Last spring we got eleven inches of rain in four days here in Missouri. Not a dramatic hurricane situation, just a slow grinding soaker that would not quit. Power went out on day two. Our county road about a mile east of the house looked more like a tributary of the Gasconade River than a road. I put on my muck boots, walked out to the garage, and stood there looking at my supplies with the particular sinking feeling of a man who has been fooling himself.

I had been doing my preparedness planning the way most people plan vacations. Imagining the best possible version of conditions. Sunny, mild, manageable. That week cured me of that habit permanently, and I have spent the time since then fixing the gaps it exposed.

Your Sleeping Bag Is a Paperweight If It Gets Wet

This is the one that gets people, including people who should know better.

Wet down insulation loses almost all of its ability to keep you warm. I do not care what the price tag said. A soaked down sleeping bag is about as useful as a trash bag full of wet leaves on a forty degree night. I replaced every emergency kit sleeping bag with a Teton Sports Celsius XXL synthetic fill bag, which runs about fifty dollars on Amazon. Synthetic insulation holds a meaningful portion of its warmth even when it is damp and that difference is the difference between a bad night and a dangerous one.

I seal that bag inside an Earth Pak ten liter dry bag, about thirteen dollars, before it goes into the pack. I have done this for three years and have never once pulled out a wet sleeping bag. The dry bag weighs almost nothing and costs less than a restaurant lunch. There is no reason not to do this.

Cotton Kills and Wool Does Not

I want to be direct about this because it sounds dramatic but it is just true.

Cotton fabric loses virtually all of its insulating ability when wet and then holds that moisture against your skin and accelerates heat loss. Wearing a cotton base layer in a sustained wet situation is genuinely dangerous. I keep a complete wool base layer set, top and bottom, sealed in a gallon Ziploc bag in every emergency kit. Smartwool makes a mid-weight crew top that runs about seventy dollars and the matching bottoms are another sixty. That sounds like a lot until you understand what it is actually doing for you.

I also carry three pairs of Darn Tough wool socks, about twenty two dollars a pair, in a separate sealed bag. Wool socks are the single most important piece of clothing in a wet weather situation. Your feet are your transportation and wet cold feet become blisters and blisters become a mobility problem and a mobility problem in an emergency is a serious situation. Darlene thinks I am obsessed with socks. Darlene is not wrong.

Starting a Fire When Everything Hates You

Here is something I want you to actually do and not just read about.

Pick a rainy evening in the next few weeks. Go outside. Try to start a fire with what you have available. Do not go back inside for better supplies. Just go try it with what you have got.

I will be right here when you get back.

What you discover out there is going to be more educational than anything I can write. Wet wood is stubborn. Cold humid air makes everything reluctant. The ground steals heat from your fire before it can establish itself. I have been starting fires for over forty years and I still work harder at it in a cold rain than I want to admit.

What actually works for me is a two part system. First, I buy fatwood sticks at Ace Hardware for about nine dollars for a four pound bag. Fatwood is resin-saturated pine heartwood cut from old stumps and it lights and burns hot even when the outside is wet because the resin does not care about moisture. I pack ten sticks in every emergency kit.

Second, I make petroleum jelly cotton balls at the kitchen table while watching television. Take a regular cotton ball, work Vaseline into it thoroughly, drop it in a small Altoids tin. Each one burns for four to five minutes with a real sustained flame. They cost about two cents each to make and I have never once failed to get a fire going when I had fatwood and a few of these working together.

I also keep an MSR PocketRocket 2 stove, about fifty dollars at REI, and two fuel canisters in our kit. Not because I think it replaces fire skills, but because there are conditions where you need boiling water in ten minutes and a fire is going to take forty-five. Having both options is not cheating. It is thinking clearly.

Two Feet of Moving Water Will Carry Away Your Truck

I want to say this plainly because people die in Missouri every single year from ignoring it.

