PREP FAILURE: THE WALL OF SHAME

[techmonkey]

The other night, some dumb ass hit a branch valve for the water main in my area with his car.

Reminds me of a question I wanted to ask you folks; I've heard stories telling how a water heater "could" explode if the water mains are shut off and it stays powered up, in past I've figured "Just to be safe is wise" and flipped the breaker for my water heater off; Is that rumor true or just a neat story these folks told to tell a good story, in the tradition of Popcorn Sutton (Who had a bumper sticker "Never let the truth get in the way of a good story")

There is a pressure relief valve on the side of the heater that will pop if the pressure gets too high. It has a little lever valve on it, push on it to test it while keeping out of the way of the hot water that comes out. When they go, you have a LOT of water everywhere. The valve should be guaranteed for at least 10 years IIRC. IF the heater is empty, or you are about to empty it, you need to turn off the power to it to keep from destroying the heater elements. Also, there are sacrificial anodes inside the tank to keep galvanic corrosion from rusting away the tank, they should be checked every 5 years.

[Lycosa]

When I first moved to Florida I decided to go survival camping. My son and I build a pretty nice lean-to shelter with a saw palm thatched roof. We couldn't decide what to use for bedding material so we scouted around a bit and found that the place was loaded with Spanish Moss. We gathered up arm loads and made a REALLY comfortable matress. The next day we were scratching and itching like mad. Felt like I had been eaten alive by something.. and I had.. by Chiggers. Seems that those little guys love hanging out in Spanish Moss. Approximately 2 weeks worth of scratching and worrying about infection before it subsided. Lesson learned, learn a bit before you head out.

[MasterMaker]

"She finally did, with me laying across the floorboard and both my legs pinned in the doorframe uncomfortably, feet still on the ground outside. I'm looking her right in the eye, and it's easily 10 full seconds of me waving her forward, backward, ANYWHERE before she can seem to process a thought at all. Car doesn't move."

Certain humans - maybe ALL humans, in certain conditions - freeze in crisis/emergency situations. An off-duty cop friend was a few cars back of a minor fender bender on a heavily traveled, two-lane mini-highway with no shoulders here in the St. Louis area (Forest Park Parkway) in rush hour. The accident happened in the right lane, causing both vehicles involved to stop - and, by extension, block all further progress in the right lane. Still one lane open, correct? Wrong. A driver in that 'other' lane, the lefthand lane, panicked when she saw the entirely bloodless/no-injury mishap beside her, and refused to move forward. (She was exactly parallel to the two involved cars.) She sat in her car, hands clinched on the steering wheel and a wild animal glaze over both eyes as several hundred vehicles idled and honked behind her. My cop friend finally got out of her car and approached the zombie, displaying her badge as she did so. "You need to get moving," my friend told her. "You're causing a traffic jam two miles long." The zombie (physically, a normal-looking middle aged lady) looked up at her, real terror and confusion very evident in her eyes, and exclaimed: "I don't know what to do!!!!" After another fruitless minute of telling her to just accelerate and get the hell moving, my friend finally had to threaten to arrest the dingbat - which did the trick; she finally drove away.

Remember: this lady, and many just like her, are out there right now, in every community. Just imagine how much trouble they'll be if an actual emergency hits.

This!

[Mr_Sheesh]

There is a pressure relief valve on the side of the heater that will pop if the pressure gets too high. It has a little lever valve on it, push on it to test it while keeping out of the way of the hot water that comes out. When they go, you have a LOT of water everywhere. The valve should be guaranteed for at least 10 years IIRC. IF the heater is empty, or you are about to empty it, you need to turn off the power to it to keep from destroying the heater elements. Also, there are sacrificial anodes inside the tank to keep galvanic corrosion from rusting away the tank, they should be checked every 5 years.

I know, trust me, SOME people are dumb enough to seal up that pesky leaking relief valve, and wouldn't know a cathode from an anode if both bit them at the same time! Also quite a few water heaters are glass coated inside, or were when the people I know who're into biodiesel were looking at using them for stills. And a (good) water heater tank has more than once been used as an air compressor tank.

Last place I lived, had had a leaky pressure relief valve when I moved in (it was so bad that the wood under the hot water heater, was all rotted out - Not QUITE a "mostly the water pipes were all that was holding the heater up" situation, but close. Previous owner had just ignored the heater as it was in an out of the way place. MUMBLE. Replaced it.

