Customer Reviews

Just in Case: How to be Self-Sufficient when the Unexpected Happens

5 star:		(27)
4 star:		(17)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book is excellent! It is the first realistic book on preparedness I've come across for anyone with children, or anyone who doesn't necessarily relish the idea of taking to the woods to live primitively at the first whiff of trouble. Instead of impractical, expensive ideas like stocking a bunker full of MRE's - often recommended by others but completely unaffordable if you have a large family, and what kid would eat that stuff anyway? - she shows how to stock up an abundance of food that your children will actually eat without busting your bank balance to $0. I have an entire section of my home library devoted to living off the land & preparedness-type books, but I find myself turning to "Just In Case" more and more as I take practical steps to prepare my family for whatever may come. I would recommend this book for anyone, but it's particularly helpful for moms or dads trying to plan for the future while still having to pay the bills in the present.
Update: I'm back on Amazon to buy another copy of this book...lending it to like-minded friends is dangerous, like me you might never get it back! So though this copy will be for me I'm sure I'll be buying more for gifts as other friends start turning to my library for info. This book is great and I am uncomfortable not having it on my shelf.

The author has the right idea in that we should be prepared for various situations "just in case" and wrote an easy-to-read book full of mostly excellent information, but Kathy Harrison should have quit while she was ahead.

The book's strength is in home preparedness for the beginner, particularly food preparation, recipes, and storage which comprise more than 50 pages of the nearly 230-page text. However, if you have a carport instead of a garage, don't have a basement, live in an apartment, or rent, you need a lot of imagination to adapt her advice to your living arrangement and you'll need to accept that parts simply aren't going to work.

Where the author fails is in areas away from the house.

For my first example, the car repair kit on p. 87 inexplicably includes window washer fluid, a PINT of oil, and engine coolant. However, if a vehicle is well-maintained as she advises, there's absolutely no need to waste valuable space on storing these items in your vehicle. Surely, barring vehicular damage, nothing more than gas and air for tire pressure is required for the length of time she advocates preparing, which is as short as three days to as long as a month or two. And, what's the point of having only a pint of oil especially when oil is typically sold by the quart? You're much better off utilizing the space for things you really need, like drinking water.

For another example, the wilderness travel hiking kit on pp. 175-176, she unfathomably recommends a folding camp grill and mess kit, omitting any mention of food other than snack foods that don't require heating or cooking. Not only that, she's apparently unaware that since many places ban open fires, you're much better off with a backpacker's stove and fuel although she does list a stove and fuel for the car emergency kit on p. 88.

It isn't as though she's solely addressing a survival situation where you might have to disregard an open fire ban in order to save your life because she heads her wilderness travel lists with: "If you are a frequent hiker, a few simple items should always be in your pocket or daypack" and "For longer hikes to more remote locations, a larger pack will provide space for more equipment...."

But, what about infrequent hikers? Doesn't preparedness apply to them as well, perhaps more so because of their lack of experience?

In the text, she mentions boiling water, except you don't need a camp grill to accomplish that and, if your water bottle is stainless steel, you won't need anything from the mess kit, either, although you could use the cordage and maybe the duct tape or the heavy work gloves you brought for sawing wood, none of which she mentions, to retrieve your bottle from the heat of the fire without burning yourself on the hot stainless steel.

What? There's no mention of duct tape or cord in the wilderness hiking list? Yikes!

It gets worse.

For hydration, she recommends only a water bottle with filter or a "good-quality" filtering water bottle, not extra water, not halogens, nor that the key word is "microfilter" instead of "filter." At first, I suspected the author glossed over this topic in the wilderness section because she didn't want to spend time doing the necessary research which is a great way to get you terribly sick while being falsely confident that you're prepared because you bought a filtering water bottle like she said.

