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Life After the Oil Crash
Deal With Reality or Reality Will Deal With You
Editor's Note: Part I of this series is archived here. -Matt
I just got back after dinner tonight. After hanging with the family for a bit, I decided to decipher some of the many pages of notes that I wrote, some under the effect of some really bad home brew. We had a great time. Brain is full.
So, listed below is my effort to consolidate what I learned in our discussion/debate into useful summarized points (there are many that I have from my notes). The rest of the text (my long winded, unreduced form) will commence and immediately follow this post. I have not spent very much time streamlining the proofing the text, so please bear with me and forgive my obvious inability to reduce hours of conversation into useful points.
These summary bullets, in no particular order, from the campside discussion of Tom, Bill, and Mike (mainly Tom):
1. Your mobile phone can lead anyone motivated to find You, your cache / equipment . If You want to leave a clear trail, map, and location, leave it on - make calls - check the weather. If not, turn it off before You leave if You bug out. When at your base camp (or home if Bug in), do be in a position to receive and routinely monitor radio, CB, and walkie talkies traffic. You may discover some visitors are unknowingly close, and they hopefully will be unaware of You. Start a log book of non-threatening transmissions received.
2. If you have the capabilities of transmitting (walkie talkies, mobiles, HAM, CB, etc.), and you need to make communications, do so as far away from your site (bug in or bug out) as practical. Protect your equipment, secure it away from anyone within your camp from freaking out and making transmission from camp vs. the agreed upon communications site.
3. Bug in / Bug out. Tom's ideal scenario is to cache food/supplies at your BOL, a small cache to travel with, and to cache a large supply, secretly at your current home/location (and hide it exceedingly well). By making the choice to bug in (if you do have other options) is accepting too many variables that could occur. By choosing to bug out, You are minimizing some fairly scary unknown variables. Bug out quietly, and early, and use ongoing intel and surveillance to wisely determine the return trip, if at all. In essence; Bug out then come home later, to your secret stash. If neighborhoods, rural farm homes, etc get raided, they are looking for food and anything useful that falls under survival and they will trash it, and move on, but will likely not burn it down (They most likely will not care about your leather sectional). When You come back, be prepared for a clean up, and to dig back into your hidden stash.
4. We must choose, with exceedingly careful and prudent thought, whom would be good assets to have at your BOL if at all. Community always works best, but a social collapse or the like, will freak people out - even people that are relatively safe at your BOL. Do not tell people of your BOL unless You want them, and whomever they bring hungry, and likely desperate, to show up.
5. Boredom: In this instant gratification, all noise - all the time environment we live in, most can not handle entertaining themselves, nor do they appreciate nor can they handle quiet. Make accommodations for reading, playing, games (chess is great for camping), etc. Tom described to us that they spent a significant amount of training in learning how to be still, and patience. Military History has shown that the desire to act (rather than waiting for the ideal trigger), has prematurely killed battalions and unnecessarily put innocent people in harms way. He said that control of the mind is a most difficult challenge, and can easily become a lifetime endeavor.
6. Awareness: There is something significant to be said about your party's awareness of the current and long-term danger. If sheltered to a large degree or unwilling to listen, we simply cannot duct-tape our family at the first sign of danger, and throw them kicking and screaming into the back of your pick-up, arrive at the BOL, and tell them that SHTF and we are staying put for 3-6 months, and hand them a MRE; You likely will quickly find them to be a liability, a non-stop nuisance/distraction, and it will become clear at this point that we have not done a good job at this important transition. What we/they need, is buy in and to frankly have an attitude of "Thank God, XXXX has planned, prepared, and thought about the survival of his family/friends, we are alive because of her/his forethought, he/she has earned our respect, and we will listen, and most importantly - we will do our part and help us survive". We may need this valuable decision later, against confusion. So, some exposure to what is really going on in the outside world, will be necessary. Including them on Intel should help. If not considered, they may learn the hard way that humans are quite a dangerous creation.
