But, rather than recycle “conventional wisdom” about heading to Montana or Wyoming, I've taken a somewhat more systematic approach to narrowing down potential exit destinations. My idea here was to determine the areas in the USA that are remote enough to be away from any likely disaster areas, and to have affordable land, yet were close enough that, if TSHTF, I could plausibly get my family there, while avoiding scavengers.
Here is a basic map of the USA. Population centers are shaded a little darker. Canada and Mexico are blacked out, because I tend to think that if things are bad enough for us to want to head to the border, those borders are going to be shut tighter than you'd believe.
One of the scariest things I can imagine is a Chernobyl-style nuclear meltdown – either accidental or intentional. After Chernobyl, scientists were measuring significant fallout all over Europe and Scandinavia, and measurable levels of fallout over the entire Northern Hemisphere, so really being a few miles out of town isn't going to save your ass, but obviously the farther the better. Here's the same map, with all the currently-active nuclear facilities indicated by red dots. (Source: http://eyeball-series.org/npp/62npp-eyeball.htm)
As you can see, there are quite a few of them. Since there's no way to know which are more likely to have an accident or to be targeted by terrorists, let's plan on avoiding all of them. Here's a map that shows a fairly optimistic (i.e. small) fallout radius. Already, you can see that most of the East Coast is not looking too good.
Well and good, you may be thinking, but it's more likely that terrorists will set off suitcase nukes in major cities than try to break into heavily-secured reactor facilities. Okay, here's a map that shows similar fallout radiuses from the top 40 population centers in the USA. (Rather than city population, which doesn't take into account adjacent population centers, I've used TV markets as my reference for this: http://www.tvb.org/rcentral/markettrack/US_HH_by_DMA.asp)
Really, it's not too different. Here's a map with both danger zones overlaid. You can see that really, it just tells us more of the same (although it does start to look scary as hell).
So, looks like everything in the West is pretty safe, right? Not so fast. What are you going to do once you get your family – and whatever stragglers you've picked up – to your little hideout? Live on canned food forever? No, you've gotta plant crops and get ready to sustain yourself indefinitely. That means you need water. Unfortunately, here's the same map with the dryest, most drought-prone parts of the country shaded brown. (Source: http://www.mapsofworld.com/usa/thematic-maps/usa-precipitation.html)
Uh-oh. That narrows things down a bit. But wait, without electricity and heating oil, what are you going to do when the temperature drops to freezing for several months per year? Here's the same map with the coldest parts of the country shaded in. Worse yet. (Source: http://www.arborday.org/media/zones.cfm)
Outside of a small area on the California/Oregon border, and parts of Oklahoma, Arkansas, Mississippi, and East Texas, things are looking pretty slim. There are little pockets that look appealing – parts of Kentucky, for example, but if you keep in mind that two-thirds of the US population lives within a day's drive of that area, it starts to look like a bit of bulls-eye. Not to mention the fact that TN/KY/WV are heavy coal-mining states, meaning that many of the mountains been strip-mined, polluting the water and irrevocably harming the local ecology. Most of the other “safe” areas have similar issues.
So, WTF? My point here is that NOWHERE IS 100% SAFE. There is no perfect spot to “bug out.” If there were, everybody with an ounce of sense would already be there!
So, let's back up a bit. In my next post, I'll explore a possible scenario, and see what we can learn from it.
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