You've got a week. What are you going to do with it?

This is my main water tank. I'm confident my water supply issue is sorted better than most. 

Excellent start. now to buy a bucket to get water from a to b.

I’ll never need to worry about water.

Filling the freezer is never bad idea.  The fuller the freezer the more efficient it runs.
One can always pressure can or dehydrate, smoke contents.

When campingni put ice in cooler box  then wrap with wet towels and keep the towels wet.  The ice lasts up to a week. Can use salt water, or any other water.

A last minute prep might be a solar fridge, or all the gas bottles I can get hold of.

I have to come back to one of my time worn sayings, If you are not living where you have a good chance of survival and the lifestyle that goes with it when the SHTF you will be like a lot of the sheep that many of you carry on about.

After a serious SHTF event money will have no value and fuels and the means to get around will be severely curtailed. I am not sure if many of you realise that just by having water in towns and cities turned off, even for only several days is going to bring most people to their knees.

I said in a previous post more thought should be given to the three basics we cannot do without. Water, food and shelter. Look seriously and what you have at present in relation to those three things and just imagine how you would survive a week without them. A big four wheel drive, a fancy expensive bowie knife, your overloaded bug out bag etc. is not going to do you any favours at all. You have to be living the lifestyle before the SHTF event occurs. Remember also that if you have six months supply of any item, after the SHTF event you will have six months to either grow it, make it, or learn to go without it.

Saying you are going to escape to your bug out retreat after the SHTF event when and after all hell has broken loose will be virtually an impossibility. If your retreat is more than an hour away then there is a good chance that if you ever do get to it you will find that others will have beaten you to it and taken whatever they wanted to before your arrival.

In saying the above I can look at our lifestyle and what we are able to produce, which would be more than a lot of people, but even so there are still so many items we have to purchase because we cannot grow it/them or make it/them. To us water is most important but during the year to get that water to the gardens etc. we rely to some degree on petroleum products to power the pumps. Without those products we would have to rely more on natural rainfall or be prepared to use more manual labour for irrigating the vital food supplies. We are presently working at a solar powered solution to this problem but we know that if we do this it, like everything else, will not last for ever.

Absolutely agree with all of that... BUT...

We can only work with what we have access to. Financially, physically, mentally. There's a lot of things where people can be at a disadvantage because they still have to live their lives. Some of us don't own our own homes yet. Some of us can't live at our BoL because of work. Some of us are unable to carry large loads because we're physically disadvantaged. Some of us can't drive a truck. Some of us don't have space for garden beds.

The thing is doing the best you can with what you have without disadvantaging yourself (or others) to get there. Those of us in this community are a million miles ahead of the people sitting on their couch waiting for the news to tell them what to do. 

For the people who have yet purchased a property that is suitable to bug out to or will never have one of their own there are, or will be after a SHTF situation as there are many people out there living off grid that will always require an extra set of hands.

In our case there are always jobs that need doing but with only the two of us and with what we already do there is no way we could ever be task free.

As well as having good vegetable gardens and orchard areas which keep me quite busy the crops have to be harvested and the fruit has to be preserved or made into jam for later use, this is where a good set of hands is invaluable, Vegetable seeds have to be planted in trays ready for planting out at the appropriate time, hopefully when the weather is suitable. Crops have to be protected from predators, watered, composted and weeded. A great life but needs basic skills and understanding.

I visit and talk to like minded people in an area that covers about a 70 kilometre radius of where we live and link them up with like minded people and people with the skills to help them in areas such as solar power, minor earthworks and building skills. The shortage of like minded labour, to my way of thinking, will always be there. In many cases there is adequate accommodation for an extra couple or even a family with an adequate caravan.

It must be remembered that it takes one person of a family to supply the food for the family, two people working to supply food can produce enough food for up to five families, three people can supply the food for nine or so families so after any SHTF situation community groups are going to survive better that an individual family on their own. This is an area where community cooperation comes into its own.

Basic skills are what are sadly lacking. Many of the people moving onto rural blocks are so citified to a degree that many of them have no real understanding of where their food comes from. This was proved during the first few months of the Covid pandemic when many of them visited nurseries and tried to purchase vegetable plants out of season not realising that many items in supermarkets are grown in many other places and shipped to our areas out of our season. A group of children saw brown cows for the first time and thought that they were the givers of chocolate flavoured milk.

The word TEAM stands for Together Everyone Achieves More.