Good idea Sprite - better still if you can save it to a memory stick so that you also have images of the more expensive (replacement-wise) items in place in your home

Another suggestion is to make sure that any food you use in your emergency packs is food you actually eat and that you have a good degree of confidence in its freshness.

When you are in an emergency situation, that is not the time to be sick from bad food or learning how to eat foods new to you or learning how to prepare foods.

Lizzy

Something I have been working on is a large plastic storage box- the sort you get from a discount shop- with a change of clothes for each of my family of five, plus a folder with copies of all our vital documents and cd's with important irreplacable photo's, and a list of contact numbers.
I plan to keep this at a family members house a few suburbs away, as well as another set of cd's and documents and a few $$$ with a relative about 100 k's away.
I figure that if worst case we have to leave the house, or worse yet our town, in the middle of the night with nothing but nightwear- at least we have something to go on with.

when we had a flood in T'ville in 98, I tried to grab the essentials for a day or 2 in evac centre - but it was too much for us to carrywith 2 children that needed to be carried too:jawdrop:
I have since refined this ALOT!

The floods here this yr have been a good 'prac' for food preparedness if nothing else. I found that certain foods that I did not realize were used more than I thought. Also found out that may 'stockpile' was not near enough to feed 6 people for an extended time. I had plenty of base stuff (flour, rice, pasta, potatoes - we could have had cakes and desserts all the time but the veg etc would have been sorely lacking amongst other things like loo paper:shy:)

So in light of what I learned from that, I would suggest that everyone have a 'prac' run (even if you leave you place as we couldn't and do all the other 'normal' things) to see how your system would work and where it is lacking or overdone (as the case may be)

now that must be as clear as mud but I am not going to change it cos I may make it worse

Something I still need to work on is being able to carry all this 'emergency' stuff and still keep the kids safe at the same time (need to be an octopus;))

I found a great emergency web site where you can find really good emergency kits at PRONTO SAFETY. You can get just the bag or the complete kit so its really easy to make up your own emergency kit. They also do great first aid kits for aussies.

That's not a bad site Pronto, and as they include lists of what's in each emergency bag you could make up your own if you can't afford what they offer.

I have been thinking about having certain items stored 'in the cloud' where I could retrieve them wherever I was...pdf copies of important documents like insurance, etc .. The question is of course how securely they can be kept. I guess if I could be reasonably sure that they could be secure I would be happy to set it up.

Does anyone know of a way to do this? Eg (to get the discussion going) how about Google docs? password protected at least.....

AND how useful a flickr account or similar would be to store photos away from your house...

OK folks all this is good advice- I have back ups of important stuff in different locations- as far away as the ES. What worries me is no one has suggested including a couple of bottles of your favourite tipple- so good to relax with when you have to leave in a hurry.LOL

i am in the process of saving copies of everything to a portable hard drive and usb stick - which can be popped into a clip seal bag when leaving.

Am in process of updating a list of assets as well and photo's of such. Found it hard previously to prove we owned things when they left in the water and were not there to show the assessor.Also if things are stolen we have proof they were here and ours.This info will also go on stick as well as a printed copy kept with other emergency papers in another clip seal bag. As i am my sisters guardian and my mothers power of attorney there are lots of papers that are important,

I lost heaps of photo's to flood once and i am endeavouring to scan all our photo's from pre-digital days so that we can save these to hard drive as well.

WHile on the idea of the USB sticks- they are cheap at big stores at the moment due to the back to school sales. I bought one to put all my photos onto but have discovered that i need at least two more.