The 43,800 Hour Kit

For the last little while Amber has been begging me to work with her on updating our 72-hour kit. It didn't seem like a long time ago since we last did the kits, so, since I have had school, I have kept putting her off.

However, with my Christmas break from school, and also with a disaster experience from my friends, the Moss family (see: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, & Aftermath blog entries from moss-grove.blogspot.com) I relented and we worked on our food storage this week.

Well, when we dove into the dusty old suit cases that contained our disaster supplies, we found some very interesting things. First of all, where I thought we had recently updated our kits, I realized that time flies faster that I expected. Everything in the kit had expiration dates of 2005, 2006, and some lucky items expired early 2007. Our fruit cups had brown fruit in a milky juice. The fruit snacks were as hard (and about as large) as popcorn kernels. The cup of noodles were pretty tasteless and bland. Although they had expired a year earlier, I made the kids eat them for lunch thinking that dried cup of noodles didn't really go bad. Note to self, cup of noodles do go bad. The kids and I couldn't stomach the aged noodly lunch and so our sink got piled up with five containers of Lipton Cup O' Noodle Soup.


My favorite find in the 72 hour kit was a decayed and petrified (another sign of the age of the kits) mouse corpse halfway inside a chewed up bag of now-hardened moldy Jerky. (Note: this is a doctored picture as I couldn't get Amber to hold the real bag for the camera!)

The emergency candle we packed had melted all over the bag that it was stored in. There were even some items for which we couldn't remember their purpose - like a baggy full of bullion cubes.

I really can't imagine what are faces would have looked like if we truly had an emergency and we grabbed our 72 hour kits and went to a refuge with the children. Hungry and thirsty from trekking over flooded roads or broken power poles, we would sit down and open our bags for our first emergency meal to find...THAT. Hmm...pretty sobering.

We only had two 2-liter bottles of water in the kit. That would hardly sustain 7 people - let alone hydrate our 200 calorie cups of noodles and our 20 packages of hot cocoa mix. (I still have no clue what we would have prepared and consumed our hot-cocoa with as there were no cups or containers for the drink).

One comforting thing is that we would had plenty of candy as we had 15 large king-sized Spree Candy sticks and a baggie full of hard candy - that never goes bad!