However, in an earlier section, she spends over four pages discussing water purification in the home although I recognized the illustration of the portable water filter as being of a filtering bottle suitable only for filtering potable tap water, that is, for aesthetic reasons. Also, for the adult evacuation kit on p. 95, she does mention a pocket purifier and purifying tablets. The inconsistencies of the book, making readers piece things together as best they can, if they can, which for newbies may be difficult with so much to process, is highly irresponsible especially for a vital necessity like safe drinking water.

For my final example, she lists a compass on p. 175, but not a topographical map without which is the best way to get lost and remain lost until your dead body is found as has happened to others who ventured into the wilds with inadequate knowledge and gear. The author does have GPS on the car emergency list on p. 88, failing to mention that the considerably more expensive GPS receiver isn't 100% reliable which is why outdoor experts stress our needing to know how to navigate with a map and compass.

Frankly, considering how much she preaches getting off the grid and avoiding reliance on the government, I'm surprised that she contradicts herself by listing GPS instead of a map. Not only is a GPSr not 100% reliable, what the government giveth, the government may taketh away especially for national security or military purposes. Don't get me wrong. I bought a GPSr over four years ago. However, I still keep a Rand McNally road atlas in the car and just bought a laminated road map for my Go bag "just in case" along with a bottle of Map Sealer to waterproof a couple of favorite city maps.

I realize my low rating may seem unduly harsh, but not only did I not learn anything new, the flaws contributing to illness or potential death nullify a lot of the weight of her guidance that's well-worth following.

If Harrison had stuck to home preparedness and did more to address what those who live in other types of homes could do instead of dropping the ball for the applicable areas as she did, I might have rated it five stars. It's because of the excellent advice she included that I didn't award the lowest one star.

So, use "Just In Case" for its strengths, if you want, with the understanding that the flaws are so bad they're hazardous to your well-being. It's because of the flaws that I'm rating the book with merely two stars since they really will put you in danger or distress if you blindly trust every word she's written.

DON'T BE SCARED, BE PREPARED, A Review Of Kathy Harrison's "Just In Case"

[...]

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.

I bought this book and thought it was well worth it. I have been doing emergency preparedness for years as each new weather emergency showed me something I needed or wished I had on hand. Some web sources are heavy on the wilderness survival end, but I found this to be a very good basic book for how to prepare for sheltering-in-place or evacuation, and to begin a lifestyle of preparedness.

Teacher/Photographer's point was well taken about a lack of sources. I wonder if that was the publisher not wanting to imply endorsement? I could just about guarantee the author gets a lot of her food storage items from "Emergency Essentials," and a source for non-electric items is "Lehmans." Or, google (when did that become a verb?) "Emergency preparedness," and it will take you to any number of sources, including blogs and message boards that will be glad to offer advice about quality.

SEPTEMBER 12, 2011 UPDATE POST-SOUTHWEST GRID OUTAGE:
I bought this book almost 3 years ago in Virginia, where it applied very well. However, if you had picked this book up in, say Southern California a few weeks before the power went out in the whole Southwest recently, you probably would've have found the book's unrelenting focus on Northern winters frustrating to say the least.

In Chapter 10, Loss of Power, despite saying "There will likely be no advance warning of impending grid failure beyond the rolling brownouts that are now a common summer occurrence in much of the country", the chapter is devoted to power outages in the context of a harsh winter: keeping pipes from freezing, thawing frozen pipes, and restarting your heating system when power is restored (all of which came in handy our first winter in Virginia). If you move on to Chapter 12's two pages on dealing with 'extreme heat', hoping to find something that applies there, you'll find advice like "if you don't have air-conditioning at home, head out to find it. Malls, libraries, and other public air-conditioned spaces can be good places to hang out when it's sweltering outside" which doesn't help at all. The wildfire section could be so much better -Pat Welsh's Southern California Organic Gardening (3rd Edition): Month by Month is much more informative and specific when discussing avoiding landscaping your yard with fire hazards (like palm trees, the individual branches of which will sail away, on fire, to light up houses blocks away). She suggests this: "connect your garden hose and lawn sprinklers. Turn them on and position them to wet your roof and fuel tanks." The reason wildfires are ever-present in Southern California is because of the dry Mediterranean climate with droughts being the norm (here, native plants go dormant in the summer instead of in the winter like they do up North, if that gives you an idea). Taking precious water and attempting to drench the whole town rather than saving it for firefighters to apply to buildings actually in flames is not a good use of resources. One of the first things they did in the September power outage -the height of fire season- was restrict completely ANY outside water use. Many people responded to the power outage by setting off fireworks (who knows why).

