When we think of an earthquake, we think of a violently rattling house: things falling from shelves, pictures falling from walls and china falling over in cabinets. Essentially a lot of falling.

So how can we prevent our painstakingly preserved food from suffering the same fate? Read the article below to learn how to keep your jars of food safe in natural calamities.

STURDY SHELVING

Either wood or heavy duty metal. The ideal shelves should be either attached directly to wall studs at the back and supported by legs at the front to distribute the weight or should be free-standing but secured to your home’s framing studs with heavy duty screws or earthquake strapping to prevent rocking or “hopping” of the entire shelving unit in a quake.

BRACING AT THE FRONT OF THE SHELVES

A good shelf means nothing if a jar can just bounce off of the front of it in a quake. People who build wood shelves can add 1×2″or similar strips of wood across the front of the shelf. Ideally, you want this bracing to be high enough to prevent a jar from bouncing right over it.

I have seen a lot of examples of bungee cords being used to brace jars against earthquakes and, frankly, I don’t know that it does much. Bungee cords are stretchy. I have a hard time believing that you could get a bungee cord tight enough to actually keep a jar from bouncing off a flat shelf in an earthquake. If anyone has any direct experience with this I’d love to know your experience.

JAR PADDING

Once you’ve ensured your shelves aren’t going to collapse, and you jars aren’t going to rattle off your shelves, the final step in earthquake proofing the pantry is padding the individual jars.

The simplest way to do this is to store filled jars back in the original box they came in with the cardboard divider in place (or, make a sturdier DIY one out of corrugated cardboard). I highly recommend wrapping once or twice around your jar-boxes with duct tape when they are still new and crisp. This does a lot to keep them functional and strong enough to handle getting shoved around (gently, please) while full of preserves.

You can also wrap your jars individually in something squishy. If you get a package with a lot of bubble wrap in it, you can cut jar-sized sections and duct tape them into reusable bubble-wrap sized sleeves for your jars.

MY HALF-ASS SOLUTION

The medium-duty wire shelf snaps into the wall-mounted bracket. These types of shelving systems are great and really customizable for closets and are probably great for pantries too, if the owner of the pantry is not insane about storing heavy canned goods, like me. You can get shelving systems like this at any organization store or big-box home improvement chain.

Simply flipping the wire shelves gives my jars a teeny bit of protection against sliding right off the front. The lip generated by this move is about 3/4″ deep. That’s not a lot but it is something.

Essentially, the key to keeping your mason jars full of preserves safe is to have sturdy shelves bolted to the framing of the house, with lips or pockets to prevent the jars from sliding from the shelf. It also doesn't hurt to individually pad the jars against each other, as they can rattle enough on the shelf to simply shatter.

Thank you to Northwest Edible Life for providing this informative article.