The pitfalls and pratfalls of do-it-yourself longterm food storage were the subject of a lot of joking on a local radio show today. I'm not posting to make fun of the person involved, or to rant about the radio announcers using this story to classify all Y2Kers as morons (which they did). This is a real-life cautinary tale about a possibly fatal mistake that someone preparing for Y2K made and how it damged his house and could have killed him or someone else in his family.

Seems that in Fayetteville, Arkansas there was a reported bomb explosion in a residential neighborhood. Emergency crews and police responed and found a large hole blown through the garage roof of the house in question. Police found the homeowner and began the questioning about his "bombmaking activities".

The man's response was that he wasn't making bombs, but was preparing food to be placed in buried storage for Y2K. His latest effort was to put packages of beans and rice into a large sections of PVC pipe with a cap on one end. After the food was inside, he added a chunk of dry ice to drive out the oxygen. And then he tightly capped the open end.

This all sounds familiar to most of us, except that capping the container before the dry ice has all vaporized is not part of the recommended process. As the dry ice kept vaporizing, it pressurized the PVC pipe eventually caused the pipe to burst, with explosive results. Please don't make this mistake yourselves, you may not live to hear people laughing about your new beans and rice recipe.

Also do not play with liquid nitrogen by putting that into a 2-litre soda bottle and capping it tightly. Someone tried this at work and the result was the metal garbage can the bottle was in looks like a grenade went off inside it. These are examples of seriously life-threatening pitfalls which can occur when putting food into Y2K storage. How is somebody going to explain a death or crippling injury when they were too close to an exploding container of rice and beans. **Un-cooked** rice and beans. After cooking and consumption, some form of mild explosion is an almost given. ;)

WW

-- Wildweasel (vtmldm@epix.net), April 09, 1999

Answers

This happened to me when I rushed the storage of lentils in some one-gallon enamel-lined paint cans. The top blew off and put a 1/2-inch dent in the plaster our 10ft-high ceiling. It was a really small chunk of ice, too.

Dano

-- Dano (bookem@blacksand.srf), April 09, 1999.