In Chapter 4 "Home Systems", she includes solar in the list of grid alternatives (along with propane and wood-burning). She DOESN'T mention -and neither do any other books on solar that I've read- that if you get a solar energy system that IS tied to the grid (to sell back power to the electric company, as she says) IT WILL NOT WORK IN A POWER OUTAGE. If the grid goes down, so does your system. Only an off-the-grid, battery-tied solar system will work in a power outage. Shocking, but true. With extreme heat being the bigger issue than extreme cold and the annual threat of wildfires and the copious amounts of sunshine this area gets, solar makes more sense in Southern California than wood-burning stoves, propane fridges, or root cellars. But only if you get the right system.

Between the advice elsewhere in the book (her general, good-for-any-emergency info) and through happy coincidences (like how having a worm bin and compost tumbler gave us not only a way to get something back from all the produce that got pitched from the fridge, but also would have been a pest-free way of dealing with that waste if the power had been out for days and garbage collection had been suspended). I still recommend it to those in hot climates; just be aware that her area of expertise is rooted in a different part of the country.

And now back to the original review:

The author makes the case that the supply lines upon which we rely today are taut and far-flung, leaving us vulnerable to feel even a hiccup of disruption. She walks you through what she does to have a home that can run for weeks without outside assistance -how she creates slack in those supply lines to absorb the effects of rolling blackouts, snow storms, and so on. She encourages you to start just by considering what you would want on hand to be safe and comfortable for three days and build from there, giving you a lot of food for thought in the process. She says, "I write about managing a home for a period of time without running water or electricity as though it is a given that such things are necessary for comfortable survival. In fact, people have lived without such luxuries for millennia, and all over the world, many people live without them now, either by choice or (circumstance). We turn these luxuries into necessities when we forget the skills we need to manage without them." It is also an infrastructure problem. It's not just that I don't know how to prepare a meal in my fireplace, it's that my fireplace and pots and pans aren't designed for that purpose. Heck, the fireplace isn't even designed to heat the room, it's just for ambience. It boggles the mind that homes are bigger than ever as families have gotten smaller and the storage industry has exploded, yet you can't do half the things in a home you used to be able to do. We've traded all our utilitarian spaces for recreational ones, deciding somewhere along the way that a third living room was better than a cellar, laundry room, mud room, pantry, and so on. We're told we need to store water, but the author points out that setting aside even a two week supply is a major strain on her available storage. And then you have to rotate your stock. It seems like homes ought to have a kind of mini suburban "well" built into them -something like your hot water tank that water is constantly moving through, but that in the event of a disaster you would close off and draw from until that system was up and running again. Create a little slack, in other words. But moving on to more food for thought:

I realized that of the two big concerns -electricity and water- an interrupted water supply is by far the more serious problem for my situation. With this book, I have determined how I could store and cook food without electricity, acquired a few hand-crank lights/lanterns, a hand-crank radio/flashlight/cellphone-charger, and a first aid kit, and I've aggressively set aside water. In an apartment, sheltering-in-place is going to be more like camping and less like homesteading. My balcony makes the perfect sheltered "camping" kitchen for a camp stove. It would sit on an IKEA butcher block that is easy to move out of the apartment, putting the stove at the right height and providing counter space; we have a fire extinguisher too, of course, that would be kept in arms' reach. Hanging a tarp on the exposed side completes the shelter while still allowing for plenty of ventilation. I've built a small collection of recipes using foods that don't require electricity to keep and that produce small enough portions that they don't make leftovers either (alternatively, just stocking up on some one-to-two-person sized cans of meals like chili/soup/stew/chowder/pasta solves both these problems while allowing you a way to have meat and cheese). For fun, I've bought a couple of board games, a deck of cards, and been actively seeking out 'parlor' games that don't require more than pen and paper or yourselves. I've enjoyed the rehearsals she suggested, too: it lets me play "snow day" instead of just longing for one. The book also gave me new reasons to always have two weeks worth of food in the house, which has been much better for my life and budget than the crutch of running out for fast food. An unexpected benefit was that despite being preparation for an unwelcome, unwanted disaster, it has made my home much cozier.

