GoKawiilReading Dave's post, Prepare (opens in a new tab), has me thinking about my own preps, so I wanted to write down a few things about our own plans and approaches.
Threat model #
In order to plan properly, I took the time to think about the things I felt could affect us. I see a fair amount of people on the preppers subreddit planning for the Shit Hits the Fan type scenarios. That is, societal collapse and zombie apocalypse type events. That's not what we plan for. We plan for things that we feel are likely to happen to us.
We have a strong preference for sheltering in place, so we do not have a go bag or anything like that. We'd shelter in place because that's where all our preps are!
Water outages #
Since moving to Richmond, VA we've had more water outages than power outages, which is backwards from what I'd expect. Since January 2025, Richmond has issued two boil water advisories for us. The first one lasted five days (opens in a new tab) and the other one lasted two (opens in a new tab). During one of them, the water wasn't working at all. Turning on the faucet did nothing. Drinking water wasn't a problem for us, but flushing the toilets was.
Then in July 2026, a 36 inch transmission main broke (opens in a new tab) near the treatment plant and pressure dropped in parts of the city for more than a day. The city chose not to issue an advisory at all (opens in a new tab).
To prepare for water outages, we keep the following on hand:
35 gallons of potable water stored in 7 gallon Aqua-Tainer jugs (opens in a new tab) , which gives us two weeks of drinking water.
, which gives us two weeks of drinking water. 25 gallons of non-potable water stored in 5 gallon buckets. This is for flushing and lasts about three days. After that, we'd start using the camp toilet.
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