Posted on 06/04/2014 7:09:33 PM PDT by Kartographer
Best way to survive is not being close to any problems. Like I describe in my survival course about my experience in Balkan war I missed my chance to bug out in time. I ended up surrounded by enemy army and trapped in city for a year without power and regular resources. Everyone fighting for the little what was left and being shot at by snipers and artillery from enemies did not make experience any better.
There are many reasons why people fail to bug out. Last week Jay (guy I run this website with) left Bangkok because of military coup. He first did not want to leave right away but then common sense won and he left. You can read about what happened in our forum. Nothing bad happened after he left, but it could have.
There can be many reasons like failure to recognize that S. gonna hit the fan, blocked streets on the way out of the city, problems convincing everyone to leave or just some special events you want to stay for.
(Excerpt) Read more at shtfschool.com ...
Preppers’ PING!!
It’s the normalcy bias.Most people will refuse to believe that their lives are about to be turned upside down in a day,or a few minutes.
I have a sister-in-law like that,if TSHF she’s going to put my brother in grave danger.
It is your choice you can prep or you can stand around on a bridge waiting for FEMA to bring you a bottle of water, a MRE, a warm blanket and a kiss for your boo-boo and maybe you can even get your picture as you stand there on the national news.
The world is dry tinder just awaiting the right spark.
So listen to what the bible says: A prudent man sees danger and takes refuge, but the simple keep going and suffer for it. NIV Proverbs 22:3
Selco covers this in this article many times people just can not except that a breakdown is occurring even as they watch it happening before their eyes. Why don’t they realize it? It’s caused by a condition called ‘Normalcy Bias’ a mental state people enter when facing a disaster.
It causes people to underestimate both the possibility of a disaster occurring and its possible effects. This often results in situations where people fail to adequately prepare for a disaster, and on a larger scale, the failure of governments to include the populace in its disaster preparations. The assumption that is made in the case of the normalcy bias is that since a disaster never has occurred then it never will occur. It also results in the inability of people to cope with a disaster once it occurs. People with a normalcy bias have difficulties reacting to something they have not experienced before. People also tend to interpret warnings in the most optimistic way possible, seizing on any ambiguities to infer a less serious situation.
A good article on ‘Normalcy Bias’ is on our own ChocChipCookies Blog The Survival Mom:
http://thesurvivalmom.com/2010/12/29/normalcy-bias/
You either prepare and stand on your own beholden to no one or you become dependent on others to provide your basic needs and become their ‘serf’. Me I don’t want to be beholden to anyone for providing what is needed for me and mine. I certainly don’t want to have to kiss some ‘gubberment’ third class bureaucratic to try and coax some help from them, I don’t want some ‘jack booted’ thug herding me in line and telling me where to stand, sit, eat or sleep. And last but not least I don’t want to be shut up in with a bunch of ‘zombies’ and have to worry about not only trying to get basic necessities but having to fight to keep what I manage to get.
Just getting started or an old hand you might find my Preparedness Manual helpful. You can download the manual at:
http://tomeaker.com/kart/Preparedness1j.pdf NOTE! THIS IS A FREE DOWNLOAD. I DO NOT MAKE ONE CENT OFF MY PREPAREDNESS MANUAL!
For those of you who haven’t started already it’s time to prepare almost past time maybe. You needed to be stocking up on food guns, ammo, basic household supplies like soap, papergoods, cleaning supplies, good sturdy clothes including extra socks, underwear and extra shoes and boots, cash (I myself have been putting up change for the past few years both for the metal content and the fact that using change places to make what purchases you can will move you down the the list of possible marks during shtf), tools, things you buy everyday start buying two and put one up.
As the LDS say “When the emergency is upon us the time for preparedness has past.”
Again I like to recomend FReeper’s ChocoChipCookie Blog The Survival Mom (Please Blog Police let this one slide!) Where you can get lots of useful information like:
http://thesurvivalmom.com/2011/11/20/8-morale-boosters-for-any-worst-case-scenario/
http://thesurvivalmom.com/2010/02/02/survival-priorities-the-rule-of-three/
And More
Also there is Ferfal’s Blog a survivor of Argentina’s first collapse:
And there is Selco’s Blog a Bosnian War survivor at:
“There is no greater disaster than to underestimate danger. Underestimation can be fatal.”
Helped send a lot of Jews to the ovens.
Mark for Later (just before it becomes obvious).
I remember Hurricane Rita. My (legal immigrant) wife couldn’t figure out why I was packing up and plotting routes out of Houston. She said that everything was fine, nobody but me was panicking...because her friends weren’t panicking and the weather was fine.
Then her friends started panicking, and so did she. It was pretty funny...but that is the normal bias. We ended actually staying until the mad rush died down, but still before the storm, as they were opening reverse-flow highway lanes at the end. So we made it out with no problem (8 hours to San Antonio, rather than 24+ hours to go 50 miles, like most people).
By the way, the wife is re-upping her foreign citizenship, so we can have a bug-out option, assuming we can make it out before things get really bad.
