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Comment by toomanybeersies | Hacker News Reader

At least when I lived back in New Zealand I had an emergency plan. I wouldn't call it a doomsday plan. With the likelihood of earthquakes and other natural disasters leaving you without help for days or weeks, it's only sensible. No need for global unrest to cause problems.

You don't need to be a doomsday prepper to be prepared. And you don't need a complete collapse of society for things to get uncomfortable for you.

You should have at least 3 days of food and water, as well as other essential supplies (blankets, first aid kit, radio) in a bag or convenient location, ready to go in an emergency.

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I live in Florida. Only having three days of food during the Summer is irresponsible. A week of non-refrigerated is realistic. People who laugh about "prepping" haven't heard about hurricanes.

Having less than a week worth of rations (as in canned / dry food) is irresponsible regardless of where you live.

During the “great storm” we had in London where we had like maybe 5” of snow fall and everything stopped working I had people seriously complaining and telling war stories about going hungry because they couldn’t get food delivered...

Like seriously any small scale natural disaster or even a local utilities outage can cause issues to so many unprepared people it’s not even funny.

I keep some basic canned / dry food enough for about a week for 2 people, 20 liters of bottled water and several high capacity charged chargers and I live in W2 London.

You said it great. It's not only "i can still buy anything anytime and all my energies and water work" and "Mad Max". Being prepared does not mean I expect Mad Max world.

Even having a basic first aid kit at hand can mean the difference between life and death in a lot of cases. I keep a tourniquet and quick-clot gauze in my first aid kits because ambulance response times are commonly 30 minutes around here. If you have an arterial bleed you're going to be in pretty bad condition by the time the paramedics arrive unless you can control it. I've never seen an off the shelf first aid kit stock those items. Most of the off-the-shelf kits can barely treat a scraped knee.

There's good reason normal first aid kits don't have tourniquets.

It seems every decade they reverse their position on tourniquets.

I believe that they're discouraged because they tend to do more harm than good when applying a gauze and pressure is sufficient. People tend to go overkill.

However, there are situations where they save lives. This is why simply having first aid supplies isn't sufficient, but actually knowing what to do is essential as well.

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