72 hr kits

Mike and I are the emergency preparedness couple for our ward. For the past year we have been teaching every 5th Sunday on something to do with emergency preparedness. It has been a fun task to do. We of course are probably the ones that learn the most from this calling, and we love doing it.

Mike has really used his organization skills to put together a ward emergency plan. It is using what the stake is putting into place, but adding his own flare to make it fit our ward situation. Our ward is unique due to the fact that our entire ward is comprised of several apartment/condo complexes. This makes it a little difficult, for example it would not be only one family displaced by a fire, it could be anywhere from 6 to 10 families displaced. So it has been a lot of work to get things started and on its way.

But this last Sunday we were trying to think of what would be a good thing to teach on. We feel we have touched on a lot of stuff and were struggling to know what to teach on. So we decided to teach on 72 hr kits. Side note: we did decide on this before the disaster that hit in Haiti. So we had used our resources and found a few people that had theirs put together and had them explain what they did to get theirs ready. It worked great. There were all different stages of personal kits put together.

A year or two ago Mike’s mom gave us food for our 72 hr kit. So we tucked it away and really forgot about it, until this lesson. Well come to find out that ALL of the food had expired and many of the items had exploded. Whoops!!! So we had decided to save some money to get everything back in order. We really thought it was going to take a ton of money to get it all back together. We were pleasantly surprised…

This is the outline that we used to put together our food part of the kits…

72 Hour Emergency Food Pack

Day 1

Breakfast: granola bar, hot chocolate, orange juice
Lunch: 2 beef jerky, trail mix, fruit cup
Dinner: ravioli, crackers with peanut butter, fruit snack, bottled water
Snack: gum, candy pieces

Day 2

Breakfast: instant oatmeal, hot chocolate, orange juice
Lunch: 2 beef jerky, crackers with peanut butter
Dinner: ramon noodles, apple sauce, bottled water
Snack: gum, m&m’s

Day 3

Breakfast: granola bar, hot chocolate, orange juice
Lunch: 2 beef jerky, peanuts, fruit cup
Dinner: cup of soup, crackers with peanut butter, bottled water
Snack: gum, candy pieces

MISC: emergency blanket, tooth brush, tooth paste, 6 spoons

Of course you can change things around and make it fit your own families, but this was simple and so cheap. Each bag only cost about $16. Not bad at all, I know. We have to finish getting everything else in our 72 hr kits. But we have food at least.

Well I hope that everyone as some plan together for their families needs in case of an emergency…