Prepping and common mistakes.

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savageagle

HamRadio/Office of Emergency Services/Fire-EMT-SAR
Joined
Nov 13, 2012
Messages
469
Reaction score
528
Location
Squaw Valley, California, USA, EARTH
1. Obsessing About Doomsday
If a nuclear strike is your primary concern where you live, move. With that exception, the first step in preparing for emergencies is not to quit your job, sell the house, and move to Utah. The first thing you need to do is prepare for likely emergencies. It does you no good to sell the house and move into an off-grid, radiation-shielded bunker if you don’t even know how much food to store in it, how to filter your water, or how to escape your rat hole if it’s ever compromised. I’m not saying you’ll never need a fallout shelter; I’m saying power outages happen every year and sometimes last several days or weeks, and nuclear attacks are a little more rare.

Assess the risks in your area and be ready for them. The most common risk is interruption of public utilities by any number of natural causes, so prepare to eat, drink, shelter yourself, and administer first aid for at least two weeks before you start digging that fallout shelter.

2. Relying on Gadgets Instead of Skills
Tools are useful, but only if you know how to use them. I do product reviews, so I have a lot of gear lying around, most of which adds some measure of convenience, but very little of it is truly essential. Skills, on the other hand, are definitely essential. For example, I have several types of compact camp stoves that use available fuels like twigs and pine cones to boil a quart or so of water in just a few minutes. Are they handy? You bet. But before you buy any of them, know how to do without them, and spend that money getting your food and water stock up to par.

As another example, I have water bottles with an integrated filter so I can dip water out of a roadside ditch and safely drink it. But before I ever owned one of those, I knew how to make a filter with moss, grass, a shirt sleeve, and homemade charcoal.

3. Obsessing About “Bugging Out”
If you live in the urban jungle and a hurricane or Nor’Easter is bearing down, you might be wise to leave well ahead of time. But what if you can’t? What if your family is scattered around town, and by the time they all get home the escape routes are hopelessly snarled? You can’t risk running out of gas on the highway, so you decide you’re better off remaining at the house. If that’s the case, it had better be ready for you to “bug in.”

4. Not Having an Evacuation Plan
This is the flip side of the previous point — you might live in a relatively secure rural location and your primary strategy is to hunker down in the event of some sort of disaster. You’re ready to bug in until the second coming. That’s great, but what if you have to leave? What if you’re overrun with mobs from the city? What if your place burns? What if it’s confiscated? Your primary location might be compromised any number of ways, so you need a contingency plan for that. It might be a hunting cabin in the next state, or the “old home place” your grandparents passed down, or maybe an arrangement with a friend or family member where you mutually serve each other as a secondary safe retreat. Whatever the case, you need someplace to go and some way to get there, all of which are worked out in advance. Don’t try to set this up while the hurricane is bearing down.

5. Putting All Your Eggs in One Basket
The previous point illustrates a principle that should apply in all aspects of preparation — contingency planning. You need plan A and plan B. Don’t store all your food in one room — it might burn, get flooded, or get stolen. Same with your guns, water, money, clothes, tools…. Don’t plan just one evacuation route. Don’t have just one flashlight. Make sure your car has a spare tire, a small gas can, and a siphon hose.

Now apply this principle to everything you do by way of emergency preparation.

6. Not Having a Support and Communications Network
This comes from yet another obsession; this one about OPSEC, or Operational Security, which is being extremely secretive about your emergency planning. By all means, be wise about sharing your plans, but no man is an island — you need a support and communications network. Our grandparents called this network “community,” and the people who constituted it were known as “neighbors,” but people hardly know their neighbors anymore. Everybody’s watching TV or playing Black Ops (I can’t tell you how much goofy advice I get from people who’ve only ever handled a First Person Shooter gun). Dependency on the state destroys community (and society in general); we need to rebuild community again.

But back to the point: Yes, you need to be smart about how much and whom you tell, but when unreliable government services go down (they’re always the first thing to go), your neighbors will suddenly be very valuable again — unless they didn’t prepare, in which case they could suddenly become your most immediate threat.