One last thing: Probably you can tell this from the cover, but this is not about wilderness survivalist skills or preparing for the collapse of civilization: it assumes systems will eventually come back online. Provisions will have to be restocked, even if they are just things like baking soda, propane, and lids for your canning jars. It is not about total independence from any and all grids, it is about replacing our current ones with something better. As she says, "In this way preparedness can serve what I believe to be its true purpose: not to isolate us from the world but rather to build local community and allow us to recognize our interdependence." (p. 21)

This book contains good, general information on domestic emergencies and similar household problems. It's a step above PSA's (Public Service Announcements), but not by much. Things like how to turn the gas off, or saving drinking water, or how to deal with frozen pipes.

This is kids stuff for survivalists, so don't even bother. It's clearly geared for families and homeowners. Not bad for what it is - a first step.

Rather than scare us with the ideas that the sky is falling and no one can help up, Kathy Harrison assures her readers that yes, sometimes bad things happen, but not only can you and your family survive, but you can be comfortable, happy, and good neighbors to others. Though she is far more self-sufficient than most of us will ever be, she assures us that thriving in a snow storm, a flood, or rolling blackouts is within the average family's grasp. Rather than panicking every time we hear a warning and running to Walmart to buy them out of bottled water and canned foods, she give the reader a flexible but clear method for stocking up a home and getting the whole family involved. She reminds us throughout to be one of the good guys--not hording those last-minute emergency supplies and sharing if possible with some of our less-prepared neighbors.

This is a wonderful handbook for any house than needs suggestions on how to make a 72-hour kit, to make sure the kids don't freak out in emergencies, and to keep a family together, safe, comfortable, and well-fed in any kind of emergency. She isn't telling us how to skin animals or set traps or survive in the brush. Use survival manuals for that. She is showing us how to avoid having to stay in emergency shelters or to need FEMA every time Mother Earth goes a little crazy.

Kathy Harrison has written the definitive guide for family preparedness. This book is not only chock full of useful information, it is also a great read. She not only gives you information, she actually reveals a quality of thinking defensively which is often missing in similar books. A great read from a great writer. Buy this book now before you need it!

There are a hundreds of books on preparedness out there - some woefully simplified, some decidedly hardcore. If one is new to this genre, it can be overwhelming. I found this book to be a great starting point. It covers just about everything, but it does so in a succinct, cut to the chase way. On the sliding scale of preparedness books, it really lands on the "general information" end of the spectrum.

Several reviews have commented on the "family-friendly" nature of this book, and the observation is an accurate one. This is not a book for someone who is looking to fortify his compound in northern Idaho and needs guidance on types of razor wire.

There are whole books written about each topic the book covers, from wildfire preparedness to readiness for terrorist attacks, but if you're interested in a well-written read that will quickly bring you up to speed on the basics, you can't do better than this book.

I do feel this book has a lot to offer families and homeowners on preparedness. I intend to begin to follow several suggestions myself, like having cash on hand, getting an evacuation pack together, and keeping my car at least half full of gas. The one problem i had though is that, as an apartment dweller in Nashville, many of the steps i simply cannot take. No fireplace for heating in winter, no basement for cold storage of veggies, no hooking up a generator to run a small fridge. I suppose the author's first suggestion for me would be to save up for a down payment on a home! This book has made me look realistically at my situation.