Considerations For SHTF Living & Bug Out Locations

Editor’s note: If you are not yet in the location you want to be if the S were to hit the fan, and are currently looking for either a home or raw land, then we recommend that you also read What Is The Best Place To Live In The United States To Prepare For The Coming Economic Collapse. The opinions expressed below are a supplement to that article.

If insulating yourself from a worst-case scenario is your primary concern then the following considerations, some of which were mentioned in the article above, could help you to better decide what to do next:

* Stay out of the cities: This is without a doubt the top concern when looking at the possibility of an economic collapse or other disaster scenario. You’re likely better off taking your chances in the middle of the wilderness than you are staying in an urban center. You’ll be dealing with packs of wild animals in both scenarios, but at least you would have a chance at acquiring some food, water and shelter.
Of course, we’re not recommending that you make the wilderness your bug-out plan, but rather, are pointing out that cities will be hit extremely hard, and millions of people will be in need of food, gas, clean water, medicine and other supplies. In an all-out collapse, similar to that described by James Rawles in his book Patriots, the grid would go down, transportation systems would come to a halt and urban areas, including suburban areas, would become war zones as individuals, gangs and clans would compete for the last remaining resources.
When you think major city and SHTF, think Hurricane Katrina, but on a regionalized scale affecting tens of millions of people.

* Don’t plan on living in the wild: While the wilderness may seem like a much better option than the inner city or suburbia, you’re not the only one who’s thought of it. Only experienced outdoors men should even consider living in the wild as a primary back-up for a collapse event.
Like the cities, it will only be a matter of time before competition for resources reaches a boiling point. Unless you’re one-hundred or more miles from any major human access points, you’re going to come across others who are looking for food, water, shelter, clothing and supplies.
Depending on where you are in the country, the elements may become just as dangerous as gangs in the city. Without the proper equipment, you’d probably have a better chance of surviving an inner city meltdown then you would freezing temperatures in the north / north-west part of the US.
If the wilderness is your plan, do you have a plan for staking and defending a piece of land for you and your family? And are you prepared to evade and/or deal with the golden horde that will eventually makes it way from the cities?

* How close is your support network? If you plan on relocating, are family members and like-minded friends within a tank of gas to your new location? While an SHTF location 400 miles outside of a major city is a great idea, if your plan is to have just you and your immediate family of 2 to 5 people defending the land you may run into problems. Regardless of how many guns or how much ammo you have, coordinated attacks by gangs or the possibility of being overrun by those who managed to make it to rural areas should be a consideration.
Also, looking at the location of your home town and the reality of coordinating with neighbors and city officials to stop non-residents from entering a particular area would be prudent. A support network on a familial and community level will be critical if you are near any population centers, even if your town is only made up of a few thousand people.
Primarily, your immediate team is of the most concern – keeping 24 hour watch and working the land will be critical, and you’re going to need more than just a few people to do this effectively.

* Is your new place to live capable of going off-grid for extended periods? We’re not just talking about electricity – but water and food as well. Electricity and gas power are important, but not as important as your immediate needs like food, water, shelter and defense. With the right people by your side, your defense capabilities should be significantly enhanced.
But if the grid goes down, how will you manage? Will there be fresh water available from a well or stream? What if someone dams your stream up river? Is there enough arable land to produce food – and enough water to keep it alive?
Remember, the food you need will not be just for you, but for the animals you might be raising. Do you have reserve feed for those animals, or do you plan on feeding them off the land?

* Location. Location. Location. The above article pointed out that coastal areas could be deadly – for a number of reasons. If you’ve read any historical doomsday theories, you’re likely familiar with the statistic that some 90% of the world’s population lives within a hundred miles of an ocean. Bad news if the earth ever decides to sneeze. That, and the fact that those areas become major targets in the event of war or wide-scale terrorism.
The east coast of the US, especially, would be dangerous simply because of the number of people. Even if you aren’t directly on the coast, golden horde migrations will overrun hundreds of thousands of acres of land during evacuations or panics.
The west coast would experience similar effects. From the south, as the article mentions, there is the real possibility of mass migrations and violence – it’s no secret that certain lines of thoughts suggest the southern US belongs to Mexico – so be prepared for an onslaught if you are anywhere within several hundred miles of the southern border.
During any such mass migrations, any easy to traverse land masses will be subject to disturbances and only those in remote or difficult to reach locations will go unscathed. If it even exists, the SHTF protection zones, in general, seem to be the central United States regions – this includes flat lands and mountainous regions, stretching from northern Texas up towards the Dakotas and west towards Idaho.
Parts of northern California, Oregon and Washington also qualify. There is, of course, the possibility that some natural events – Yellowstone comes to mind – could wreck havoc, but other than that, the right piece of property in these areas could be your best bet to survive a whole host of end of America scenarios.
This is not to say that areas outside of this zone are unsafe, as we are speaking more in regional generalities here. Ideally, you want to be out of the migration path of the horde, preferably on higher ground in the mountains, or a good distance from any major or high trafficked roadways if you’re living on flat land.
One rule of thumb would be to look at how far away a major city is from your location. If tens of thousands of people live within a gas tank of that location, you can expect unfriendly visitors.