I'm just "a little" conservative about safety stuff at times, comes from doing search & rescue, flying, and building aviation safety systems for work, you kinda get in the "No Failures that could be prevented, are acceptable" mindset; At least once it probably saved my bacon, seems worth it to me

The Mythbusters usually get at least part of the Physics wrong, but HAVE figured out how to reliably blow a water heater up - Entertaining when it's done for fun; Other than that, I really, really, really NEVER want things like that happening accidentally in the same BLOCK as I'm in, maybe the same state LOL.

[bacpacjac]

Had a shoulder strap blow off my edc day hiking pack today - half way to our turn around point.
http://i1105.photobucket.com/albums/h35 ... G_0201.jpg

[roykin]

got out of the service about 12 years ago and had a huge collection of "surplus" gear. was still young enough to not worry about the future and gave most of it away, now been slowly buying it back! and not getting anything given to me! lol

[shrimpwd]

Moving to a new house these past few weeks, and a semi-prep fail came about today.

I got out of the van, carrying a cat carrier in each hand. Brought the cats inside, let them settle down. Had dinner. Planned to go out, so I got ready. Other family members decided to go out, left in the same vehicle that we'd been in earlier.

My GHB/EDC+/computer bag was in the front passenger seat... I hadn't removed it when I got in. I needed it for the evening.

Luckily, they dropped it off at Starbucks (where the baristas know me), and I was able to pick it up when I arrived.
(and I forgot my mug, so I had to pay an extra $.10 for my coffee...)

[Vicarious_Lee]

So, me and my boy, living right on a golf course, hunting golf balls, etc. Y'all know that about me. So we see about 1-2 snakes every day on that course. There is this one type of timid snake that always runs from us that isn't a garter snake, isn't a rat snake (though we've seen those), and doesn't conform to any of my previous memories of Texas venomous snakes.

We've been seeing and naming several families of common brownish water snakes that have a strange touch of grey in them. There's a family of 4 at the main bridge to the creek. The two biggest ones, over 3 feet each, are at the golf ball pond we scavenged tonight. I got a pic of the biggest one as the smaller one ran to the water. Again, it looked menacing, and it was tensed but not moving, and the head was heart-shaped, but then again so is a bull snake's head, and they're not venomous.

Got a pic of the biggest one tonight when he didn't run away.



So I thought it might be that dreaded Texas Cottonmouth from my youth, but I was reassuring myself that it looked just like all the little non-venomous, shy, brownish-grey water snakes that we'd been studying and getting close to all these months. It was probably just a bigger version of that common snake, and in my distant memory with an aggressive cottonmouth this big beautiful snake didn't match up. It was clearly striped. Having gotten a few pics, I decided to compare it to a Google Image Search for Texas Cottonmouth.





Oh, so my question that I should've answered 3 months ago about whether those two big snakes in the pond were actually venomous Cottonmouths...turns out that all the little water snakes that I and my 4-year-old son have been messing with are ALL Texas Cottonmouths.

I was laughing hysterically at this. My wife.....far less so at this point. Words like "fail" and phrases like "Dude, you suck" are popping up.

ETA: so this is good:

Most bites occur on the extremities. Upper extremity bites predominate in males and are often associated with deliberate handling of the snake.
Pain around the bite site
Swelling
Nausea, vomiting, or diarrhea
Syncope, near syncope
Co-intoxication with alcohol is common and may affect the patient's judgment and ability to comply with therapy.

Well, I've never been drinking when showing my son these timid snakes that I was sure weren't venomous all these months.

http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/771329-overview

[Odinsown]

Hey Everyone:

When I got my windfall, I went on a huge spending spree. Two of the things that I got was a Ruger 10/22 Target model and a case (5K) of CCI Stingers to go with the Ruger. I never got a manual so I went to Ruger's website and low and behold ammunition labeled "stinger" are not to be used with The Target or Tactical models of the 10/22. It seems that the case will not fit in the chamber and the weapon may fire out of battery. I had that happen to me once and it was very uncool. The question that I pose here is what to do. I have a Ruger 22/45 so I will be able to use the CCI. Should I trade the Target model in on a normal 10/22 or just live with the fact that I cant feed the Target model any ol' kind of ammo.

Odinsown

[Nuclear Genie]

That which doesn't kill us, only postpones the inevitable.

A couple years back a fellow outdoors enthusiast and I were tromping through the Alpine Lakes Wilderness on a sunny September day. We were checking out a Fire Lookout which we had decided could make a totally plausible and insanely defensible BOL. Now I knew this hike would be a burn. It's about 3800 feet of elevation gain over about 4.3 miles so I figured I'd travel light using my "Spy Bag" (Basically a Ballistic Nylon Purse, don't judge it works). This bag has room for 2 Waterbottles and 9 other essentials. In place of one bottle I usually carry a canister of counter assault bear spray but since it was going to be hot I yanked the Bear Spray and threw in a Cool Refreshing Starbucks Bottled Frappuccino™.

