Hi! I am Tim MacWelch of Earth Connection School of Wilderness Survival and Ancient Skills near Fredericksburg, Virginia. This is our video clip series on Emergency Preparedness. In this clip, we are going to talk about the fact that your vehicle can be a storehouse if you stock it properly.
So every vehicle should have a basic amount of emergency or survival type equipment in it. The more passengers you can carry in your vehicle, the more gear you should carry for safety and emergencies. Here we have a nice simple assortment of stuff for just one person or a very small group.
For a small group we would want to add more elements for warmth and shelter like more sleeping bags, more blankets, even clothing articles: coats, jackets, hats, gloves, things like that. So some elements that you can have in your car for safety and emergencies would be sleeping bag. One nice soft warm sleeping bag for each person that your car can carry, also some blankets and spare clothing are never a bad idea.
Good, bright, colors that can be used to signal for help are also an important thing to consider. We would also want to consider having some extra clothes: hats, gloves, jackets, anything extra for warmth in the cold weather. We would also want to still have those blankets and sleeping bags in the warm weather because it can get cold at night, or you could go out of your area into a colder place. So extra clothes are something that you might want to change out for different seasons but something to sleep in or something to sleep with to keep you warm is a year round necessity. After shelter, water is our next most important survival aspect. You can have jugs of water; spring, summer, and fall. In the winter time, they might freeze and burst. So that's when we might want to switch to juice. The sugar in the apple juice acts as a safe natural anti-freeze. Now that will not keep this from freezing and bursting in extremely cold sub-zero weather but just simple freezing every night, following each day in moderate winter weather, the fact that this juice has an anti-freeze like ability keeps it from bursting the jug, and again with our water, we have got it to plastic jug that is capable of expansion because ice expands as it freezes and it will burst containers if they are not able to handle that expansion.
You may also want to consider some water purification equipment to purify the water wherever you do go. You could use a pump like this one where we drop this hose into contaminated water and pump the handle, and out of this little spout shoots clean, sterile safe water. You may want to also have some jugs to put that water in.
Next in importance after water, is fire. So by having some simple elements for fire making, matches and lighters, even a little camping stove and a fuel. This is like a portable camp fire and this is a way to start any fire with matches and lighters.
After fire in importance is food. You want to have food that won't freeze and burst, food that won't go bad if it stays in the car for a long time, food that's able to go through a lot of temperature extremes without going bad, preferably high calorie items, fatty items: candy bars, different types of nutrition bars, stuff like that, that you don't have to worry it about freezing, and you don't have to worry about it rotting or going bad.
After food, in importance we may want to consider, the toilet paper for our nature calls. We will also want to consider sources for light at night time. A big flash light like this for seeing into the distance, and a smaller flash light like this headlamp to wear on your head so you have both hands free to work and this will burn for about 100 hours on three AAA batteries. It's a small battery, it's a commonly available batteries, but they burn a really long time with these type of bulbs.
Another thing we might want to consider is some backup survival gear, some small light weight stuff that we could have just anywhere; these little emergency sleeping bags, or a foil-covered Mylar bag that you can actually crawl inside off, and it will reflect a lot of your body heat back towards you and it's already in the shape of a sleeping bag so it's very efficient.
Tools are very important. These are some basic hand tools: hammers, wrenches, screwdrivers, pliers, different hand tools that would be good to keep in the car. Another thing you might want to consider for your vehicle is some kind of signaling item, a nice loud whistle preferably brightly colored, so you can find it of you drop it. Three blast of this whistle is an international signal for help; three of anything, three honks of the car horn, three shots from the gun or three blasts from a loud whistle.
So those are just some of the things that you could keep in your vehicle that would make your vehicle a storehouse of safety equipment. Next, we are going to talk about emergency preparedness in the home. Are your home is still a shelter even if the utilities go out?
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