DON'T BE SCARED, BE PREPARED, A Review Of Kathy Harrison's "Just In Case"
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As we mark the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and the horrors of a ravaged New Orleans and Gulf Coast and as the residents of those areas again wait breathlessly to see where the volatile Hurricanes Gustav and Hanna are headed, a review of Harrison's third book, Just In Case: How To Be Self-Sufficient When The Unexpected Happens is especially timely.
Kathy Harrison and her husband Bruce live in Western Massachusetts and have spent many years parenting hundreds of foster kids, and in fact, in 1996 were named by their state as Foster Parents of the Year. Kathy has devoted her life to caring for homeless, abused, and neglected children, and has written two other books before Just In Case entitled Another Place At The Table and One Small Boat. That's why, unlike most preparedness books, this one is supremely family-oriented, born in the heart of an ordinary mom who simply cares about the safety and well being of her family.
As we mark the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and the horrors of a ravaged New Orleans and Gulf Coast and as the residents of those areas again wait breathlessly to see where the volatile Hurricanes Gustav and Hanna are headed, a review of Harrison's third book, Just In Case: How To Be Self-Sufficient When The Unexpected Happens is especially timely.
Harrison notes that this book is not about long-term survival and emphasizes that her "objective with this book is to offer access to the kind of crisis information that will be helpful to ordinary families in extraordinary situations." Therefore, she hasn't offered directions for making shoes or clothing or hunting and skinning game animals for food. Consequently, her introduction asks some exceedingly practical but tough questions:
**Can you provide your family with sufficient food if the grocery stores are closed?
**Do you have access to safe, clean water if the municipal water system or you well is compromised?
**Can you keep your home warm if fuel supplies are disrupted?
**Do you have a source of light if the power grid goes down during a storm?
**Can you evacuate your home with three days' worth of supplies for each family member in five minutes?
**Can you shut down your home systems in ten minutes?
Many Truth To Power readers are also familiar with Sharon Astyk's Causabon's Book site and the Simply Living website which offer an abundance of suggestions for food storage and rotation and which I cannot recommend highly enough. Their emphasis, however, is a bit more long-term whereas Just In Case is specifically a family disaster prep tool intended to prepare folks for an acute crisis situation.
The book's first section uses the acronym "OAR" which stands for "Organize, Acquire, and Rotate". As we organize what we already have, we get clear on what we need to acquire, and then after acquiring it, we need to rotate those materials so that they do not become antiquated and therefore useless in an emergency.
In Harrison's Preparedness section, her "Personal Preparedness" chapter, addresses health, skills, bookkeeping and financial preparedness, and how to conduct "trial run" drills with the family once a month to practice for a quick evacuation of the home. Also addressed are: preparedness with children, pets, and preparing your car.
A section dealing specifically with disaster instructs the reader about what to do in an emergencies such as the loss of power, fire in the home, natural disasters, toxic hazards, pandemics, and terrorism.
Although Just In Case, as stated above, does not focus on long-term preparation, its last section offers skills for independence which indeed are useful for a more protracted descent away from the status quo as energy depletion, infrastructure, financial, and climate change collapses intensify. The skills section addresses water purification, cold storage, heating with wood, and gathering and harvesting wild foods. In addition, Harrison has included a section on wilderness survival.
Her "Food From Scratch" section offers in-depth instructions regarding canning and dehydrating food, as well as pickling and making yogurt and cheese. And for those wondering how they might actually prepare stored foods that would produce tasty, tantalizing meals from them, Harrison gives us an entire chapter entitled "The Stored Food Cookbook."
I must confess that Kathy Harrison not only captured my mind in this book but also won my heart. I feel her compassion and protectiveness of her readers and their families in every page. Here's one exemplary paragraph from her introduction:
We live in precarious times, with a looming specter of global warming and climate change, pandemics, terrorism, and food insecurity assaulting us every day. Many families live only a paycheck away from homelessness. Our fragile and interdependent system of transportation, communication, and finance leaves most Americans only a few days away from hunger. My intention is to encourage all families to become familiar with the basic goods and skills necessary for self-reliance should the worst happen.
While as Harrison notes, the world has always been a scary place, this is the first generation that has fallen into total dependence on a fragile network of vulnerable independent systems. Food, for example, as became so blatantly obvious this year, is inextricably connected to transportation and fuel. Those who occasionally shop at big box or chain stores have certainly noticed sections of shelves or entire shelves that are empty these days. When one inquires about where these items are, the usual response is, "Well, the trucks haven't delivered them yet" or "we were out of that item for weeks, and finally the trucks came and brought a shipment, but customers have cleaned them out already." All of these systems depend on the others, and as Harrison succinctly summarizes: "...the whole system will collapse in a domino effect that could bring our usual lives to a screeching halt. The shelves will be empty, the money will dry up, the lights will go out, the cars won't run, and people will stay at home."
The other possibility is that people won't stay home because they will no longer have a home to go to as a result of foreclosure or natural disaster. In that case, we would see massive homelessness, wandering, and migration, and then it would be crucial to have a variety of wilderness survival skills.
I haven't been able to put Kathy Harrison's book down and move on to another. I highly recommend your purchasing it sooner rather than later as an indispensable investment in your own and your family's survival.