The network is not completely incompatible with operational security. Everybody knows I prep, and a good many people know some of my stock locations, but almost no one knows even half of them, or what is there. So go ahead, develop mutually beneficial relationships and help everyone get ready. When your neighbor preps, it doesn’t just help him; it helps you too. And vice versa.

7. Failing to Practice
Would you build a car and sell it without test-driving it? No. Would you serve a soup without tasting it? Of course not. So don’t put your family at the mercy of an emergency plan that has never seen a drill. The day your house burns is not the day to learn how to escape a burning house; the day you have to evacuate is not the day to chart your route; and the day the blizzard strikes is not the day to stock up on food and water.

And Here Are a Few More Typical Prepper Mistakes
  1. Failing to Make Preparation a Part of Everyday Routine. It’s easy to integrate basic readiness into your everyday routine. Buy meat by the case and trim it yourself, and use the trimmings somehow. Ditch the lighter fluid and figure out some other way to light that charcoal grill. In fact, make your own charcoal. Check the first aid kit in your car. Change the spare tire, just for practice. Learn a new knot. Plant a garden and tend it… then harvest it! Those skills and the mindset undergirding them have been lost, but you can regain them and teach them to the next generation.
  2. Leaving Your EDC Behind. It’s called an “everyday carry” kit because you’re supposed to carry it everyday. If it’s too bulky and inconvenient, trim it back or alter your carry method. Consider my recommended “pocket EDC” method.
  3. Obsession With Prepping. Let’s be clear; a healthy, happy family is more important than extending your food stock another month. Everything in the family begins with the husband-wife relationship. Make sure that’s solid above all else, and everything else will fall into place.
Conclusion
Our grandparents didn’t have a name for “prepping;” they just called it “living.” My grandparents never ate a chicken they hadn’t raised themselves. They had a garden and “put up” food every year. They mended clothes. They made scarves out of worn out sweaters.

It’s not practical to completely alter your way of life and return to the way your grandparents lived (back then, 90% of the population was rural; now 90% is urban or suburban). But you don’t have to do that in order to be ready for emergencies. The only thing that has to change fundamentally is this: You need to regain a certain degree of self-reliance and reliance on reliable resources. Your family can’t count on FEMA; they have to count on you. Don’t disappoint them.

I hope this is useful to someone.
A couple of things I wanted to add. Over the years i have purchased many gadgets and I read the users manuals. What do you do after you have become familiar with the gadget? Myself, i have a huge box of users manuals and have saved every one. I don't use the gadget enough to feel confident I can use it properly when the need arises so i keep them. I have in the last 3 months geared up with everything i feel I will need when i have to bug out or do some recon. I mean everything from a tactical vest full to the teeth, things attached and my duty belt full as well. It's a drill of sorts. Every time I explore a different route from my door as if I was on the run from someone. where I live 25% is flat so I get the needed workout too. I do this at night too and I utilize everything I would use if it were the real thing. I've even had a passing car call 911 on me because i'm carrying a hand gun and long rifle or my shotgun. I have never broken the law and thankfully sheriffs I encounter are understanding and good with what i'm doing. I spend from 1-4 hours mapping out a route and save everyone for evaluation on ease of travel and speed making sure I add steep inclines, rocks, creeks, areas with heavy vegitation and anything that would help with determining the best route for any route I might need to take. I will not know what direction i have to go in which depends on who's coming and from what direction. when i'm done I want at least 3 routes I can count on and many routes have been revised on my map and some routes have been physically changed with the help of a pick and shovel. I have included some safe zones where I know I could stay a bit as long as nobody is right on my tail and some of those include buried items I could not carry but would only benefit me while i'm idle at that spot. I feel that the success using any of the gadgets i have depends on the knowledge i have in my head. Training and running through drills with your whole family is the best thing you can do to be prepared. Give out responsibilities to your family and go through drills so everyone can get used to where things are and what to do with them.
As stated in the article somewhere, neighbors are valuable and here we have a community watch program and we all know and trust each other. It's a tight group as we are surrounded by mountains on all sides. It's a valley about 3/4 miles by 1 mile and everyone is situated in the hills. The valley floor is where everyone runs cattle. I'm known as the "night guy" because of all the night optics visible when i'm active. i'm a light nut with everything from a small flashlight to a tower mounted rotatable helicopter light. It lights up everything in the valley and beyond.
I valued time at community meetings where I got to meet everyone and they got to meet me and most important, to find out what everyone is about and letting others know that I care about my neighbors and community. These neighbors are the ones that we can count on and NOT FEMA. sharing our ideas and our concerns about disasters and dangers we may be faced with in the near future has been the most valuable thing as a community we could have ever done and it has opened the doors to cooperation in working together as a community with one goal in mind. Survival!
Your community and the neighbors in it should NOT be over looked. They could be the resource that could save your life.
 
