Ebola, Ebola, Ebola, What I Am Doing To Prepare

How many times in the last sev­er­al weeks have you heard about Ebo­la?  Too many?  Me too.  Some may say I am crazy, some may say I am cau­tious, and some are walk­ing around liv­ing in their bub­ble of life with­out a clue.

It was only a few weeks ago, when I pub­lished a book­let for Ms. Prep­per regard­ing get­ting home in the event of a nat­ur­al or man made dis­as­ter.  My fear then was ISIS, Al Qae­da, or oth­er rad­i­cal­ized group/individual might do some­thing in Man­hat­tan that could be cat­a­stroph­ic for the City and it’s res­i­dents in some way.  How­ev­er, with the new poten­tial threat of Ebo­la, regard­less of those that are recov­er­ing, cur­rent­ly, I am con­cerned.  What hap­pens, “if” it gets out of con­trol in a region of the Unit­ed States and local and state agen­cies can­not keep up with med­ical treat­ment for patients.  Yes, our fed­er­al gov­ern­ment will kick it up a notch and try to con­tain the out­break, and that lends itself to a num­ber of dif­fer­ent con­ver­sa­tions.  “If” it hap­pens, if it gets that bad, if there are shel­ter in place orders, what’s your plan?

So what is “the plan.”  Hon­est­ly, mine is a loose plan to date, but I am prepar­ing.  Prepar­ing costs mon­ey, if you don’t have some of the prepa­ra­tions you may need for this poten­tial pan­dem­ic dis­as­ter, hur­ri­cane, or some­thing else.

In the Patri­ot Nurse video I have includ­ed above, I include to help reit­er­ate what I am going to put below short­ly.  So what are some of my con­cerns?  Well imme­di­ate con­cerns beyond food, water, & secu­ri­ty is hygiene.  Not just any hygiene, but some­thing I am going to call “hygien­ic decon­t­a­m­i­na­tion.”  What do I mean by that?  Well, in the event the SHTF regard­ing an Ebo­la out­break, I want a way to decon­t­a­m­i­nate those I know that are not infect­ed, are not car­ry­ing the virus in such a way it will make them sick, but still need to be decon­t­a­m­i­nat­ed in the event it is on their cloth­ing, body, or oth­er gear.  So, what am I buy­ing or what do I have in my prepara­to­ry stock that can be used for decon­t­a­m­i­nat­ing gear and/or peo­ple?  Below is a short list:

• GLB — GLB is a chlo­ri­na­tion prod­uct to dis­in­fect pools.  A table­spoon can make a gal­lon of bleach for per­son­al use.  I got this from the book NO FEMA.  Chlo­rine bleach will kill the ebo­la virus.  If you want to know how to mix it so that you have the prop­er ratio of GLB bleach to water, you can check out this doc­u­ment on “Clean­ing and Decon­t­a­m­i­na­tion of Ebo­la on Sur­faces.”
• Lawn & Gar­den Sprayer — This will pri­mar­i­ly be used to house the GLB/water decon­t­a­m­i­na­tion solu­tion that needs to be mixed in order to “wash down” a per­son, cloth­ing, or gear.  You can make your mix­ture, pres­sur­ize the sprayer, and self decon­t­a­m­i­nate or decon­t­a­m­i­nate some­one else.
• Tyvec Suits with Hoods, elas­tic cuffs, etc. — Yes, they are dis­pos­able, but if there is a “shel­ter in place” order, one may have to go out­side to inter­act with anoth­er.  It may be inevitable, and I want to be sure both myself and Ms. Prep­per have the prop­er gear to help pro­tect our­selves.
• Duct Tape
• Nitrile Gloves
• N95 masks and “oth­er masks” that can be used to cov­er our faces.  If you do some research, there’s con­tent out there on the Inter­Web, talk­ing about Ebo­la being small­er than the N95 fil­tra­tion, so N95 may not be as help­ful as we in pre­pared­ness think it would be.  Read some of this stuff, and judge for your­self.  For the aver­age per­son, lay­er­ing dif­fer­ent types of masks may be a way to add a mul­ti-lay­ered approach to not ingest­ing Ebo­la.  All I have here is the­o­ry, and do not have gear that would allow me to pipe oxy­gen into a mask and keep one com­plete­ly free of breath­ing in some­thing that may become air­borne.  An inter­est­ing thought here, is that if you are a div­er, and have a “full face mask” there may be a way to rig up your div­ing sys­tem so you do not expose your­self to con­t­a­m­i­nat­ed air; but I leave this for you to fig­ure out.
• Plas­tic sheet­ing.  Yes plas­tic sheet­ing.  This will be used for var­i­ous pur­pos­es.  Most impor­tant­ly to seal off a sec­ond bath­room and hall­way.  It will be used to seal off an area used for:
  • Decon­t­a­m­i­na­tion area
  • Seal­ing win­dows and doors
  • Seal­ing closed con­t­a­m­i­nat­ed cloth­ing and/or gear
  • Cre­at­ing both neg­a­tive pres­sure rooms or pos­i­tive pres­sure rooms (more on these lat­er as my bud­dy Shane, who is a nurse is work­ing with me on these).

The above is sim­ply for the decon­t­a­m­i­na­tion of a per­son, cloth­ing, and/or gear.  This is sim­ply one seg­ment of the prepa­ra­tions.  Oth­er areas of prepa­ra­tion are most notably water and food.  With regard to water:

• I’ve recent­ly replaced 35 gal­lons of water stor­age, added anoth­er 10 — 15 gal­lons,
• locat­ed my Water­Bob,

From the per­spec­tive of food, I ordered up some addi­tion­al food that suits Ms. Prep­per’s diet, although I dou­bled it up as long term food stor­age as well.  To be trans­par­ent, what I ordered for her were veg­e­tar­i­an MRE meals, in addi­tion to a few oth­er odds & ends.

I do have to buy some addi­tion­al dog food this week for Pup­py Prep­per.

Ulti­mate­ly, I am prepar­ing to shel­ter in if I have to.  I don’t see a ben­e­fit, yet, to Bug­ging Out, unless we bug out VERY ear­ly in a semi-per­ma­nent fash­ion.  But, hon­est­ly, we’re not pre­pared for that, as we don’t have a per­ma­nent bug out loca­tion “yet.”

As for Bug­ging In, or head­ing to a fall­back loca­tion, or BOL, there’s var­i­ous OPSEC con­cepts at play, that I have not com­plete­ly been thought through yet as well.  This is an area of high con­sid­er­a­tion and impor­tance in the com­ing week or two.

In con­clu­sion, there are oth­er plans that are “in-progress” and will mature, change, and will be adapt­ed for in time.  None of these plans are by any means per­fect that I am try­ing to put into place.  How­ev­er, as close as I can get to per­fect for “us” and oth­ers that may be involved are what are impor­tant to me.

What are your plans?  Have you start­ed or are you in pre-pan­ic mode, as I was a cou­ple weeks ago?  Let me know.