaking the bank
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| Review Date: April 17, 2009 |
| Reviewer: M. Cozzens, rural NW Pennsylvania |
| This book is excellent! It is the first realistic book on preparedness I've come across for anyone with children, or anyone who doesn't necessarily relish the idea of taking to the woods to live primitively at the first whiff of trouble. Instead of impractical, expensive ideas like stocking a bunker full of MRE's - often recommended by others but completely unaffordable if you have a large family, and what kid would eat that stuff anyway? - she shows how to stock up an abundance of food that your children will actually eat without busting your bank balance to $0. I have an entire section of my home library devoted to living off the land & preparedness-type books, but I find myself turning to "Just In Case" more and more as I take practical steps to prepare my family for whatever may come. I would recommend this book for anyone, but it's particularly helpful for moms or dads trying to plan for the future while still having to pay the bills in the present. |
A very good start
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| Review Date: September 20, 2008 |
| Reviewer: Old KY homebody, KY USA |
I bought this book and thought it was well worth it. I have been doing emergency preparedness for years as each new weather emergency showed me something I needed or wished I had on hand. Some web sources are heavy on the wilderness survival end, but I found this to be a very good basic book for how to prepare for sheltering-in-place or evacuation, and to begin a lifestyle of preparedness.
Teacher/Photographer's point was well taken about a lack of sources. I wonder if that was the publisher not wanting to imply endorsement? I could just about guarantee the author gets a lot of her food storage items from "Emergency Essentials," and a source for non-electric items is "Lehmans." Or, google (when did that become a verb?) "Emergency preparedness," and it will take you to any number of sources, including blogs and message boards that will be glad to offer advice about quality. |
Little House in the Big Woods
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| Review Date: December 1, 2009 |
| Reviewer: Auntie Claus, seattle, WA |
The author makes the case that the supply lines upon which we rely today are taut and far-flung, leaving us vulnerable to feel even a hiccup of disruption. She walks you through what she does to have a home that can run for weeks without outside assistance -how she creates slack in those supply lines to absorb the effects of rolling blackouts, snow storms, and so on. She encourages you to start just by considering what you would want on hand to be safe and comfortable for three days and build from there, giving you a lot of food for thought in the process. She says, "I write about managing a home for a period of time without running water or electricity as though it is a given that such things are necessary for comfortable survival. In fact, people have lived without such luxuries for millennia, and all over the world, many people live without them now, either by choice or (circumstance). We turn these luxuries into necessities when we forget the skills we need to manage without them." It is also an infrastructure problem. It's not just that I don't know how to prepare a meal in my fireplace, it's that my fireplace and pots and pans aren't designed for that purpose. Heck, the fireplace isn't even designed to heat the room, it's just for ambience. It boggles the mind that homes are bigger than ever as families have gotten smaller and the storage industry has exploded, yet you can't do half the things in a home you used to be able to do. We've traded all our utilitarian spaces for recreational ones, deciding somewhere along the way that a third living room was better than a cellar, laundry room, mud room, pantry, and so on. We're told we need to store water, but the author points out that setting aside even a two week supply is a major strain on her available storage. And then you have to rotate your stock. It seems like homes ought to have a kind of mini suburban "well" built into them -something like your hot water tank that water is constantly moving through, but that in the event of a disaster you would close off and draw from until that system was up and running again. Create a little slack, in other words. But moving on to more food for thought:
I realized that of the two big concerns -electricity and water- an interrupted water supply is by far the more serious problem for my situation. With this book, I have determined how I could store and cook food without electricity, acquired a few hand-crank lights/lanterns, a hand-crank radio/flashlight/cellphone-charger, and a first aid kit, and I've aggressively set aside water. In an apartment, sheltering-in-place is going to be more like camping and less like homesteading. My balcony makes the perfect sheltered "camping" kitchen for a camp stove. It would sit on an IKEA butcher block that is easy to move out of the apartment, putting the stove at the right height and providing counter space; we have a fire extinguisher too, of course, that would be kept in arms' reach. Hanging a tarp on the exposed side completes the shelter while still allowing for plenty of ventilation. I've built a small collection of recipes using foods that don't require electricity to keep and that produce small enough portions that they don't make leftovers either (alternatively, just stocking up on some one-to-two-person sized cans of meals like chili/soup/stew/chowder/pasta solves both these problems while allowing you a way to have meat and cheese). For fun, I've bought a couple of board games, a deck of cards, and been actively seeking out 'parlor' games that don't require more than pen and paper or yourselves. I've enjoyed the rehearsals she suggested, too: it lets me play "snow day" instead of just longing for one. The book also gave me new reasons to always have two weeks worth of food in the house, which has been much better for my life and budget than the crutch of running out for fast food. An unexpected benefit was that despite being preparation for an unwelcome, unwanted disaster, it has made my home much cozier.
One last thing: Probably you can tell this from the cover, but this is not about wilderness survivalist skills or preparing for the collapse of civilization: it assumes systems will eventually come back online. Provisions will have to be restocked, even if they are just things like baking soda, propane, and lids for your canning jars. It is not about total independence from any and all grids, it is about replacing our current ones with something better. As she says, "In this way preparedness can serve what I believe to be its true purpose: not to isolate us from the world but rather to build local community and allow us to recognize our interdependence." (p. 21) |
Good but
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| Review Date: August 20, 2009 |
| Reviewer: Melanie Ivanoff, Nashville, TN United States |
| I do feel this book has a lot to offer families and homeowners on preparedness. I intend to begin to follow several suggestions myself, like having cash on hand, getting an evacuation pack together, and keeping my car at least half full of gas. The one problem i had though is that, as an apartment dweller in Nashville, many of the steps i simply cannot take. No fireplace for heating in winter, no basement for cold storage of veggies, no hooking up a generator to run a small fridge. I suppose the author's first suggestion for me would be to save up for a down payment on a home! This book has made me look realistically at my situation. |
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