1. Obsessing About Doomsday
If a nuclear strike is your primary concern where you live, move. With that exception, the first step in preparing for emergencies is not to quit your job, sell the house, and move to Utah. The first thing you need to do is prepare for likely emergencies. It does you no good to sell the house and move into an off-grid, radiation-shielded bunker if you don’t even know how much food to store in it, how to filter your water, or how to escape your rat hole if it’s ever compromised. I’m not saying you’ll never need a fallout shelter; I’m saying power outages happen every year and sometimes last several days or weeks, and nuclear attacks are a little more rare.

Assess the risks in your area and be ready for them. The most common risk is interruption of public utilities by any number of natural causes, so prepare to eat, drink, shelter yourself, and administer first aid for at least two weeks before you start digging that fallout shelter.

2. Relying on Gadgets Instead of Skills
Tools are useful, but only if you know how to use them. I do product reviews, so I have a lot of gear lying around, most of which adds some measure of convenience, but very little of it is truly essential. Skills, on the other hand, are definitely essential. For example, I have several types of compact camp stoves that use available fuels like twigs and pine cones to boil a quart or so of water in just a few minutes. Are they handy? You bet. But before you buy any of them, know how to do without them, and spend that money getting your food and water stock up to par.

As another example, I have water bottles with an integrated filter so I can dip water out of a roadside ditch and safely drink it. But before I ever owned one of those, I knew how to make a filter with moss, grass, a shirt sleeve, and homemade charcoal.

3. Obsessing About “Bugging Out”
If you live in the urban jungle and a hurricane or Nor’Easter is bearing down, you might be wise to leave well ahead of time. But what if you can’t? What if your family is scattered around town, and by the time they all get home the escape routes are hopelessly snarled? You can’t risk running out of gas on the highway, so you decide you’re better off remaining at the house. If that’s the case, it had better be ready for you to “bug in.”

4. Not Having an Evacuation Plan
This is the flip side of the previous point — you might live in a relatively secure rural location and your primary strategy is to hunker down in the event of some sort of disaster. You’re ready to bug in until the second coming. That’s great, but what if you have to leave? What if you’re overrun with mobs from the city? What if your place burns? What if it’s confiscated? Your primary location might be compromised any number of ways, so you need a contingency plan for that. It might be a hunting cabin in the next state, or the “old home place” your grandparents passed down, or maybe an arrangement with a friend or family member where you mutually serve each other as a secondary safe retreat. Whatever the case, you need someplace to go and some way to get there, all of which are worked out in advance. Don’t try to set this up while the hurricane is bearing down.

5. Putting All Your Eggs in One Basket
The previous point illustrates a principle that should apply in all aspects of preparation — contingency planning. You need plan A and plan B. Don’t store all your food in one room — it might burn, get flooded, or get stolen. Same with your guns, water, money, clothes, tools…. Don’t plan just one evacuation route. Don’t have just one flashlight. Make sure your car has a spare tire, a small gas can, and a siphon hose.

Now apply this principle to everything you do by way of emergency preparation.

