This Is Only A Drill - Part 2

After a little digression with the last couple of posts, I'd like to resume the narrative thread I began earlier, regarding the actual logistics of a hypothetical Event.

So, let's say the time has come to Bug Out. There's a lot of good advice out there about stocking your car with tools, gasoline, etc., driving in a convoy to avoid brigands, and so on. All of which is outstanding, unless the Event was of an electromagnetic nature (EMP attack), and now virtually nothing works. This is why I put bicycles on my short list! If you happen to have horses, that's great, as long as they don't get sick, hurt or hungry, and as long as the sound of thundering hooves doesn't alert every opportunist within earshot to your presence, trajectory, and destination.

Bicycles are inexpensive, quiet, require no fuel, and are relatively easy to maintain and repair. Whether you're looking to get through a massive traffic jam, roads blocked by debris, or dealing with the aftermath of an EMP, you can count on a bicycle to see you through. A couple of spare inner tubes and a hand pump, and you're pretty well set. Of course, a bicycle offers no protection against any sort of violent attack, but it's the old strength vs. speed question. Would you rather be stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic in your Silverado while your city comes apart at the seams, or would you rather rely on stealth and maneuverability to avoid hot spots and get the hell out of Dodge?

Don't get me wrong, cars are great, and I'd much rather drive the 170+ miles to my hideaway with family and supplies than bike there, but it seems to me that any type of cataclysmic event is likely either to render cars unusable (for any one of numerous reasons), or to put so many people on the roads that cars will turn into death traps. A few years ago, facing a major hurricane, the authorities of a Southern state ordered a mandatory evacuation of thousands of residents. Those residents dutifully piled into their cars ... and sat on the highway for hours, many of them running out of gas in standstill traffic, while the weather got worse and worse. Thankfully, the hurricane wound up losing strength and nobody got killed, but the lesson learned was that our nation's infrastructure can not accommodate mass evacuation, even for an emergency as slow-moving as a hurricane.

Now imagine what the outbound traffic in your city would look like if a suitcase bomb went off at a football game!

Anyway, let's say you manage to bicycle to the destination you've prepared, dealing with whatever weather is going on, and avoiding or fighting off looters, rapists and assorted weirdos. Now what? Let's say you have some food and supplies (and that they haven't been found and looted by anyone else). How long will they last? The answer is, not long enough! This is why it's a really great idea to take up gardening as a hobby, RIGHT NOW. Hunting is fine, as long as you know what you're doing, but I tend to think that I'd like to stay as close as possible to my family and my hideout after a major Problem, and I'd also like to keep gunfire and other attention-drawing behavior to a minimum. I like things that are quiet and inconspicuous, so I recommend that anybody who considers himself a hunter invest in a good hunting bow, and learn how to use it. Along the same principle, I recommend that absolutely everybody, regardless of age, physical condition or infirmity learn the basics of agriculture.

The more you learn about how to raise your own food under optimal conditions, the more likely you are to be able to figure out how to do it under less-than-optimal ones. Now, even dedicated survivalists can't grow more than 80%-90% of their own food (and that's with years of preparation, building up orchards, etc.), but if I have any motto it's that "Something Is Better Than Nothing." If you can make your canned food last longer by growing some veggies, then that's a success. And there are some things that you can do to make it more of a success. Here are a few:

1) Use a greenhouse. No matter where you are, or what season it is, a greenhouse will allow you to grow more produce, faster, than you could otherwise. It doesn't have to be fancy either: PVC pipe and plastic dropcloth are cheap. Put 'em together, and you've got yourself a nice, fully-scalable greenhouse. Start small - maybe a 3' or 4' cube that you can put over some freestanding containers or a shelf of seedlings. I'll post some sample pictures soon, but there are plenty of designs available online. One tip: A layer of plastic on both the inside of the frame and the outside will leave an insulating cushion of air in between that will drastically help moderate temperatures inside the structure.

