Garrett came home from Costco yesterday with a shrink-wrapped pallet of 72 Kirkland water bottles because the man at the door said it was hurricane season. I watched him drag it into the garage, where my Honeywell thermometer read 103, and I told him very calmly that the bottles would not be living in there. He told me FEMA recommends one gallon per person per day for three days. I told him FEMA does not have to drink it.
I want to be clear that I am not anti-preparedness. I am the one who canned 14 quarts of tomatoes last August while Garrett was at the lake. I am the one who knows where the headlamp is. I am simply not warehousing polyethylene terephthalate vessels in a 104-degree concrete oven for six months and then handing them to my children during a blackout and saying drink up, sweetie.
There is a Facebook group I trust on this — “Bottled Water Is the Long Con,” 41,000 members, mostly mothers, extremely organized. The pinned post has a chart showing antimony leaching from PET roughly triples between 75 and 100 degrees, and that’s before you factor in the bottle sitting next to a riding mower in coastal Carolina for a storm that may or may not come. My sister-in-law Megan, who works the front desk at a pediatric practice and is basically a nurse, said she wouldn’t let her dog drink from one that had been in a hot car.
So I countered with the kit I am actually building. Twelve half-gallon Ball mason jars filled from our well, sealed with new lids, stored in the cool corner of the basement next to the seed potatoes. A box of beeswax-coated cheesecloth for filtering rainwater off the porch roof. Two enamel camping pots. The Berkey. Garrett asked how much water that came out to per person per day and I told him it came out to enough, which is a quantity he is not familiar with because he was raised on Mountain Dew Code Red.
The rest of FEMA’s list is its own situation. They want canned tuna, fine, but they do not specify pole-caught, which means you’re stockpiling mercury for an emergency. They want a manual can opener and a battery-powered radio, both of which I agree with, although I’d prefer the radio be hand-crank because I do not trust an alkaline battery sitting next to my children’s emergency snacks for eighteen months. They want “moist towelettes,” which is a phrase that should not appear on any list of things you give to a human body. Those are 94% propylene glycol and a fragrance the company is legally allowed to call “fresh.”
Now, I will say. I am not a purist about everything. My kit does include a tin of Maldon, because salt is a mineral and minerals do not expire, and a jar of raw honey from the Bechtels down on Route 9, because honey is the only food on earth that is genuinely shelf-stable for ten thousand years — they found some in a pyramid, look it up. I am also keeping a sleeve of Saltines, and yes I know what is in a Saltine, but my four-year-old will eat one in a blackout and will not eat a single bite of the dehydrated lentil thing I made in March, and preparedness has to meet people where they are.
When I posted my version of the kit in a smaller group I’m in — “Homestead Hurricane: Heritage Methods for Modern Storms” — a woman named Pilar who runs a goat operation outside Wilmington commented that I should add a small bag of hardwood ash, for both filtration and, if it comes to it, soap. I had not thought of soap. That is the difference between a FEMA kit and a kit assembled by women who actually know things.
Garrett has not moved the pallet out of the garage. It is still sitting there, sweating, doing whatever PET does at 104 degrees in the dark. I told him that is fine, he can drink from it during the storm, and I will be in the basement with the mason jars and the children and Pilar’s ash, waiting for the power to come back on like a person whose nervous system is intact.
The man at the Costco door, by the way, was also handing out free samples of an electrolyte powder. I read the back of the packet in the parking lot. The third ingredient was sucralose. I asked Garrett if the storm was supposed to be that bad and he said he didn’t know, he just thought we should be ready. We are, honey. Just not for the storm they’re selling.