6. Not Having a Support and Communications Network
This comes from yet another obsession; this one about OPSEC, or Operational Security, which is being extremely secretive about your emergency planning. By all means, be wise about sharing your plans, but no man is an island — you need a support and communications network. Our grandparents called this network “community,” and the people who constituted it were known as “neighbors,” but people hardly know their neighbors anymore. Everybody’s watching TV or playing Black Ops (I can’t tell you how much goofy advice I get from people who’ve only ever handled a First Person Shooter gun). Dependency on the state destroys community (and society in general); we need to rebuild community again.

But back to the point: Yes, you need to be smart about how much and whom you tell, but when unreliable government services go down (they’re always the first thing to go), your neighbors will suddenly be very valuable again — unless they didn’t prepare, in which case they could suddenly become your most immediate threat.

The network is not completely incompatible with operational security. Everybody knows I prep, and a good many people know some of my stock locations, but almost no one knows even half of them, or what is there. So go ahead, develop mutually beneficial relationships and help everyone get ready. When your neighbor preps, it doesn’t just help him; it helps you too. And vice versa.

7. Failing to Practice
Would you build a car and sell it without test-driving it? No. Would you serve a soup without tasting it? Of course not. So don’t put your family at the mercy of an emergency plan that has never seen a drill. The day your house burns is not the day to learn how to escape a burning house; the day you have to evacuate is not the day to chart your route; and the day the blizzard strikes is not the day to stock up on food and water.

And Here Are a Few More Typical Prepper Mistakes
  1. Failing to Make Preparation a Part of Everyday Routine. It’s easy to integrate basic readiness into your everyday routine. Buy meat by the case and trim it yourself, and use the trimmings somehow. Ditch the lighter fluid and figure out some other way to light that charcoal grill. In fact, make your own charcoal. Check the first aid kit in your car. Change the spare tire, just for practice. Learn a new knot. Plant a garden and tend it… then harvest it! Those skills and the mindset undergirding them have been lost, but you can regain them and teach them to the next generation.
  2. Leaving Your EDC Behind. It’s called an “everyday carry” kit because you’re supposed to carry it everyday. If it’s too bulky and inconvenient, trim it back or alter your carry method. Consider my recommended “pocket EDC” method.
  3. Obsession With Prepping. Let’s be clear; a healthy, happy family is more important than extending your food stock another month. Everything in the family begins with the husband-wife relationship. Make sure that’s solid above all else, and everything else will fall into place.
Conclusion
Our grandparents didn’t have a name for “prepping;” they just called it “living.” My grandparents never ate a chicken they hadn’t raised themselves. They had a garden and “put up” food every year. They mended clothes. They made scarves out of worn out sweaters.

It’s not practical to completely alter your way of life and return to the way your grandparents lived (back then, 90% of the population was rural; now 90% is urban or suburban). But you don’t have to do that in order to be ready for emergencies. The only thing that has to change fundamentally is this: You need to regain a certain degree of self-reliance and reliance on reliable resources. Your family can’t count on FEMA; they have to count on you. Don’t disappoint them.

