I went to pull something out of my home kit last night and found that one of my milk jugs of water had essentially exploded. About 3 inches of water in the bottom of my Rubbermaid container. On top of that, I had a lantern battery in the same container that got soaked and added a little "battery juice" to the mix. Upon inspecting the milk jugs (commercially purchased but unoped gallon of water), I could not find any visible holes, but the snap seal on top was no longer air tight because I could squeeze water and air out of it. The whole jug looked like it had been vacuum sealed: it was all shriveled and collapsed. Has this ever happened to anyone else? Temperature change in the basement hasn't been more than 10-15 degrees, and certainly nothing below freezing. I had read that milk jugs were pretty inexpensive containers, but obviously I'll incur some cost replacing this stuff.

On another note, much of my food and other items were stored in smaller, separate containers within the larger one, and seemed to be unaffected. Then I noticed that all the edges and lids on my canned food had started to rust. This may have been from the moisture in the larger container, but wanted to throw it out to see if I'm doing something wrong here. Again, I assumed canned food was ok for emergency kit storage.

Lesson learned:

1. Keep it together, but pack it up separately and redundantly.
2. Don't trust milk jugs
3. Battery juice stinks <img src="/images/graemlins/smirk.gif" alt="" />

Any thoughts on better storage methods is welcome, as I'm going to research a bit before rushing out to buy replacements. Should I just go with commerical "emergency food" blocks and MRE's for the 72 hour kits, and individual bottles/boxes of water? The 24 pack of water bottles that were in the same kit seemed fine, other than the mildew on the outside.