Ridgewell County Faces Regional Shart Survival Kit Shortage Ahead of Fair Season
GAUZE has activated its emergency reserves for the first time since the 2023 Chili Expo. County health officials are urging residents to 'plan accordingly,
By Hester Grume·June 30, 2026
GAUZE has activated its emergency reserves for the first time since the 2023 Chili Expo. County health officials are urging residents to 'plan accordingly,' which they acknowledge is advice no one has ever once followed.
Ridgewell County health officials confirmed Tuesday that the county's supply of Shart Survival Kits has fallen to what the Department of Public Wellbeing is classifying as "critically insufficient" levels, with less than three weeks remaining before the opening of the 74th Annual Ridgewell County Fair, historically the highest-demand period for personal digestive preparedness products in the region.
The shortage, which has emptied retail shelves across Cladmore, Pellmoth Heights, and Drosswick over the past ten days, prompted GAUZE (General Aid for Urgent Zone Emergencies) to activate its county emergency reserves for the first time since the 2023 Greater Ridgewell Chili Expo, an event that consumed 1,400 kits in a single afternoon and led to what GAUZE's after-action report described as "a fundamental reassessment of chili as a spectator activity."
"We are not in crisis. We are in a pre-crisis preparedness deficit," said Ridgewell County Director of Public Wellbeing Fenna Goss at a Tuesday morning briefing. "The fair has not started. Nothing has happened yet. People are purchasing kits in anticipation of things that have not occurred. This is, in a narrow technical sense, responsible civic behavior. It is also the reason we have none left."
Goss said the county maintains a rolling Shart Survival Kit reserve calculated at 2.4 kits per projected fair attendee, a ratio established after the 2019 fair, when a deep-fried foods pavilion operated for nine consecutive hours without incident before what the county's incident log recorded simply as "hour ten." The 2019 reserve ratio was 0.8 kits per attendee. By the following year, it had been tripled.
This year's projected attendance is 41,000. The county's reserve, which was fully stocked in April, has been drawn down by a combination of the Taco Baraco Category 4 intestinal event in May, which required emergency deployment of 300 kits, and what Goss described as "sustained civilian purchasing activity that began approximately the moment the fair schedule was posted online."
Goss said the county currently holds 6,200 kits in reserve, against a target of approximately 98,000.
"We are at six percent of target inventory with nineteen days to fair opening," Goss said. "I would characterize this as concerning. I would not characterize it as surprising. The fair has a reputation."
The retail shortage has been driven in part by what vendors describe as panic buying. Breck Todder, owner of Drosswick Road Pharmacy in Cladmore, said his store sold its entire stock of both the Original (SK-1) and Tactical (SK-2T) editions in four days. He imposed a two-per-household limit on Thursday. It was irrelevant by Saturday.
"I put the sign up Thursday morning," Todder said. "By Saturday afternoon, there was nothing for the sign to apply to. I left it up anyway because I think it communicates something. I'm not sure what. Optimism, maybe."
Todder said customers have been purchasing in patterns he described as "inconsistent with personal use."
"A woman came in Wednesday and bought eight Tacticals," he said. "I asked if she was attending the fair. She said she was not. She said she was attending her nephew's wedding, which is outdoors and catered by the same company that did the Taco Baraco. She was buying for the table."
GAUZE Regional Coordinator Hedda Mott conducts inventory at the organization's Ridgewell County reserve warehouse. Current stock stands at approximately 6,200 units, or six percent of the county's fair-season target.
AeroGuard Personal Systems, the Threllside-based manufacturer of the Shart Survival Kit, confirmed that demand across Ridgewell County has exceeded projections by what the company called "a meaningful margin." Regional Sales Director Fenwick Dawe said the company's production facility is operating at full capacity but faces constraints in its supply of three key components: medical-grade containment film, the proprietary neutralizing agent used in the kit's remediation sachets, and the small dignity towel.
"The dignity towel is the bottleneck," Dawe said. "It is a custom textile. It cannot be substituted. We have received suggestions from several retailers that we ship kits without the towel and I want to be very clear that we will not do that. The towel is not optional. The towel is the point."
Dawe said AeroGuard has redirected stock from three adjacent counties to Ridgewell, a measure he described as "a short-term rebalancing that will be felt elsewhere." He declined to name the affected counties but said their fair seasons begin later in the summer, allowing time for restocking.
"We are borrowing from the future," Dawe said. "The future will understand."
GAUZE Regional Coordinator Hedda Mott, who oversaw emergency kit distribution during the Taco Baraco incident in May, said the organization is preparing contingency plans in case the shortage persists through the fair's opening weekend. Those plans include staffing additional relief stations at the fairgrounds, pre-positioning kits at what Mott called "historically significant food vendor clusters," and coordinating with the Special Feces Forces for rapid-response deployment if demand spikes.
"The fair is a nine-day event. The first three days are manageable. It is historically days four through seven, when the novelty of deep-fried options has worn off but the consumption has not, that generate the majority of kit demand," Mott said. "Day eight is the chili cook-off. Day eight is its own planning document."
Mott said the organization has also reached out to GAUZE chapters in neighboring counties about mutual aid agreements, though she noted that "nobody wants to lend us their inventory right before fair season. They remember what happened in 2019."
The county's public health advisory, posted to the Department of Public Wellbeing's website Tuesday, recommends that fair attendees "plan accordingly" by bringing personal kits from home, familiarizing themselves with the locations of GAUZE relief stations at the fairgrounds, and exercising what the advisory calls "dietary awareness in proximity to competitive eating exhibitions, deep-fried food pavilions, and any vendor operating under a temporary food permit issued in the last 72 hours."
Goss acknowledged, when asked, that the phrase "plan accordingly" appeared in virtually every public health advisory her department had issued in the past three years.
"It does," Goss said. "And to my knowledge, no one has ever once followed it. But we will continue to say it because it is technically correct, and because the alternative is saying what we actually mean, which legal has not approved."
AeroGuard has committed to an emergency production run that Dawe said would deliver an additional 40,000 units to Ridgewell County within fourteen days. He cautioned that the timeline depends on the dignity towel supply chain, which he described as "more fragile than people assume for a product that is, at the end of the day, a very small towel."
Fair organizers have not commented on the shortage but have updated the event's FAQ page. Under the question "What should I bring to the fair?" the first item now reads: "Your own."
