What is under your bed?

If you think about how many hours a day you are asleep and look at the odds there’s a pretty good chance that spur of the moment disasters such as earthquakes, tornadoes and planes crashing into your house might just happen while you are in bed. In this case it’s important to have a few things within arms reach because who knows what shape your room or house will be in and it might not be as easy to get to your family, your emergency bag, or just out of your house as it was pre-chaos. The above photo includes a few of the things I generally have next to or just under my bed at any given point. A breakout of the stuff I have and the stuff I should have but don’t can be found after the jump.

I should point out that for most of my life I’ve had some things within arms reach of my bed, though they have rarely included emergency supplies. They’ve mostly been weapons of one kind or another because the surprise I always expect in the middle of the night is a break in rather than something less malicious. That said I’ve slept through many more earthquakes than robberies so recently I’ve been changing the focus a bit. Don’t get me wrong, I still think home defense is important and have “tools” for that easily accessible but I’ll cover all sorts of weaponry in another post where that is more the focus. As for the stuff that has a purpose other than convincing an intruder that picking my house was a terrible judgment error, lets see what’s there:

From left to right:

Flashlights: I usually have two next to my bed at all times. The 2D Maglight is an old faithful though honestly it’s getting a bit obsolete at this point and I might retire it soon. I’ve had this particular one for about 15 years and it’s served me pretty well in that time. It doubles as an impact device when needed which I’ve thought would be good if trapped and I needed to bang on a wall to get someones attention but I have better options now so really it’s only there out of habit. I can’t imagine buying D-cell batteries again, well, ever.

I also have my Surefire E2D on my nightstand though it doesn’t stay there. I carry this around a lot so frequently it’s with me, but at night I always pull it out of my pocket and leave it on the stand. It’s small and at 120 lumens it’s about a billion times brighter than the maglight which I tend to think if the power goes out and I need to see where I’m going is going to be a much better option.

Shoes: The Bunny Slippers are mandatory and obvious. Every household should have these and they are important for lounging around and middle of the night trips to the bathroom or kitchen. Sure you could have some boring plain slippers but what fun is that? The shoes are the real important thing. If you don’t have a pair of shoes you can slip on quickly next to your bed you are on crack. Literally. On crack. Put the pipe down and go grab a pair of shoes right now and put them next to your bed. If something happens and you have to run out of your house really quickly you don’t want to be caught outside for hours or days in bare feet. Especially if there is some kind of disaster which has debris all over the place, the last thing you want to add to an already bad situation is injured feet. So go get shoes now.

Do Everything Tool: Lets say there is an earthquake and your house sustains some damage. Maybe it’s just a shift in the foundation that wedges your bedroom door closed. Maybe it’s something bigger and your ceiling caves in. Maybe any number of things where you will be cursing the fact that your toolbox with exactly what you need right then is on the other side of the house or out in the garage or wherever. Having a tool right there that will allow you to pry open a door, cut through drywall, break a window, etc is very important. I’ve got an Annihilator, which is an 18-Inch multi-purpose utility and wrecking bar (here’s an early review of it from my own blog). I like it because it’ll do anything that I can think of that might come up including turning off my gas should that be required. What you have should be catered to what you think you might need, but really you want something that does many of the things this does. For me, it makes more sense to have one thing than a whole collection of crap including a crowbar, hammer, axe, gas shut off tool, utility knife, etc but YMMV.

Guns: Plural. More on this later.

As I mentioned above this is an area of prep that I haven’t been 100% on top of and as I stopped to look at what I had what jumped out at me most was the things I didn’t have. A few things which I should probably add in the very near future are:

Whistle: If I’m trapped or pinned somehow and can’t get out on my own, blowing a whistle is much louder than yelling, easier to do for extended periods of time, and prevents you from inhaling a ton of airborne crud like you would constantly taking deep breaths to yell. It might be the thing that gets a rescue workers attention and saves your life.

Gloves: Similar to the shoe argument but for your hands. A really good idea and I can’t believe I don’t have some already.

Water: It’s a good idea to have a bottle stashed near the bed. Ideally I won’t be stuck there and will use the other things I have to GTFO but things don’t always go as planned and you can’t really have too much extra water around. It’s easy and cheap enough to pick up a large bottle at the store which I’ll be doing on my next grocery run.

Is there anything else I’m forgetting or overlooking? What do you have in case things go bump in the night?