This winter is supposed to be a cold one, and the recent blizzard in Buffalo has shown us how severe a little snow can be. Are you prepared?

Many things can trap you in your house for extended periods of time, and you need to be able to take care of yourself until things get straightened out.  If you are fortunate enough to be simply trapped in your house but still have power, all you need to worry about is making sure you have something to keep morale up and a sufficient food supply to wait it out. Many people amazingly don’t even have three day’s worth of food; there were reports of good “upstanding citizens” dumpster diving only days after hurricane Sandy because they had run out of food. Remember you need to have three days of **non-perishable** food,  your fully stocked fridge and freezer is no good after a day without power, unless you have a backup method of generating electricity like a battery backup, or a generator. Please keep in mind that while it’s tempting to go buy a generator to make you feel safe, it’s easier and cheaper to make sure you already have a reliable source of food. A generator is no good anyway if you don’t already have a stockpile of gas, which you wont be able to go get, just like you cant go get that food. Be sure to have plenty of long-term storable foods. The caveat is that they must be foods that you already eat; if you hate beans, but know they last a long time, you wont eat them and they will eventually go bad. You just threw away 20 dollars on rotten food.

The simplest and cheapest way to build up a stockpile of food is called “copy canning”. Any time you go to the store to replace something you ate that came from a can, buy two instead of one. After you do this 6 times, you will have an extra 6 cans of chili or beans or spaghetti Os in reserve that you didn’t even feel in your wallet. Just make sure to rotate your food, and always use the oldest can first so nothing goes bad. Once you feel like you have 30 days worth of food in reserve, you can probably move onto another project towards self-sustainability, like 1 gallon of water per person per day minimum. If you lose power from a storm in the winter, it can become dangerous very fast, as it will be easy to catch pneumonia or die.  If you have natural gas or propane hookups, they should still work, so cook away. This will give you fresh warm food, which is a good morale booster, as well as heat up your home. Wear lots of layers, wrap yourselves in plenty of blankets, and stay in and insulate one room of the house. One room takes less energy to heat than an entire house, and it may be possible to stay comfortable with just your own body heat and a few candles for light. If you care to make the investment, you can get a propane heater like this one which will run off your standard barbecue tank and is rated to be safe for use indoors even when the power goes out.

As long as you have enough food and water to last without freezing, you should be OK for a few days until life can return to normal. If you want to be more than OK, you will need to implement more advanced  procedures of course.