2) Unless you're looking for amber waves of grain, you can grow a lot of beans, tomatoes, lettuce, potatoes, and assorted veggies in containers and raised beds. Furthermore, water is precious. You'll need less of it if you cultivate plants in containers or raised beds, and you'll also have less trouble with weeds.

3) Herbs aren't just for hippies. If TSHTF, there's no access to meds. But, guess what, most medicine comes from plants anyway. Herbal medicine can be slower and and less effective than commercial pharmaceuticals, but it's also gentler, surprisingly powerful, and a whole lot better than nothing. Invest in a good book on herbs - one that gives you the culinary and medicinal use of many common herbs, as well as guidance on cultivation and preparation. Find out what will grow in your area, and if you have any specific medical conditions (hypertension, angina, etc.), find out what herbs can be used to treat it, and make sure you have some of those seeds on hand. Ideally, start growing some herbs now, get used to using them, and start learning how to identify and use them.

The moral of this drill? Something is DEFINITELY better than nothing.

Iran May Be Planning EMP Attack

I'm going to interrupt my instructional scenario to bring you an interesting analysis regarding Iran's potential strategy of using nuclear weapons - not by detonating them in population centers, but by launching them into the atmosphere and detonating them at altitude, to create one or more widespread Electro Magnetic Pulses, crippling tranportation, knocking out power, etc. This may now be the most plausible crisis to prepare against, so I'm going to adjust the strategy I've been discussing to account for this new development.

http://www.newsmax.com/timmerman/iran_nuclear_plan/2008/07/29/117217.html

Nowhere To Run

There are as many opinions about where one could best survive as there are people interested in surviving. In a way, this is good, because it means that we aren't all saving our pennies trying to buy plots of land on the same mountain somewhere.

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.

The Problem, And What To Do About It

Point 1. Too Much Is Too Much.

America consumes more of everything than any other culture in the world. So, naturally, most survivalist/preppers port that mass-consumption philosophy over to disaster preparedness, insisting that anything short of a basement fallout shelter with a full arsenal and months – if not years – of food supplies are the absolute minimum required to be safe in the event of a major cataclysm. More guns, more ammo, more bottled water, more canned food, more of this and that …

Bullshit. And here's why.


Point 2. Should I Stay Or Should I Go?

Unless you're lucky enough to happen to live very far away from any population center associated with whatever Bad Thing happens, there's really no type of disaster that would allow you to take advantage of the type of stockpile that conventional survivalism advocates. If you have a well-stocked retreat in the mountains of Wyoming – and you're there when disaster strikes – you're all set, at least until your canned supplies run out (more about this in future posts). But the fact is that most of us live in or around urban areas, and need to plan accordingly.

And that planning begins with the realization that there are really only two types of disaster scenarios that exist – Stay Home or Leave Home.

Stay Home disasters are generally short-term, and unexpected (like Katrina or 9/11). If you're caught in one, you'll want to hunker down in your house (if it isn't destroyed or uninhabitable, and you haven't been forcibly evacuated) for a few days, maybe a week or two at most. In that situation – and I've been through a devastating hurricane and its aftermath – it is definitely much nicer to have some food, water and a gun than not to. But, although folks may be scared, and some looting may occur, you're not likely to see mobs of desperate, starving people roaming the streets. Basically, if you have enough non-perishables and bottled water in your cupboard to allow you to keep your head down and wait until the authorities restore order, you'll probably be fine. In fact, without the many distractions of modern life, you may well find yourself chatting amiably with neighbors you didn't know you had (more about this in Point 3).

Leave Home disasters are generally long-term, and they might build gradually to crisis proportions (such as the Eight Year Drought experienced by the American Midwest during the Depression, or the Asian Flu pandemic of 1957), or they may be horrifyingly unexpected (like the Chernobyl nuclear reactor meltdown, or a hypothetical dirty-bomb attack on American soil). Some Leave Home disasters are short-term (like a raging fire, or an impending flood), but the common denominator of these disasters is that – as you might expect from the name – you will not be able to stay home! You will have to leave behind your thousands of dollars worth of carefully-hoarded supplies, your tons of ammunition, and anything else you can't carry. If you're lucky, you'll be able to use your car. Otherwise, you're going to be using people-power to get the hell out of town. And, if you have more than a few easily-hidden Krugerrands and personal firearms, you're going to feel kinda self-conscious staggering down the highway with a fancy tactical backpack full of boxed water, gold ingots, and ammunition for the AR-15 slung over your shoulder.