Six inches of moving water knocks a grown adult off their feet. Twelve inches floats small cars. Two feet of moving water carries away full size pickup trucks. If you cannot see the road surface under the water you do not drive through it. I do not care how many times you have crossed that low water bridge before. I do not care if it looks shallow. Water depth is deceptive and current is invisible from inside a vehicle until it is too late.

I keep laminated paper county road maps in both of our vehicles because cell service becomes unreliable in flood situations right when you need navigation most. I have driven our three bug-out routes enough times to know every low water crossing by memory. I know which roads flood first when the Gasconade comes up, which ones stay passable an extra hour or two, and where the high ground alternates are. That knowledge lives in a different part of your brain than information you read in a newsletter. It lives in the part that still works when you are stressed and tired and it is dark and raining hard. You have to earn it by actually driving the routes.

Your Well Water Is Suspect After a Big Rain

This one surprises people and it surprised me too when I first learned it.

Private wells, especially shallower ones, can take on surface contamination during significant rain events. Floodwater carries bacteria, agricultural runoff, and all kinds of things you do not want to drink, and heavy rain can push that surface contamination down into the groundwater. I treat our well water during any meaningful rain event the same way I would treat collected rainwater.

Eight drops of plain unscented Clorox bleach per gallon, stir it, wait thirty minutes. That is straight from the CDC and it works. I keep a small dropper bottle of bleach in every emergency kit for exactly this purpose.

I also carry a Sawyer Squeeze filter, about thirty dollars at Walmart, in every bag I own. The Sawyer Squeeze filters down to 0.1 microns which handles bacteria and protozoa, the things most likely to make you sick from flood-affected water sources. It weighs three ounces. There is genuinely no reason not to have one.

Hypothermia Happens at Fifty Degrees

Most people think hypothermia means blizzard. That association gets people seriously hurt in the spring and fall here in the Midwest.

Wet and fifty degrees kills faster than dry and twenty degrees in many situations. Wind and moisture strip body heat off a person relentlessly in a way that dry cold simply does not. I have seen healthy adults get into genuine trouble on what most people would describe as a cool spring day because they got wet and stayed wet and the wind picked up.

The signs are worth knowing cold because one of the symptoms of progressing hypothermia is impaired judgment, meaning you may not recognize what is happening to yourself. Uncontrolled shivering is the first sign. Slurred speech and stumbling mean things have progressed to a genuinely dangerous stage. When shivering stops in someone who was cold and wet, that is often not improvement. That is often the situation getting worse.

Treatment in the field is straightforward. Get wet clothes off. Get dry insulating layers on. Get the person out of wind and rain. Apply HotHands hand warmers, about a dollar each at any hardware store, to the armpits and groin where major blood vessels run close to the surface. I keep two warmers in every kit. I also keep a SOL Emergency Bivvy, about twelve dollars, which is a reflective emergency sleeping bag that reflects ninety percent of body heat back to the person inside it. It folds up smaller than a deck of cards and weighs almost nothing and I have given them as gifts to people who looked at me like I was strange and then later thanked me.

Hot Food After a Wet Miserable Day Is Medicine

I want to be clear that I am not talking about comfort here, though it is that too.

Cold wet miserable conditions measurably impair human decision making and increase the kind of impulsive risky thinking that gets people hurt. Getting a hot meal into yourself and your family after a hard wet day does something for the human brain that is genuinely hard to overstate. It is not luxury. It is operational.

I keep Mountain House freeze dried meals in our kits, about ten dollars each at REI or on Amazon. They only require boiling water and they are ready in about ten minutes. The MSR PocketRocket stove I mentioned earlier makes that possible regardless of what the weather outside is doing. Darlene's favorites are the chicken and rice and the beef stew. I am partial to the lasagna, which surprises people when I tell them but honestly it is pretty good for food that lives in a pouch.

A hot cup of coffee also belongs in this category and I will not apologize for that position. I keep a small bag of Starbucks Via instant packets and a titanium camp cup in my bag. After two days of cold rain that cup of coffee is worth more than almost anything else I am carrying.