Hi, my name is Ben, I work in the marketing department at The Ready Store and I wanted to share with you a couple of the lessons I learned from 2010. The end of the year often is accompanied by reflection of the events that have transpired in our lives and 2010 has been an interesting year for my neighborhood. We have had some problems that in all my years I have lived here we had not yet experienced and in one case never though could happen.

In September there was a fire in the foothills about 1 mile from my home that burned down three homes and charred 4,300 acres causing an evacuation of about 5,000 people. Thankfully the wind gusts died down and allowed fire fighters the chance to slow the blaze and put it out.

In May our little town’s water source was contaminated with bacteria that made thousands of people sick. Thankfully no one passed away but the problem led to a lot of pain literally and figuratively. After the two week boil order was lifted we went back back to drinking tap water again.

While we learned lessons from both issues, the water contamination was the disaster that affected our family the most and exposed some of the chinks in my family’s food storage armor. Here are some of the lessons we learned:

1. Don’t assume that the local/state officials will make the right decisions.

Our family assumed that the poison-sickness related symptoms had to do with something we did wrong (like food preparation issues) or that our neighborhood was passing around the flu bug. We learned to trust less in the local official’s ability to detect problems and communicate them. There was a 3 week period before the city announced that there was an issue and to not drink the water.

2. Have a larger water supply to use.

We had a couple days supply that we used once we were notified not to drink the water but that soon ran out. Luckily we live near other cities that were not affected so we could go buy water at some of the grocery stores out of our area. The water at our local grocery stores got bought up within the first couple hours of the boil notice.

3. If you get sick, don’t drink tap water.

Often when people get sick conventional wisdom tells them to drink a lot of fluids. Well that is a problem when the fluid is contaminated water. We kept drinking the bad water for weeks not knowing it was keeping us sick. Next time we experience those symptoms we are going to drink from our water supply first.

4. Have an alternative heating source.

We ran out of our small water storage within a couple days and decided to start boiling water. If we had another stove (like a camping stove) it would have made things a bit easier, this isn’t a big one but considering I like the outdoors I need to just buy a JetBoil or similar heater.