Introducing "Lessons Learned"

Hey there, fellow preppers!
Have you survived a disaster? Were you prepared in advance to face it, or is that disaster what got you thinking about emergency preparedness?
2 comments
Greg Hall
Icemas2013. 4 day icestorm during Christmas week. I was prepped, or so I thought. Power went out. No problem, my automatic backup would kick in, pure sine wave inverter and 150 amp hr of battery power. Problem is the inverter failed 6 minutes into the power outage! I reset the inverter. It failed again. Disconnected the batteries and did a hard reset. It failed again.
OK, enough with this 21 century stuff and I reverted back to 1915. Started up a Perfection Firelight Kerosene heater whick powered a Sterling engine fan to blow the heat around the room. Now I had heat (10,500 Btu) and light (300 cp). Lit another wall lamp, Eagle #3 w/20 cp and the entire house now had light and heat. They ran for 4 days until power returned. And you know, neither the Perfection Firelight heater, Sterling fan or the Eagle #3 wall lamp failed in those 4 days! Guess it pays to have a backup plan for when the primary backup plan fails!
South Bay Safety Guy
Living in California we tend to focus on earthquake preparedness, but don’t forget the more mundane disasters. In the last 5 years our family hasn’t experienced a single major quake, but we HAVE experienced almost a year of unemployment for the primary wage earner, plus three separate occasions where a family member had to go to the hospital. It’s good to have supplies, but we got through those personal emergencies with plain old unglamorous insurance and savings.