In summary, if you are in an urban or suburban area when an Event happens, and you can stay in your house, then things are not so bad that they won't soon be fixed. If you can NOT stay in your house, then you can't take most of your supplies with you anyway. My point is that, in either case, more than a few weeks worth of supplies is a waste of money and space. Counter-intuitive though it may seem to the American mentality, buying more stuff will not save you.

So what will?


Point 3. No Man Is An Island.

The typical survivalist mentality is one of rugged individualism to the nth degree. We are told that we will have to steel ourselves to the sound of our dying neighbors clawing at the door to our fortified basement, as we grimly ration SPAM and iodine tablets to our sobbing families. This is, in my humble opinion, bullshit.

First of all, what's the point of surviving if you can't live with yourself? I don't know about you, but I'm not too keen on the idea of letting people die at my doorstep if I can at all avoid it. If it's them or me, fine, but I'd prefer to find another option.

Secondly, as discussed in Point 2, unless you have a really sweet fallout shelter, and a nuclear attack happens at just the right distance from your home to not kill everybody but to cut you off from law and order for an extended period of time, you're very unlikely to be in a situation where you're hunkered down for months at a time. And, in that case, if history teaches us anything, it's that one man with a gun and a full pantry can not hold off the world for very long. In fact, once his location and state of his affluence is discovered, it'll be Custer's Last Stand all over again. You would do whatever is necessary to care for your loved ones, and so would they.

In any case, it's far more likely that you'll be facing one of the two scenarios I've described in Point 2: either you'll be dealing with a couple of weeks of post-disaster chaos, or you'll be hoofing it out of town in a long caravan of your fellow citizens. In either case, there's strength – and safety – in numbers. Chances are, the only people that are already going to be in organized groups are criminal gangs, so if you've got something you don't want to give up (like your wife or daughters), you're going to have to form – or join - a gang of your own. Whether you call it a Neighborhood Preparedness Association, a Citizens Brigade, a posse, a church group, or a Girl Scout troop is up to you. But in the absence of the technology that insulates us from each other, it'll be time to get friendly. In fact, don't be surprised if you like it! After a hurricane devastated my city, a few years ago, I met - and had nice conversations with – more of my neighbors than I ever had, in the previous five years I'd lived in that house. Interestingly, after the National Guard moved in, and the situation stabilized, we all went back to politely ignoring each other. However, it's been my experience that adversity brings out the best in most people. It's just the assholes you need to watch out for.



Point 4. I Survived. What Next?

So, since a Stay Home disaster is really not that big of a deal, let's consider the Leave Home experience. Imagine a worst-case scenario – the kind of thing that really gets those survivalist juices flowing. How about a coordinated, simultaneous nuclear attack on multiple US cities? This was the premise of the TV show “Jericho,” and what a terrific yarn that was! Now, that program took place in a small town that was fortunate enough to be largely untouched by the initial attacks, received only minimal fallout, and then more or less held things together thanks to good local leadership. Very nice. But what about the rest of us, who are statistically far more likely to be in population centers when TSHTF?

(Note: my reference to statistical probability also explains why you tend to find yourself in the longest line at the supermarket. In any given environment, if the majority of the population is in one place, the odds are that any given person will be in that place. You ARE any given person, so you're more likely to be there too.)

The short answer is that you need three things:

1) Somewhere to go.
2) A way to get there.
3) The ability to sustain yourself and your dependents for the indefinite future, once you're there.

Taken together, these three elements comprise the "Personal Exit Strategy" for which this blog is named. Interestingly, all three of these conditions are just about equally difficult to meet. In upcoming posts, I will attempt to outline a rational approach to all three problems.