7. Prepare for an absolute SHTF. Tom's view was just to go head and plan for the absolute worst scenario that could occur that provides a conclusion that we still have a chance at survival. Start with 'need', and work down this prioritized list until You get to the 'want'. He said he planned for this, not because he believes it is eminent (I do), but because too many get caught up in wasted energy and expense of the 100's of mild to moderate scenarios that don't involve real, terrifying danger/threat to life. If we plan for the worst, most of the mild and moderate scenarios (which are in essence noise) are easily covered with only slight modification, by default. Also, make a commitment in your brain that all of your preparedness may be for naught - the time and resources you have expended - and get over it. Make some effort to ensure that the equipment / items that You procure/build/grow can hopefully be used in everyday life now, or in the future (i.e. if you already have 20 AK's and four twin .50 cals, with 50k rounds in ammo cached, shouldn't you really look past the AK aisle at the gun store and buy that .308 with the Leopold 6*9 that You have always wanted to go hunting?).
8. One of the most difficult challenges for a human being to overcome, is training / preparing for a very important event that in our minds, has no known time of commencement - with the conceivable possibility of never.
9. Tom's equipment and general bug out plan (very condensed): He said that the first thing he did was to locate land to retreat too. He ran an ad in the paper to lease some land for hunting / camping - min-100 acres, for three years with the option to renew for 2 more terms of three years. He's got ~60 acres, close to the duck river, heavily wooded for three years, with the option of 2 more terms. Cost is $1200 / yr. They drew up a simple term sheet that provided that he did indeed have a lease. He thinks that our economy is coming down sometime within the next 5 yrs, but most likely between Fall 2010 and Summer 2011. He located his site close to the middle, and has over the last year or so prepared his site. An important feature of his site, is that he can drive in about half-way. He has stored some food supplies, but mostly equipment, fuel, some ammo, and a few weapons. The site is roughly 40 miles from his current home, is rural, with only 3-4 neighbors - the closest being about 5 miles away from the BOL.
He described his biggest prize and the most enjoyable hobby was the design and retrofitting of his trailer. He said the most useful tool around his home is his 5*10 foot trailer. It came with the home, and when he realized how useful it was, he sold the family on converting it to a camping trailer, and he bought another one to use for hauling trash, wood, etc. He has built this trailer to house 10 tanks of propane (bbq grill size), in which he bought ~one tank a month for about a year. It also contains all of the camp chairs, tents, heavy food staples (cans of food, rice, beens, etc - about 20 -5 gallon buckets.) tools, axes, a communications compartment with his HAM radio, walkies, laptop, a small solar panel, an ammo/gun compartment, a fishing compartment with multiple trotter(?) lines, 2-100 gallon tanks of water (only one filled in bug out), with a roof to erect for the trailer that collects the rainwater, filters it with modified filters he bought at Lowes, and it fills these tanks (he said that the roof dimensions were 15 by 6 (tin) and for every one inch of rain, he collects roughly 50 gallons of water. We average in these parts about 5 inches rain / month, which provides ~ 250 gallons/month (about 1/3 of his family's needs). Even though it is filtered, he still boils the water for drinking if he has to pull from the tanks. He designed a crude outdoor shower, whose flow is generated by an old hand-crank fuel pump. The same pump, can be used (switch a PVC valve) to wash dishes in the make shift kitchen/study table that is erected after it is located. Lastly, once the trailer has been located, he uses a jack to removes the tires, and set it on blocks.
He also keeps ~ 100 gallons of diesel rotated in/out of his trucks bed tank, with enough stabil to keep the diesel good, for he says 12 to 18 months. All of his vehicles are diesel, and the small 6500w generator is diesel (got it at Northern Supply).
He has taken the trailer out camping with family a few times. They love it, and it has given him a chance to wring out some bugs and determine new needs / useless items. When it is at home, he keeps it covered and stored in a shed in the rear of his house. The only thing it lacks, in an emergency bug out, is the food-stuffs which he keeps in a room close to the garage in his home (temp controlled). He says it will take roughly an hour or so to load this, and if they have the time, he can be fully loaded - and out the door in 3 hrs. If things appear dicey, he is going to preload.
If they have to make the trip and bug out, he is planning on doing this (leaving the home) at about 4am. Before leaving, he will call the switchboard and take two personal days from work. He can be at the site in an hour, plans on setting up the campsite by 7-8am, and monitor news to determine the state of the emergency. If it appears to be a false alarm, he will stay and camp for a couple of days and monitor the news. If it is not a false alarm, he is going to drive to a restaurant 5 miles down the road that has wifi, and send his pre-drafted emails, make phone calls, cache the most recent financial and news data, check and post on his blogs, and get the hunker down underway.
Great survival and disaster preparedness books:
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Great survival and disaster preparedness books:
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