No, nothing like the movie. I’m talking about actual buckets. Five gallon food-grade buckets with gamma-seal lids, to be exact. Six of them.
Maybe you’ve heard of the concept of a bug-out bag. It’s essentially the bag you grab to take with you when the hurricane is coming. Or the wildfires. Or the zombies. It’s an emergency kit. But instead of a duffel bag, ours are in buckets. The bucket itself is pretty useful in an emergency, for anything from water storage to a stool or table to a makeshift toilet. Or even a drum, if you get bored enough. I often hear that after the initial rush, emergency situations can get unspeakably boring for those affected.
The bucket tooth is also watertight, or very nearly so, and rigid, so the contents don’t risk getting smushed. And you’ll be amazed at how much can fit in one. The gamma seal lids make it wonderfully easy to get into the excavator buckets without using any tools or four-letter words. The last thing you need in an emergency is to be wrestling with your bug out kit to get at its contents.
Why six buckets? We’ve got one for each family member, and one “communal” bucket with more general supplies. Overkill? Maybe. But there are all kinds of scenarios that could require us to leave at different times, or take two vehicles, or otherwise split up. Having one container per person makes it easy to make sure that spare glasses, medications, clothing, diapers, or comfort items stay with the person who might need them.
What kinds of emergencies are we trying to cover? Who knows. It’s the old Boy Scout motto: Be prepared. The idea is to cover a wide range of possibilities. In an actual emergency, you may not have time or you may be too stressed to think of all the things you might need. By planning ahead, you are thinking and acting in a calm and rational state, so that if the worst happens, you only have to grab and go.
Does this sound like paranoia? Two words: Hurricane Katrina. Two more: September Eleventh. But really, bad things happen on a smaller scale all the time: Housefires, floods, chemical spills, tornadoes. Your odds are low, but don’t assume they’re zero. And with as crazy as things seem to be getting in the economy, where “biggest _____ since the Great Depression” is gradually getting replaced with “bigger _____ than the Great Depression”, predictability is kind of going out the window.
Now I should say that not everything you might want in an emergency can fit in a bucket tooth , and for some things it’s not practical to store them there. So I’ve also made a “Grab List” to be kept with the buckets. The Grab List is just sort of a brainstorming tool that you can scan during an actual emergency, to jog your memory. On it are anything from the practica to the sentimental to the more frivolous. The list should be ordered from most important / most likely to be missed down to the trivial, so that if you only have a few minutes, you can just stop reading before the end of the list. And when making the list, remember that your future self may not be thinking clearly when reading it, so put things like “cell phone with charger” or “wedding album.”
The contents of the kids’ buckets are much different than the adults’. They’ll need less stuff to begin with, and less of their stuff is likely to be critical, so you can always throw in some extra goodies to get them through what is bound to be a stressful time. If you have kids, imagine the difference it might make to their mental state – and yours – if the scary emergency is suddenly a cross between a slumber party and a holiday.
By the same token, imagine the difference it might make for you in an emergency, to be calmly grabbing a few buckets rather than scampering around frantically trying to get your brain to figure out ten things at once.
In deciding what goes in the adults’ buckets vs. the communal bucket, it often comes down to practicality. If it’s cheap and / or easy to build in redundancy, go for it. Remember, we’re trying to cover, at least to some extent, the possibility of having to split up, because you just never know. In some cases, I had the same item in both the adult buckets and the communal bucket tooth because it was trivial to do so. That way you’re not thinking, “So who gets the bucket with the toilet paper?”
Oh, and one thing not included is First Aid items. I have two pre-assembled First Aid kits stored with the buckets. I also included a very basic printed First Aid Booklet with each. On my Grab List is “Where There Is No Doctor”, which can be purchased or downloaded for free here. or purchased new & used here.
Investment casting
