With natural disasters across North America in the news lately, it’s understandable that you might be thinking about ways to prepare your family for a disaster in your area. A great place to start turns out to be Costco, which sells a surprising variety of dehydrated food kits that can keep four people fed for a year, or 192 people for a week.

This week, Mashable and others marveled at what they found on Costco, a kit that can feed one person for a year for $999. This idea apparently appealed to the public so much that the kit has now sold out.

Fortunately, you can buy larger and smaller kits from Costco, as well as entire pallets of emergency food delivered directly to your home or bunker.

Another kit, the Ark 390, comes in a handy and portable plastic pail and can feed one person three meals a day for a full month. You can even buy plastic buckets of your favorite individual foods, like 180 servings of macaroni and cheese or 120 pounds of freeze-dried ground beef.

Nothing new here

The existence of these kits and the fact that you can order them from Costco isn’t news to longtime Consumerist readers, though. Back in 2010, we brought you news of a similar kit, also from Costco, that was part of Costco’s selection of doomsday foods at the time.

If you had bought one of these kits back in 2010, you would still have at least another 13 years of shelf life for most of the freeze-dried products. Kits typically have a shelf life of 20 to 25 years.

Other disaster supplies

Dehydrated food has obvious problems in a disaster scenario, though: You have to hydrate it. The same brand that supplies the kits to Costco that cost up to $6,000 also sells large tanks for drinkable water. Since it’s Costco, you can buy your 275-gallon water storage tanks in bulk two-packs, or smaller 55-gallon barrels in 8-packs.

Filtration kits and filtration bottles are also available, which would be helpful in a long-term crisis or if you aren’t able to bring your 275-gallon water tank with you in your Impreza.

Doomsday Preppers jokes aside, being prepared for a disaster is a good idea. To start your house’s emergency kit, you can start with the recommendations on Ready.gov, and build from there until you’re rotating your stored water annually and buying an entire pallet of emergency food, if that’s what you want to do.

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