Good point. Everybody is the neighborhood will be competing for limited food resources. There's what, one day's supply on the shelves? Raiding stores could be a dangerous undertaking.

I also agree that the buildings probably won't all pancake together. The foundation may start to give and the building may start to lean, but until the authorities come around and actually condemn the condo, it should continue to provide shelter.

Have multiple kits. Inside the condo, in your cars and in your storage unit. They won't all be destroyed.

See this reporter's video during a looting of a big box store:
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/31299/should_hurricane_katrina_looters_be_tolerated/
Did I miss the prosecution of those two cops with the shopping cart? :-> Maybe I did. I know many Katrina victims were prosecuted, but it was for stealing liquor in one case I have read about. I may have missed all those prosecutions for taking food, water, and clothing.

According to this story
http://www.terradaily.com/news/hurricane-05ze.html
people got together and shared information on where necessities were located. "We looted a store because we had no food and we had to do something," is one quote. Assure me that if you have no food and no prospects for food other than looting it from a store that you won't loot.

Comparing the King riots with Katrina is extravagantly lacking in conformity with the facts, in my very humble opinion.

Yes, I've followed the Katrina incident and the following aftermath very carefully, even to this day. I've watched all the videos, read all the newpaper reports, even firsthand accounts. Still doesn't change my mind. Stealing is stealing. Doesn't matter if the cops are doing it, doesn't matter if everyone is doing it, it doesn't matter if you're not caught. You're still a thief, and what's worse, you're taking advantage of a natual disaster when people are their must vulnerable to do it.

Are you too poor right now to buy food and water? Not having a place to store it isn't much of an excuse. A couple cases of water and some canned food doesn't take that much room. What you're saying is, you don't want to spare the room, you want the market to store it for you indefinitely, but you don't want to pay them for it ahead of time, in fact, you want it for free if you ever need it. I wouldn't care if I recognized you, or if i knew your name, if that was my market you wouldn't be getting anything.

You can say I wouldn't understand, but I've lived in the bay area, so I'm very familiar with your situation. Space is tight, but not that tight where you have absolutely no room for essentials. I just don't agree with your mentatility that you have a right to take what you need in an emergency, when you have every opportunity to prepare beforehand. Of course, these discussions always turn into pissing matches on whether or not you would do what was necessary to help your family survive. I would do everything I could BEFORE a disaster to make sure I have the best chances of making it through, not wait until afterwards to steal from other people who are in similar situations. Do you aspire to be one of those people you saw on TV during Katrina?

It seems that you are faced with a "come as you are" survival situation. You will only have your EDC, so that's the first place to start. If you haven't studied Schwert's planning for a similar earthquake situation, a good place to start is at
http://outdoors-magazine.com/s_article.php?id_article=171
There is alot there, and may take several readings.

RAS also makes a good point:



Planning on anything that can be later viewed as looting is not really planning. The point, I think, is to plan to avoid that necessity.

Just my thoughts.

Dog show person, Susan? Me? I'm allergic to most dogs; most of them are allergic of me to, so I don't hold a grudge on that.

I'm just a bachelor who thinks that Conterra boxes and lawn furniture looks tacky if you don't do something about it. :P

Sorry, Ironraven, I should have been more specific!

I meant Philip wasn't a dog show person, or he would already know how to hide "containers". Your post was a variant on what dog show people do: Put it in place, fill it up with stuff, cover it up, set a lamp and some books on it. Voila! It's now furniture!

Sue

You don't expect to be able to get INTO the house... do you expect to be able to get OUT of the house?

When the measly 6.8 Nisqually quake hit the Olympia, WA (2001) area (35-40 mi from me), I was having trouble walking through the house toward the door.

I'll bet not too many people in the whopper 9.2 Anchorage quake (1964) were doing anything but holding on to anything they could grab. It also produced a 70-ft tsunami (Belmont, CA has an elevation of 33 ft, although the east side of the Bay would get the major damage, although it would be interesting to see what kind of backwash the west side would get), and vertical land displacements of up to 38 ft.

Have you ever thought of relocating out of the Bay area?

If your storage space is where you live, and most people spend about half their day there, you've probably got close to a 50/50 chance of being there when the Big One hits. And if you are there, you'll probably be in roughly the same condition as your stuff: Mangled beyond recognition, which makes everything else moot; or you'll just have some injuries and so will your stored items. But your place might still be standing, in which case you'll be in clover. And at the mercy of the rest of your looter buds.

Unless you're in Foster City or one of the other cities built on fill. Then you'll just be part of the Bay debris.

But disasters can be really freaky, and there's just no way you can predict how the cards or buildings are going to fall. An east-west movement may just make it sway, a north-south shake could rip it in half and tear it down.

If you can't move away, I would collect food and water and camping gear and hope for the best. Sitting in a slightly crooked building with a lousy broken ankle and supplies really beats trying to be a crippled looter pushing a stolen walker. Trust me on this, okay?

You know what the folks here say: Hope for the best and prepare for the worst. And if the worst happens and you croak, you can take peace in the knowledge that some determined looters will probably get at least SOME of the stuff you stored.

Sue

Picking up on where Susan left off, let's assume it hits and your building somehow survives with you and your stuff in it (we won't discuss it collapsing with you and your stuff in it, that would be pointless). You bring the supplies from your car kits up to your condo and then wait, listening to the news on your radio. Days go by and you're doing fine. Then the looting starts.

When the serious looters get to your condo and the supermarket shelves have been stripped, how will you stop them from taking your stuff? Even if you have a solid door, one good kick and that's not a problem for a looter. Breaking stuff? Look around, everything is broken. Police? Not today even if you could call 9-1-1. You are on your own for protecting yourselves and your stuff. It's not just stuff is it; these are your survival supplies and you can't get more, not today and probably not next week/month. Without them you won't have anything to eat.

Can you use a shotgun? Do you have one? Is that even an option?

I'm in SOCAL and while we don't live on one of the faults, they're all around us. The house might be standing, but Ralph's won't be getting any deliveries anytime soon following the Big One. I've got a shotgun, more than one.

Step one would be buy better locks. I police lock with a diagonal support down to the floor or the "castle" style with a beam across the door will keep anyone without an axe from breaking down the door (including someone with a sledge hammer). I'd also install a serious strike plate with three inch carpentry screws and a solid dead bolt on your primary lock. With a solid door and high quality locks you can keep some one from kicking your door in.

We've had several tsunami alerts, and the newscasters quote someone as saying that tsunamis will devastate the coast but that the Golden Gate will prevent them from entering the bay. How this is so is never explained. shrug - I'll just take the experts' word for it, I guess.

Still, it causes me concern that my fresh water stream will be backflooded with sea water, even if it doesn't reach our condos, so we have several 2.5 gallon boxes of water in our garage.


Which is the point of my question: if my building fails entirely (or more likely is burned to the ground in the inevitable fires that follow quakes), how do I store stuff when I have no yard. So far, the best answer is to park a car on the street and use it for off site storage that is more or less readily available. Getting it out of the way of a fire is more of a problem.