Well my buddy and I started jogging up the hill and I was doing mighty fine right up until we hit tree line. See I killed that frapp. first and was left toting an empty glass bottle, 20oz of water and a diuretic coursing through my system. Once we got above the trees we came out in a blueberry patch that you could probably spot from space and it was full of ripe delicious berries. So I put that empty bottle to use picking as we hiked and in no time my grubby paws were stained, the bottle was full and I was dying of thirst in the unobscured summer sun at 5000 feet. I had killed the last drop of water in my Sigg and was parched but figured I'd press on anyhow.

As we cornered a switchback we paused to soak in the view and I noticed a big black lab off leash about twenty yards ahead of us. I shook my head at this because it's not a good practice to let a dog roam free in an area so accomodating to bears. About a nano second later my eyeballs corrected my brain and I realized that it wasn't in fact a dog my brain was telling me I saw. A lanky black bear, gave us a dissatisfied chuff and lazily ambled off as I frantically reached for my bear spray, only to find a frappuccino bottle full of blueberries. D’oh!

Well luckily this bear, like the dozen or so others I have run into, wanted nothing to do with us and kindly wandered about fifty yards off where he sat back down and resumed grazing. It was a pretty damned cool experience really and if the iphone 1 camera had been worth a damn I'd have a great pic to go with this tale. Now fate favors heros and fools and as it happens we did manage to reach the summit after leaving the bear to his harvest and there at the lookout, by some miraculous stroke were five gallon jugs of water sitting on the steps, left by folks that know better for those who don't.

I liberated one jug of half its contents and enjoyed a spectacular view. The return hike was uneventful but we did stop at the Ranger Station down the road where I offered a $20.00 donation in the name of whom ever that sainted soul was that had left a jug thinking better for another man.

What did I learn? We're 70% water, the rest is made of stupid and weary. When the water gets low the stupid and weary become concentrated so plan accordingly. If I were to remove the Bear Spray again, it would be to add my MSR Miniworks, but instead of trying too hard to go light, I added both and picked up a slightly larger pack.

[Lycosa]

So, me and my boy, living right on a golf course, hunting golf balls, etc. Y'all know that about me. So we see about 1-2 snakes every day on that course. There is this one type of timid snake that always runs from us that isn't a garter snake, isn't a rat snake (though we've seen those), and doesn't conform to any of my previous memories of Texas venomous snakes.

We've been seeing and naming several families of common brownish water snakes that have a strange touch of grey in them. There's a family of 4 at the main bridge to the creek. The two biggest ones, over 3 feet each, are at the golf ball pond we scavenged tonight. I got a pic of the biggest one as the smaller one ran to the water. Again, it looked menacing, and it was tensed but not moving, and the head was heart-shaped, but then again so is a bull snake's head, and they're not venomous.

Got a pic of the biggest one tonight when he didn't run away.



So I thought it might be that dreaded Texas Cottonmouth from my youth, but I was reassuring myself that it looked just like all the little non-venomous, shy, brownish-grey water snakes that we'd been studying and getting close to all these months. It was probably just a bigger version of that common snake, and in my distant memory with an aggressive cottonmouth this big beautiful snake didn't match up. It was clearly striped. Having gotten a few pics, I decided to compare it to a Google Image Search for Texas Cottonmouth.





Oh, so my question that I should've answered 3 months ago about whether those two big snakes in the pond were actually venomous Cottonmouths...turns out that all the little water snakes that I and my 4-year-old son have been messing with are ALL Texas Cottonmouths.

I was laughing hysterically at this. My wife.....far less so at this point. Words like "fail" and phrases like "Dude, you suck" are popping up.

ETA: so this is good:

Most bites occur on the extremities. Upper extremity bites predominate in males and are often associated with deliberate handling of the snake.
Pain around the bite site
Swelling
Nausea, vomiting, or diarrhea
Syncope, near syncope
Co-intoxication with alcohol is common and may affect the patient's judgment and ability to comply with therapy.

Well, I've never been drinking when showing my son these timid snakes that I was sure weren't venomous all these months.

http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/771329-overview

That looks a lot like a Diamondback water snake (Nerodia rhombifer) to me. A better shot of the head and I could be certain, but just from the pic, the labial (lip) scales look an awful lot like a water snake vs a cottonmouth. Also, the pattern on a Cottonmouth tends to be more like saddles than the almost uniform diamond shape on a watersnake.

[Mr_Sheesh]

... Should I trade the Target model in on a normal 10/22 or just live with the fact that I cant feed the Target model any ol' kind of ammo.