* Hideaway, safe room, bunker. We may be getting into tin-foil prepping here, but we’ll mention it anyway. Mass migrations are going to be of critical concern in ANY collapse scenario. Even those in a fairly poor location can still have a back up plan. Our advice: If you have the ability to do so, do what the government plans on doing, and go underground.
Find property with a basement, or an old mine or cave, anything that is out of sight. If the horde comes your way this would become your new bug-out location. In such a scenario, one may need to disappear for an extended period, so quick-food considerations, water storage, and sanitation become important.
Plan on 15 – 30 days at a minimum if you’ve got to go “underground.” There’s no sense in fighting if you can get out of the way and let the horde Tsunami pass over you and eventually recede.

As preppers, we all want to say we’re prepared for anything, but a good prepper knows his or her limitations. It is impossible to plan for every potential scenario, but staying flexible and open-minded is going to be critical for survival. A willingness to admit, contemplate and act on weaknesses in your preparedness plan is of utmost importance.

There’s no slack in the system. The Green Revolution, our free market capitalist system, and our modern transport network mean we can keep ten or twenty times as many people comfortably fed as a hundred years ago. But if those modern miracles succumb to a civilizational apocalypse, we would have ten or twenty times as many hungry people as in past times of true famine. The results would be ugly. Cannibalism ugly.

This also implies that people thinking they can “live off the land” are in a dream world. Within six months after a true Mad Max catastrophe, every animal larger than a kangaroo rat within our borders would have been shot for food. Our ancestors killed off the passenger pigeon and almost killed all the buffalo with muzzle loaders, back when there were fewer than 100 million of them. Imagine what 300 million hungry people with 200 million modern weapons would do to the fauna of this continent.

"Hate to pop everyone’s bubble but these Mad Max type fantasies will never play out. Societies don’t just collapse into total chaos with every man for himself. Typically there is an out side force that precipitates the collapse of the ruling government and then moves into the vacuum left to take over. There probably won’t even be a short period of time where there is no real governing authority in charge. "

Thanks. We do appreciate you experts dropping by with your two cents worth.

I'm considering making small emergency 'stashes' of food in 6" PVC tubes and burying them underground, here and there. (When the crooked sheriff walks off with all my food I'll still have something left. Eh?

Guerrilla farming. I've already done some experimentation with planting root crops in random scattered spots in the woods. I harvested parsnips from the woods as soon as the ground thawed this spring.

We don't have local cops any more so it would be a stranger coming into town and facing off with angry locals.

Once it crashes, govts will no longer have the funds to maintain order. The best bet is the states, but the national govt will be impotent. It will be fairly anarchic, but way worse in the major city areas. They will leave the ruralies to fend for themselves while they try to contain the cities.

Rome wasn't built in a day, and it didn't fall in a day either. It only takes a company of soldiers backed by some militia to "Maintain Order". It takes a lot more than that to maintain a highway and electrical grid. When the USSR collapsed order was maintained, but the power system failed and it was impossible to travel from town to town. The collapse of the USSR and especially Yugoslavia (with the three way ethnic tensions similar to the US) are probably the examples to look at. Freedom is the first thing to go, order is the last. It turns out despotism is cheap and doesn't require a whole lot of brain power.

Anyone planning on “migrating” during a catastrophe better realized they’ll be persona non grata in most rural areas and small towns.

Yup. Look what happened after Katrina in some of those little towns on the edge of New Orleans. It wasn't pretty.

