I just ordered six months of emergency food in case the Big One earthquake hits

The Big One earthquake is a matter of when, not if, for us here in the Pacific Northwest.

In 2015 an article in the New Yorker brought a lot of attention to the massive Cascadia subduction zone earthquakes that periodically strike our area of the world. I quoted from the article in “People of Pacific Northwest: Be scared, very scared. The Big One is coming.”

By the time the shaking has ceased and the tsunami has receded, the region will be unrecognizable. Kenneth Murphy, who directs FEMA’s Region X, the division responsible for Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska, says, “Our operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast.”

In the Pacific Northwest, everything west of Interstate 5 covers some hundred and forty thousand square miles, including Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, Eugene, Salem (the capital city of Oregon), Olympia (the capital of Washington), and some seven million people.

When the next full-margin rupture happens, that region will suffer the worst natural disaster in the history of North America.

…Wineglasses, antique vases, Humpty Dumpty, hip bones, hearts: what breaks quickly generally mends slowly, if at all. OSSPAC estimates that in the I-5 corridor it will take between one and three months after the earthquake to restore electricity, a month to a year to restore drinking water and sewer service, six months to a year to restore major highways, and eighteen months to restore health-care facilities.

On the coast, those numbers go up. Whoever chooses or has no choice but to stay there will spend three to six months without electricity, one to three years without drinking water and sewage systems, and three or more years without hospitals. Those estimates do not apply to the tsunami-inundation zone, which will remain all but uninhabitable for years.

Somewhere around the time of the New Yorker article, my wife and I bought a big supply of vegetarian emergency food from Costco. It’s been sitting in a downstairs closet, untouched, for at least ten years.

Recently I checked on the expiration dates of the food, which for some reason I hadn’t put on the outside of the boxes. Some of the food was several years past the expiration date and had to be discarded.

Other food had a few more years of shelf life left, including some dog food and macaroni/cheese buckets that we’d gotten to supplement the Costco food. We’re going to donate those items.

What I realized after opening up the Costco boxes and other containers was that many required a lengthy cooking time, 10-20 minutes. This wasn’t great, given that electricity here in rural south Salem could be off for months after the Big One earthquake. We live in a well-constructed home that got earthquake renovations after a much smaller quake hit our area many years ago, so likely our house will still be standing after the Big One.

But our wood stove may not be functional. And even if it is, boiling water for 10-20 minutes for most meals seemed like an undesirable chore. So I’ve spent the past few days looking for freeze-dried vegetarian emergency food. Costco doesn’t offer this, so far as I could tell. I looked at quite a few web sites. The one that most appealed to me and my wife was ReadyWise. The home page summarizes some key benefits of their emergency food.

After comparing their bundles, which was the most cost-effective way to purchase a large quantity of emergency food, today I ordered the 1,440 serving package. I wanted enough food for two people for six months, 180 days. Three meals a day times 180 is 540 meals per person. For two people, that’s 1,080 meals. So we have some leeway on a six month supply. I figure that it’s better to have too much food in an emergency than too little.

This is what’s included in the package. It’s balanced between breakfast and entrees. The “chicken” in a few items is vegetarian, aside from one dish, I recall, that has a bit of chicken broth or whatever. Since this package is light on vegetables and nonexistent on fruit, I also ordered the ReadyWise dried fruit and dried vegetable buckets.

ReadyWise says that on average each individual serving requires about one cup of water. That spurred me to look for a better water purification device than what we have now for an emergency. I’ve ordered the Uzima system that I found on Amazon, which seems appealingly simple and has a filter that supposedly lasts for up to ten years.

Hopefully we won’t need to use our emergency food and other emergency equipment. But it gives us some peace of mind to know that it’s available. With a 25 year expiration date. At our age, almost certainly we’ll expire before the ReadyWise food does.