Image by ssilva_bucket.
If you have noticed an increase in earthquakes and tremors around the world you are not alone. It seems as if earthquakes are a weekly event anymore. Like everything else though it depends on what source you are using. USGS is crediting most of the increases in activity to the increases in monitoring. It can also be said that the increases in damage are due to the increase in people living near fault lines or even the medias obsession of reporting on catastrophic events makes it feel as if there are more. Either way, the possibility of having to deal with a tremor is quite real and very possible over one’s lifetime. While trying to “earthquake-proof” yourself would be nearly impossible and extremely expensive, there are a few little things we can do to minimize damage to our food storage from these tremors.
The idea of this post is not to provide you with an exhaustive list of things you need to do to prepare for an earthquake. That’s your responsibility. My purpose here is to throw a couple of additional ideas at you to add to your preps.
Today we are trying to minimize the damage you see in the above picture. We store a lot of food in glass jars that we can ourselves and I would hate to see it all end up on the floor. Earthquakes are not the only thing that can knock these jars off. Children and pets also get curious so by adding furring strips to front of our shelves you can minimize the risk.
As with most of my projects, this will begin with pallets. Above is a picture of a few in our pile. The poor mans lumberyard if you will. I carefully select the wood I would like to use. I check for any indication that the wood is pressure treated, cracked, or broken. These I stay away from. Most of what I use are heat treated which is just fine for wood working.
Measure twice cut once. It does not take long to put these up. I am not going win any type of prize for craftsmanship this is purely utilitarian.
I use whatever screws i can dig up. For this project I used 1 5/8″ drywall screws. I could probably build a clock out of pallets and drywall screws! Pallet wood is usually pretty rough so I like to sand or plane the wood. The wife will appreciate a splinter free shelf. I don’t spend to much time “disaster-proofing” anything. My intent is to minimize the risk, something that was pounded into my head in the Marines. Make yourself hard-to-kill. These improvements will make us a little more resilient. You cannot make yourself invincible but you can always make yourself harder to injure.
Here is another way to cover a larger opening. I just ripped the plank and smoothed out the edges giving me two strips. Though my wife has indicated this shelf is a little more difficult to rotate. Perhaps we could develop removable strips? Notice the wooden latch in the center. Made of pallet scraps of course.
Working with pallets can be a lot of fun too. In this picture I planed these planks which turned out to be oak. I built this guard to keep things from falling off the top shelf. Again using drywall screws. Another easy thing that anyone needs to do especially with children is to properly attach all shelves to the studs in the walls. The key is to attach to the studs. NO, for the love of God you cannot use mollys!
To all the naysayers that just assume everything will be destroyed in an earthquake just remember that most of the earthquakes are small and many are not even felt by humans. We may not be able to prepare 100% for everything but we can certainly minimize our risk. Remember we make ourselves hard-to-kill.If you have any questions or comments feel free to comment below or you may e-mail us at simpleprepping@rocketmail.com.
