Last Shopping Trip To Prep Before Recession SHTF Hits in 60 days— What To Buy With Only One Chance Left?

Discuss being prepared for contingencies and emergencies. Oh yeah, and the coming Zombie Apocalypse, of course!
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Electric303
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Re: Last Shopping Trip To Prep Before Recession SHTF Hits in 60 days— What To Buy With Only One Chance Left?

#16

Post by Electric303 »

A65453 wrote: May 12th, 2021, 4:00 pm
Electric303 wrote: May 1st, 2021, 1:57 pmFor myself, 2020 provided quite an education in prepping.
I was also surprised to see bare grocery shelves in April 2020. What was gone was interesting too: many of the frozen meals, canned soups, and almost no pasta or pasta sauce on the shelves. But dried foods were as plentiful as always. After that there was a shortage of flour as people got accustomed to staying home and took up baking as a hobby.

My family only keeps about a week of food at the house at any given time and we weren't really interrupted. Bought a few extra pounds of dried beans and rice just in case we needed to stretch a day or two before the stores restocked.

We also live in Texas and will be moving to AZ at the end of May. The freeze in February was a much bigger issue than Covid. We lost electrical power for four days and water for six due to three burst pipes in the house. I moved to Texas from AZ and am looking forward to getting back; it's a poorly run state.
Dried beans and rice disappeared here from the shelves for quite some time. Even though people tended to shy away from Asian stores for awhile, (given COVID's origins) but even their pallets of 25-50lb bags of rice soon disappeared. However, the Asian stores did remain much better stocked with groceries than other grocery stores throughout the period of panic buying.

I have friends and family that live between Austin and San Antonio. They were hit quite hard by the Feb freeze as were many in the middle states. A similar weather event in the AZ desert would be disastrous even from the narrow perspective that water lines here are not buried deep enough to withstand a hard freeze. Parts of the Phoenix metro did receive up to 4in of snow back in 1937. A similar snowfall event in modern times would shut the Valley down.

I was living in OK in the mid 1980's when they were hit with -10F temps. It actually froze the natural gas lines and everyone in town lost gas pressure, but the power stayed on. Most there (at that time) used natural gas as their only heating source. As in Texas, a few tried unwise heating alternatives and their family paid the price in carbon monoxide deaths. We were fortunate to have a plug in electric heater that got us through the worst of it.

Welcome back to AZ at the end of the month.


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A65453
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Re: Last Shopping Trip To Prep Before Recession SHTF Hits in 60 days— What To Buy With Only One Chance Left?

#17

Post by A65453 »

Electric303 wrote: May 16th, 2021, 7:15 amI was living in OK in the mid 1980's when they were hit with -10F temps. It actually froze the natural gas lines and everyone in town lost gas pressure, but the power stayed on. Most there (at that time) used natural gas as their only heating source. As in Texas, a few tried unwise heating alternatives and their family paid the price in carbon monoxide deaths. We were fortunate to have a plug in electric heater that got us through the worst of it.

Welcome back to AZ at the end of the month.
Thanks for the welcome.

The natural gas lines freezing is partially what did Texas in this February. The Joule–Thomson effect meant that the pressure regulators in the pipelines froze and couldn't deliver the needed flow. Another factor was that Texas' backup power generating capacity is all natural gas too, and it's generally mothballed over the winter and only brought online to help with AC demands through the summer. Whoever owned/operated these plants didn't think the cost of de-winterizing them would be worth it given the forecast so they remained unavailable.

But Arizona doesn't share Texas' biggest electrical grid blunder: the Texas grid isn't connected to the rest of the US because Texans don't want to deal with the Federal Energy Regulator Commission. This lack of connection meant we couldn't buy electrical power from neighboring states to make up for our inability to generate it locally.

A similar freeze could hit southern AZ cities hard from a water perspective, but not as bad as it did in Texas. Southern Texas also has shallow pipes, but the burst pipes were primarily inside houses. If the houses had electrical power to maintain heat (and you need a little electric to run a gas furnace) then the houses could have stayed above freezing and prevented pipes in the walls from bursting. It took some areas a week beyond the cold snap to get electrical power and water back.

In short, Texas' woes all boiled down to having an independent and unprepared electrical grid.
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