Ready for a crisis

AMERICAN FORK — The long, narrow room in Kenneth Moravec's basement looks like a food bank.

Floor-to-ceiling shelves are lined with canned fruits and vegetables, dried or powdered herbs, spices and drinks, along with drums of rice, pasta, wheat and other grains. Each is labeled with its contents and the date of purchase or when it was home-canned, usually right out of Moravec's garden.

"Right now I have about a six-year supply of food," said Moravec, whose e-mail tag line reads, "If you fail to prepare, you prepare to fail."

Moravec has taken to heart a decades-old directive from leaders of his Mormon faith that members should prepare for hard times or natural disasters by stockpiling up to a year's supply of food. A church Web site, providentliving.org, provides a guide for members.

Moravec's own preparedness philosophy has been cultivated through church teachings and hard personal experiences, including job losses and natural disasters. As a child, he said his family weathered an East Coast hurricane and then temporarily lived off their cache of stored food. And in 1989, Moravec said, he was stranded for three days on a section of the Oakland, Calif., Bay Bridge after a 7.0 earthquake. He ate from a 72-hour emergency kit stashed inside his pickup truck.

"I've been in and out of work a lot in my life, but I've always been able to feed my family because of food storage," he said.

Concern for others propelled Moravec to share what he knows. For two decades, he's taught preparedness classes nationwide to everyone from Boy Scouts to business executives and church women.

Once a year, Moravec drops in on neighbors, regardless of faith, for a preparedness check-up.

"The question is: If you had to live on your food storage and couldn't go to Albertsons every day, how long could you live," he said. "Some people look at me like I'm nuts, but most people understand where I'm coming from."

Since 1985, Moravec has also placed group orders for bulk quantities of grains, dried herbs, potato flakes and other staples. Once or twice a year, a semitrailer pulls onto Moravec's street and unloads enough food to fill his garage.

Moravec's fellow Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints congregants seem to have been converted. By his own accounting, Moravec said about 11 percent of families have socked away a year's worth of food. Another 10 percent have about six months of food saved, and another 15 percent have a three-month supply, he said.

Moravec's neighbor, Cheri Christensen, said her family recently used a small, unexpected windfall to increase their food storage to a one-year supply. Christensen buys grains and pasta in bulk and cans fruits, vegetables and even butter.