I hope this is useful to someone.
A couple of things I wanted to add. Over the years i have purchased many gadgets and I read the users manuals. What do you do after you have become familiar with the gadget? Myself, i have a huge box of users manuals and have saved every one. I don't use the gadget enough to feel confident I can use it properly when the need arises so i keep them. I have in the last 3 months geared up with everything i feel I will need when i have to bug out or do some recon. I mean everything from a tactical vest full to the teeth, things attached and my duty belt full as well. It's a drill of sorts. Every time I explore a different route from my door as if I was on the run from someone. where I live 25% is flat so I get the needed workout too. I do this at night too and I utilize everything I would use if it were the real thing. I've even had a passing car call 911 on me because i'm carrying a hand gun and long rifle or my shotgun. I have never broken the law and thankfully sheriffs I encounter are understanding and good with what i'm doing. I spend from 1-4 hours mapping out a route and save everyone for evaluation on ease of travel and speed making sure I add steep inclines, rocks, creeks, areas with heavy vegitation and anything that would help with determining the best route for any route I might need to take. I will not know what direction i have to go in which depends on who's coming and from what direction. when i'm done I want at least 3 routes I can count on and many routes have been revised on my map and some routes have been physically changed with the help of a pick and shovel. I have included some safe zones where I know I could stay a bit as long as nobody is right on my tail and some of those include buried items I could not carry but would only benefit me while i'm idle at that spot. I feel that the success using any of the gadgets i have depends on the knowledge i have in my head. Training and running through drills with your whole family is the best thing you can do to be prepared. Give out responsibilities to your family and go through drills so everyone can get used to where things are and what to do with them.
As stated in the article somewhere, neighbors are valuable and here we have a community watch program and we all know and trust each other. It's a tight group as we are surrounded by mountains on all sides. It's a valley about 3/4 miles by 1 mile and everyone is situated in the hills. The valley floor is where everyone runs cattle. I'm known as the "night guy" because of all the night optics visible when i'm active. i'm a light nut with everything from a small flashlight to a tower mounted rotatable helicopter light. It lights up everything in the valley and beyond.
I valued time at community meetings where I got to meet everyone and they got to meet me and most important, to find out what everyone is about and letting others know that I care about my neighbors and community. These neighbors are the ones that we can count on and NOT FEMA. sharing our ideas and our concerns about disasters and dangers we may be faced with in the near future has been the most valuable thing as a community we could have ever done and it has opened the doors to cooperation in working together as a community with one goal in mind. Survival!
Your community and the neighbors in it should NOT be over looked. They could be the resource that could save your life.
Well thought out and good advice on all accounts here.
 
This is all good advise. I am going to chime in on #4 though. Have an evacuation route in place. For ones that have never had to evacuate for a hurricane, here in TX I'm sure other states too, we have evacuation routes already in place. If you plan on going to a specific area, leave early, before roadblocks are put up and you can only go in the direction they tell you to go. If you find yourself in one of these lines, pull over to somewhere in the next town. Tell a local where you need to go and they can probably tell you a back road. I was caught up in one of these trying to get to an uncles house years ago, but was only able to go the way towards Lufkin. . . which is north and east of where I needed to go. Pulled over to a school that town opened for bathroom breaks. Ladies there could tell I was a little upset. . . told them what was up and they told me an alternative. When I pulled out, I went the opposite direction of all the sheeple and was able to get to where I was going finally. So young with a baby and four dogs packed in that vehicle, not to mention the getting back into the area after the hurricane had passed. . . haven't left since. This is what mandatory evacuations are like. If you can hunker down, I would.

Totally agree with the practising part, but take it a step further. Learn the how tos of everything you may need to do after a situation and do it now. Don't wait till after the fact. If you think you need to grow your food, put in a garden and learn how to preserve it to last. If you think fuel will be an issue, learn how to make biofuel and how to convert what you have. Or even the basic turning dirty water into drinkable water and starting a fire using multiple methods. One thing we need to do in our family, is learn what the other does. I'll admit, I have no clue on how to put an engine back together or starting a fire with the bow method and my hunny has no clue on how to garden, make cheese, soap or can. We need to make the time to help each other more often in these areas so we are at least familiar with them. You never know when the other is not around.

Just my two cents.
 
Just reading some older posts, this one made me laugh.

The original post is great! But the wife and I are literally quitting our jobs, selling the house (condo), and moving to Utah! Hahaha

The first don't, we have it covered.
 
Just to add, I'd recommend every prepper really research the whole nuclear bit. Chances are, you're working with knowledge drilled into our heads during the cold war, by Hollywood, and it is SO far from the truth and reality.

Of course, it's terrifying, but it is also MUCH more survivable than you may think, especially from a prepper standpoint. I'm not saying make it a major drive or anything, but there are some supplemental preps that can really make even this event much more survivable, so my advice is to really educate yourself on the current weapons in use, realistic survival advice, etc.
 

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