Odinsown

My thoughts here - Depends on what you expect to do with the 10/22. I bought mine for varmint concentrations at close range, and fun plinking, so mine is a 10/22-RB, the old school hardwood stock still; I haven't gone to the friend's place I used to go to, years ago, much, so mostly it's just been a plinker. If I need accuracy I swap to a bolt action .22. (I still need to get the trigger on mine gone over, it's gritty, too many pounds pull, etc., ugh.

Do you want super accuracy or for it to eat any ammo it is fed? I think that's the primary question to ask yourself. If you're trying to just have one good target .22 for super accuracy, with a nice clean trigger, that's one thing, if it's just a fun gun for plinking and the occasional rat or other vermin hunt at closer range, that's another. Get a trigger job on it if you get the standard model and the trigger bugs you, should be worth it if you shoot it much.

[Odinsown]

... Should I trade the Target model in on a normal 10/22 or just live with the fact that I cant feed the Target model any ol' kind of ammo.

Odinsown

My thoughts here - Depends on what you expect to do with the 10/22. I bought mine for varmint concentrations at close range, and fun plinking, so mine is a 10/22-RB, the old school hardwood stock still; I haven't gone to the friend's place I used to go to, years ago, much, so mostly it's just been a plinker. If I need accuracy I swap to a bolt action .22. (I still need to get the trigger on mine gone over, it's gritty, too many pounds pull, etc., ugh.

Do you want super accuracy or for it to eat any ammo it is fed? I think that's the primary question to ask yourself. If you're trying to just have one good target .22 for super accuracy, with a nice clean trigger, that's one thing, if it's just a fun gun for plinking and the occasional rat or other vermin hunt at closer range, that's another. Get a trigger job on it if you get the standard model and the trigger bugs you, should be worth it if you shoot it much.

Thank You, Mr. Sheesh

[Concray]

1.
Pre-storm:
The storm Gudrun is coming to destroy pretty much every powerline in the country you say?
Let's get a military surplus generator and liters upon liters of gas to get us through this pickle! we are so very clever!
During storm: Beating rain, sub-zero temperatures, wind tearing the tiles of the roof.
No extension cord. Half a tonne of generator in the garage, roaring away happily, thirty feet away from the house, and no way to get power from there to here.
If not for the grace of wood stoves...

2.
A pallet of A-batteries, you say? For only two hundred kronor?! What a steal, how could I say no? And for a washed up alcoholic, you seem really reliable!
I'll keep them in the rootcellar for now. I'm so very clever!
Two years later.
Battery acid all over everything.

[ww3sabiture]

i was going down the road when i saw steam comeing from under the hood of my cj5 and kicking my self for not replaceing the thermo and belts when i had them sitting on the counter for 2 months

[ShooterMike]

Another snake story, isn't Texas full of them this time of year?

Tonight I was walking home from my folks' house, about a mile walk down a paved country road. It was just after dark and the temperature was dropping. I KNOW snakes like to crawl out on the roadsides at this time of the evening. But there I go, walking along the edge of the road in hiking shoes and shorts...with my iPod stuck in both ears, volume turned up listening to...what else? A Zombie Apocolypse-themed audio book. I have no idea how I caught the movement out of the corner of my eye. But I jumped back just as she struck. "She" being a diamondback rattler of about 2 and a half feet in length.

Luckily, I guess she had reared up as high as possible trying to warn me off before striking and thus shortened her reach. I never heard the plenty distinct buzzing of her rattles 'til I took off my earpieces. No telling how long she'd been rattlling at me in a "HEY DUMBASS!!! I'm here..." sorta way.

Sooo stupid! I felt like an idiot, albeit a lucky one. Gotta use all the senses we have, limited as they may be for us frail humans.

[Deenie7]

Yesterday, my husband and I were rushing back into the house; he had to get showered after work in time for us to catch a train into downtown Chicago for dinner reservations. I turned to close the back door of the house and felt a tremendous pain in my head as I pushed it closed. The ladder we had stored behind the door in the back porch had been put back improperly, and it swung down and hit me about an inch or so into the hairline, diagonally up and right from my right eye. (Basically along the ridge or curve of the skull there, where it goes from vertical towards horizontal.) I put my hand there to put pressure on it, and taking my hand away within a minute later, saw some spotting of blood - not much, maybe a dime in diameter. My husband grabbed a washcloth and brought me into the bathroom to get a good look at it under the lights. He wasn't sure what to do at this point other than have me put pressure on it, so (as my skull had finally stopped doing an impression of a bell) I told him to get in the shower and get ready, and I would keep putting pressure on it.