>> you can prep or you can stand around on a bridge waiting for FEMA
And if you try to cross the bridge the government will shoot you.
I would be lying if I said the move has not be without its share of trauma.
I’m not too far from Houston.
I stayed put for Rita and Ike.
No way I was getting into that traffic with Rita.
Friend of mine did. She made it less than 100 miles in 24 hours, closer to 75 miles.
Think of what it would be like if every major city in the US tried to evacuate at the same time.
With Rita people at least had somewhere to go.
Where would people in Houston area go if the Dallas area was also being evacuated?
Better to leave early and feel like a fool, I think, than to miss the opportunity and really be one.
Serious? There are tons of places. East Texas has plenty of places. But, that all depends on the ‘reason’ for the leaving.
Yeah, standing right next to "Sissy Boy" Shep Smith while he looks at the camera and yells "what the hell?"
Scouts Out! Cavalry Ho!
A lot of preppers have the basics in clothes, shelter, food+water, and firearms.
I have a buddy with a giant underground bunker (hardcore survivalist) who showed me that his new $995 FLIR is vastly better than my old, hand-cranked Soviet-era night-vision (still, something is better than nothing...even a $30 IR automobile “dashcam” offers *some* night-vision if your budget is extremely tight).
And I showed him my body armor.
FLIR and body armor offer advantages that you can buy today over what you will typically be expected to encounter during TSHTF.
You might want or need those advantages, or you might not. FLIR needs a solar charger or wind charger or generator to keep it charged. That might be more than you expect to be able to carry in a bug-out situation...and who wants to be left with *only* the bug-in option??
I’m also a fan of caltrops for mobile defense and orchards instead of crops that need re-planting every year. I’ve got apple trees and pear trees and masses of muscadine grape vines for my bug-in option. I’m working on growing kiwis, likewise.
A still for alcohol (medicinal, sanitary, trade, and recreational value) and a tin-can refinery for turning waste motor oil into gasoline.
If you can’t afford simple body armor to stuff inside the interior panels of your bug-out vehicle, then at least consider filling up the empty space with those thick Yellow Pages books that you would otherwise throw away.
Bonus points if you put a small grate over your exhaust (prevents car-jackers killing your motor with a potato up your tailpipe at a stop) and deep sea flotation bags under your bumpers for fjording on top of the water instead of trying to drive underneath.
Other than that, think clean and sanitary. Latrines far away from food and water. Use lime juice or soap or alcohol or iodine for sanitary hands and wounds. Boil your water after filtering through a white towel by soaking from a high placed jug to a low sitting clean container.
Learn CPR, cardio-thump, and how to set broken bones (pull first!). If a wound bleeds, then clean plus apply pressure to stop the bleeding. Tournacut as a last resort only.
Use raw honey daily to build up your immune system. Use sambucus (black elderberry) in the throat of anyone who has caught a virus to slow its reproduction.
Carry an N95 cheap $1 surgical mask in your wallet and in your various automobile glove boxes in case you see coughing outbreaks.
I would be lying if I said the move has not be without its share of trauma”
I'll be escaping Mexifornia sometime in the next few months. Hope everything holds together long enough for us to get out.
I don't think our move will have trauma. I think I'll be doing the snoopy dance at all the Americans speaking ENGLISH!! Imagine that, all of you in border states. It will be like a breathe of fresh air ;).
The trauma will be moving without jobs and interest rates artificially low and stock market overvalued. But since we want to be self-sufficient and eschew the materialism that has run rampant in the greedy golden state, no biggie.
If every major city in the US was evacuated there wouldn’t be enough places for the people to go.
You would have well over 100 million people on the roads all at the same time trying to find a place to stay.
I saw it with hurricane Rita. People evacuating the Houston area going through small towns were like locust.
Every drop of gas was gone and they were still coming. Once the gas is gone there is no more coming. It was taking people up to 24 hours to go just 50-75 miles. Then there was no more gas they were stuck there.
Food stores were pretty much empty and they were still coming.
Small towns don’t have the infrastructure to take in an additional 5000 to 10,000 people and they can’t go anywhere else because they don’t have the fuel to get there.
Just how many motel room do you think small East Texas towns have. I live in SE Texas and a lot of small E Texas towns have ZERO motel rooms.
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. Local sheriff’s offices in Texas had all the rural roads closed. Supposedly that won’t be done next time. The only time to bug out from a place like Houston is to move to a small rural town with woods for hunting, waterways for fishing, a climate that will support growing food and drinkable water way before anything happens.
Thanks for your local experience dealing with Houston. Out here in SA, there are various places to egress if needed[lol Austin]. But, we are fortunate not to have the population an density of Houston.
A friend of mine was trying to get home to Magnolia from Louisiana during Rita. A small town cop stopped him in some little town in east Texas and told him he’d arrest him if he moved his car. It was right in the middle of the storm. My friend said he sat there for a few hours then hauled ass. That’s what you’ll run into in the small east Texas towns. All cops love catastrophes. They believe it gives them unlimited power.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.