If you don't have connections in the place you're going, the best case scenario would be that you'd be permitted to pass through on your way to somewhere else. Worst case, you'd be treated as an invading army by a bunch of good ol' boys who know the terrain and have been hunting man-sized animals since they were little shavers.

PING!

It should be plain to see that we are heading (or being driven, depending on your view) toward a economic collapse. Congress doesn’t have the will to cut spending and there is no leadership coming from the White House.

The dollar is falling almost every day and prices are rising, gas is head for $5.00 a gallon and there is no way the economy can’t not bear any tax increases so with out badly need DEEP cuts in spending we are head straight for the cliff.

I see no way we can avoid a crash much like that of Argentina’s only MUCH bigger:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rH6_i8zuffs

You need to remember that as a armed society and one which contains a much more violent crimial and entitlement minded element our collapse is much more likely to be much more violent than Argentina’s was/is. I see evidence in the daily news that in many big ‘blue’ cities you can expect what I call “Pocket pogroms” will be carried out and if you aren’t ‘Amish’ you better be ready to get out and quick!

For more information on living in a collapse economy I strongly suggest that you read Ferfal’s blog SURVIVING IN ARGENTINA: http://ferfal.blogspot.com

Another good video to watch is: Economic Collapse - Why People Die in Crisis - Normalcy Bias Vs. Situational Awareness

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Quos1dxW7gI

For those who would like to get started preparing my Preparedness Manual is available (THANKS!to eaker)for a free down load at:

http://www.tomeaker.com/kart/preparedness1i.pdf

“Once it crashes, govts will no longer have the funds to maintain order.”

Economic activity never drops to zero, there is always somebody selling and somebody buying what they are selling. Oil and gas will not just magically disappear, the oil producing nations will always be interested in selling that oil to someone so there will be some energy available that can be used. Also, you had better believe that if people in cities start to get hungry that they will organize and go out and take (tax) what they need from the rural areas. You’ll be paid in worthless paper for you produce or packed off to jail if you refuse (they’ll leave enough for you to survive and plant next years crop so that they can take it again, or if really stupid do what they did in Zimbabwe and give it over to cronies and watch everyone starve to death).

The real danger is that you get some genocidal idiot in a leadership position who decides that there are too many people and starts systematically killing off the undesirables. There’s not much that you can do other than run to another country if that happens. Look at the Ukraine, Cambodia and any number of other places for those types of examples.

but they didn’t have near the gang issues and people were used to living with next to nothing and the population centers were nothing like what we have today.

Note I said USSR not Russia, that was specific. Chechnya, Georgia, and the "Stans" all come into play here. Russia, with food, oil, an army and some industry to sell off, will be like the sun belt. California, Arizona and other areas subject to the Reconquestia will be like Chechnya.

The USSR had gang problems, but the meanest, toughest gangs simply became the Russian Mob. Like i said order will be imposed, but it may be the order of the Gambino crime family. And some places that aren't worth conquering, like Detroit and Cleveland, will simply become Somalia on the Great Lakes.

That’s kind of my thinking, that the gov would have it’s hands full just trying to keep some sort of order in the cities and trying to protect high-value assets (power generation plants, command and control facilities, etc),

I doubt they’ll be out harassing J6P who lives on a couple acres 25 miles outside of town.

Around here the locals would resist en masse.

Its not a dislike of police or anything, just naturally independent people who are here because we like to be alone. If it came down to it we could easily block access by road and force anyone to slog in through the swamps, across the streams or across the lake by boat.

"Its not a dislike of police or anything, just naturally independent people who are here because we like to be alone. If it came down to it we could easily block access by road and force anyone to slog in through the swamps, across the streams or across the lake by boat."

Okay.

I expect the same here.

We've already discussed the road-blocks with some.

Just remember all the past small peaceful civilizations that grew up and thrived. Oh wait, none of those are around because they all got stomped on by someone bigger and more aggressive. Remember that when planning on going out to some small rural community on a small plot of land.

Except in this case we're talking about many small interconnected rural communities and urbanites who don't have the sense to do more than head down the highway to the next city.

“Except in this case we’re talking about many small interconnected rural communities and urbanites who don’t have the sense to do more than head down the highway to the next city.”

Think about Sherman’s march, those small interconnected rural communities really did a number on him didn’t they? Nope, sorry you’ll be mowed down like clover.

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