I was kicking myself. I have no Quik-Clot. We were about to have to rush out the door for a dinner he's really been looking forward to, and here I was with a scalp wound that was bleeding, plus it was inside the hairline so it wasn't like I could just slap some bandaids on it.

Then my mental light bulb went on - styptic powder! We have some for trimming our rabbits' nails (haven't had to use it yet, fortunately) in case you nick the quick of the nail.

Fortunately, by the time he got out of the shower, the relatively small wound was coagulating nicely, so I just packed some tissues, a compact with mirror, and the styptic powder, just in case. I'm pleased that it wasn't necessary.

[killr7]

When I was in college I was active in ROTC and just starting to get into prepping. The idea of a bug-out bag was still a new (though nifty) concept to me. I lived in the on campus apartments and had a meal plan that fed me at the school cafeteria. Well Huricane Ike started coming. We had all expected it to hit New Orleans with Baton Rouge getting no more than a bad thunderstorm.

Well it basically ground LSU to a halt. Suddenly Not only were there no classes (yay), but there was no anything. The dining hall that usually kept me fat andhappy was now only offering emergency services. My meal plan of 3 all i could eat meals a day was of no use. Instead you could get one (small) plate a day with your emergency ration card. Oh, and even though the tap was still giving out water when it felt like it we were told that the water was all contaminated so we shouldn't drink it without boiling. So how did my preps do? Well I had the MRE leftovers from a bunch of FTXs sitting in my closet. There is a reason they were the leftovers. Other than that I had a 12 pack of water that lasted a day and a half, and a veritable mountain of steak in the freezer. My big prep item that I had been thinking would help if times ever got bad was a rifle. So within two days I was out of food except for steak (which was awesome), out of clean water, without electricity that I would need to boil the water, and completely relying on the government to provide me with essentially everything. That rifle I bought thinking it would save me would have only been of use had some zombies shown up. Unfortunately hurricanes do not make zombies.

To say that I took corrective actions after that would be an understatement. Food, water, and other useful items were purchased immediately afterwards.

[sheddi]

This is my latest venture in what I'm calling my "Reality Check" series of threads ...

A couple of lessons of mine you can all learn from:

1. Back in the summer I took #1 Son dinghy sailing for the first time. It was an hour's drive to the coast, and only after arriving and unpacking did I discover I'd left the sails at home ... Fortunately Mrs Sheddi was there and (with much eye-rolling) was happy to entertain #1 Son at the beach while I drove back, collected the sails and returned.
(There are various other lessons learned around that dinghy, but that one's enough of a confession for now.)

2. Six years ago we moved into a new (to us) home. There were no smoke detectors fitted, so as a responsible husband and parent I bought some and stuck them to the ceilings with double-sided foam pads, intending to fix them more permanently at a later date. So far so good. Unfortunately over the past six years the glue on the pads has failed and after three years (so still three years ago) they'd all fallen off, some multiple times after being re-stuck with new pads. I still haven't put them back up. It's on the program for this coming weekend, so let's hope our home doesn't burn down before then.
(The odds are in my favour; there are ~25 million households in the UK, and less than 50,000 household fires per year, so all things being equal there's a 1-in-500 annual risk of my home burning down. Even so, if my home does burn down (and I live to tell of it) I'll be back here to let you all know.)

[Mrbeefy]

Finally got around to trying my P-38 can openers on a can of Cranberries. I tried with all my might but couldn't pierce the can and only dented the top. Suprised at my thumb strength, disappointed at my can opener. I'm wondering if these were designed for thinner cans or something in K-rations? Anyway, thought I'd share that I'm glad I tested them at home instead of waiting until I'm relying on them in the bush!

[angelofwar]

Finally got around to trying my P-38 can openers on a can of Cranberries. I tried with all my might but couldn't pierce the can and only dented the top. Suprised at my thumb strength, disappointed at my can opener. I'm wondering if these were designed for thinner cans or something in K-rations? Anyway, thought I'd share that I'm glad I tested them at home instead of waiting until I'm relying on them in the bush!

The P-38 were designed for thinner cans...you need the bigger P-51...and try to find a USGI one...not that made in China crap. I can open a can in about 10 seconds with a P-51...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:P-openers.jpg

[Mrbeefy]

Well craptastic I do have a P-51. Probably made in indochina.

[72hours]

If you ever have a can opener fail, or fail to bring one.....
Find a nice flat rock (or the sidewalk will do), and rub the top of the can in circles on the rock until you can just lift the top off the can.

[Mrbeefy]

Or use my EDC S&W SWAT