Food Safety and Illness During an Outage

Most illness during a long outage is food or water borne, and nearly all of it is preventable with a thermometer, clean hands and one firm rule about temperature.

What actually makes people ill?

Food that warmed up and got eaten anyway, and water that was drunk before it was treated. Not exotic disease.

This is the least dramatic answer available and it is the correct one. In a household without power for a week, the realistic threats are the ones you already know from ordinary life, arriving faster because refrigeration and hand washing have both quietly stopped. The federal rule is unambiguous: perishable food that has been above 40 degrees Fahrenheit for two hours or more goes in the bin, which is what Ready.gov states plainly.

Cooking does not rescue food that has been warm. Heat kills the organism and leaves behind what the organism already produced, and that is the part that makes people ill.

The 40 degree line, and why arguments about it are expensive

Put a thermometer in the refrigerator and one in the freezer. The number ends the discussion before it starts.

• Read it, do not feel it. Food at 45 degrees feels cold to a hand that has been outside in February.
• Two hours above 40 is the threshold, not a suggestion, and it applies to meat, poultry, fish, eggs and leftovers.
• Ice crystals mean it can be refrozen. No crystals plus a warm box means cook it today or discard it.
• When in doubt, throw it out is federal advice and also the cheapest sentence in this guide.

How do you keep a household clean without running water?

Hand washing is the intervention that does the most, and it works with a jug and a bar of soap.

Task	Water needed	Method that works	What goes wrong
Hand washing	About a cup per wash	Jug poured by a second person, soap, air dry	Sanitiser used on visibly dirty hands, which does not work
Dishes	Two basins, roughly two gallons	Wash, then rinse with treated water	Rinsing in untreated water on day four
Bathing	Two to three gallons	Kettle, basin, one warm room, a flannel	Skipped entirely, which shows by day five
Toilets	Around a gallon per flush	Bucket poured hard into the bowl	Using drinking water when grey water would do
Laundry	Five gallons a load	Two buckets and a plunger	Left until there is nothing clean

The trade worth stating is that every gallon spent on hygiene is a gallon not available for drinking. That is a real constraint and the answer is not to skip washing. It is to separate the two supplies: treated water for drinking and cooking, untreated or grey water for flushing and first wash, which roughly doubles what your stored water covers.

The daily routine that prevents most of it

Five habits, done at fixed times, replace the refrigeration and plumbing you have temporarily lost.

1. Wash hands before every food task, with soap and poured water rather than sanitiser.
2. Read both thermometers once in the morning and once at night, and write the numbers down.
3. Cook the day’s food in one batch, eat it, and do not keep leftovers unless the freezer is still cold.
4. Keep raw and cooked food physically apart, which is harder on a folding table outside than in a kitchen.
5. Bag rubbish and get it away from the living space daily, because collection has stopped and animals have not.

During one four day outage a household followed all of this except the last item and had raccoons through the bags on night two, thirty feet from where they were cooking. Nobody was ill and the clean up took a morning. It is the smallest item on the list and it was the only one they skipped.

When does this need a doctor?

Dehydration in the very young or very old, any illness lasting beyond a day, and anything with blood or a high fever. Do not wait out an outage to make that call.

• Dehydration moves fastest in children and older adults and it is the most common reason an ordinary stomach illness becomes serious.
• Roads and phones being difficult is a reason to go earlier, not later. The situation does not improve while you wait.
• Nothing on this site is medical advice. If you are weighing it up, call, and let a clinician decide.

Water treatment procedures in full are in storing and treating water at home, and the cold chain arithmetic behind the thermometer readings is in how long a home freezer really holds without power.

Source: https://survivaldan101.com/food-safety-and-illness-during-an-outage/