Half an hour can last forever

Thirty minutes. That is how long the shooter in DC had to kill before police caught up with him. It was seven minutes before the first cops even entered the building. This is not a criticism of police, it's just that they cannot be everywhere. I feel like they did what they could, and did it well. You are responsible for protecting yourself and your loved ones. Own a gun, and learn how to use it. Thirty minutes can be the rest of your life.

Communications

A proper survival plan includes things like water, food, and light. One important thing that should be a part of your plan is communications. During the recent events in Boston, cellular communications were inoperable for hours. There is some question as to whether they were turned off by authorities, or if the heavy traffic overloaded the system, but the end result was the same: no phone communications were happening throughout most of the Boston area.
I have portable, handheld radios in the 2 meter band. There are 9 repeaters that are within 40 miles of my house, and each of these can be reached by the radios that I have on hand. This allows me to communicate across the majority of Central Florida with a large level of redundancy. In the event that all of those repeaters are non functional, we can go direct radio to radio on any one of hundreds of frequencies. These radios can be had for as little as $40.
If hundreds of available frequencies isn't enough, you can get a dual band radio that also works in the 70 cm band. That band is less crowded than the 2m band, and adds thousands of available channels to the possibilities.
Set up a communications plan: "If anything happens, we will contact each other on the 146.22MHz repeater at the top of the hour, and on the 145.52MHz repeater at the bottom of the hour. If both repeaters are down, we will try 433.62 MHz., additionally, we will monitor 146.52 MHz."

 The HAM license costs just $15, and no morse code test is required. Then you don't have to worry about the cell phone repeaters.

Flashlight

Flashlight that takes whatever you give it, that will run on almost any battery you've got on hand.. AAA, AA, C, or D-sized batteries can all be accommodated at the same time.

Ammo standardization and Paqlites

I have been working on a plan for TEOTWAWKI as a part of my continuing prepping hobby. Of course, there are many things that we need to consider: Communications, food, water, transportation, etc. Bug out kits.

In the area of defense, we have selected the 9mm cartridge as the defense round of choice. Although there are handguns in the house that are capable of firing all of the popular pistol ammunition: 9mm, .357Sig, .40S&W, .45ACP, we felt that the 9mm was best for a number of reasons: it is light to carry spare ammo, recoil is manageable, and it is available in firearms that everyone in the family will carry. The round is also widely available. This doesn't mean that I will be selling the other guns, but this is the round that I will plan our BOBs around, with each BOB containing a 20 round box of 115 grain +P.

I have selected the M&P40 as my personal handgun, and have fitted it with a 9mm conversion barrel from KKM. That gives me the capability of .40S&W, .357Sig, and 9mm in one handgun, with only a quick barrel change.

Also, for room and area lighting, we have elected to go with the UVPaqLite. It needs no batteries, doesn't break, and provides excellent light for dark-adjusted eyes. Take a look, it is a good product for a reasonable price. It is easier to cart this around than a pile of batteries.

EMP and prepping

In a comment to yesterday's post, Robert Hewes asks if my radios are stored in a faraday cage. I assume that he is asking the question because he has heard of EMP, or electromagnetic pulse, and its ability to damage solid state electronics. I will explain why this should not be a concern for most preppers.
EMP works by exposing semiconductor components to voltages high enough to break down the semicondictor. There is nothing magic about EMP, it is simply a powerful radio wave in the microwave spectrum (4-20 GHz) with a wavelength between 1 and 5 centimeters. This pulse is subject to the same physical laws as any other form of electromagnetic energy. The two that you have to keep in mind are the fact that radio waves travel in straight lines, and that their energy dissipates according to the inverse square law.
EM energy traveling in a straight line prevents it from damaging anything beyond the horizon, and the inverse square laws say that energy drops off that the inverse square of the distance. An EM weapon capable of damaging electronics at half a mile would require 250 times as much energy at 60 miles.
To extend the reach of an EM weapon, you must either set it off relatively high in the atmosphere, thus extending the horizon, and you must greatly increase the power. Weapons that cause long range EM effects to semiconductors over great distances require a lot of energy. This is why nuclear weapons produce the powerful pulses that reach long distances, but not many others.
Couple that with the fact that radio equipment is hardened to withstand certain amounts of EM, due to their nature (they are built to receive EM, after all, they ARE radios, it's kind of what they do), and the problem becomes even more difficult.
In short, I am not worried about it. There are many things that I can prep for, and EMP is not on the radar.

Preparation and communications

As anyone who is a regular reader of this blog should know, I am a prepper, and have been for about eight years. It was being without power and fuel for ten days after Hurricane Charley (August 2004) first opened my eyes. Being a prepper doesn't mean that we are sitting around preparing for the end of the world, although if you are truly ready for that, you are ready for anything less than that.

One of the lessons that I learned during Hurricane Charley was the need for communications. Cell service was out for weeks. With no way to reach the outside world or communicate with family members was a severe handicap. So I added getting a HAM license as a step in my preparedness campaign. It was a simple test, and a $10 fee for the license, and you don't even need to know Morse code. In exchange, I got a license that allows me to operate radios that have enough reach for most disaster communications.

The radios I am using are mobile and portable FM units in the 2 meter and 70 cm band. These are useful for communications for a large area.  I have used the FT 7900 that I is mounted in my truck to talk to repeaters that are up to 50 miles away. I can routinely reach a repeater that is over 30 miles from my house. This allows me to talk to a person in Melbourne while I am sitting in my vehicle in Lakeland, over 60 miles away. If the repeater is out of the disaster area and has an active internet connection, I can use Echolink to talk to any radio operator in the world. Telephone patches are also available.

When talking directly to other radios without the use of a repeater, I regularly communicate with friends who are 8 or ten miles away with the vehicle mounted set. I'm sure I can reach farther, but we usually use repeaters for that.

I can hear you now: "So what? Those cheap radios at WalMart claim that they are able to reach 30 miles or more." To that, I say BULLSHIT. You are lucky to reach a mile with those things.

HAM radio is the way to go, if you are serious about disaster communications and about prepping. Give it a look, it is well worth it. A 2 meter mobile radio can be had for about $200 new, and the ability to reach the outside world and call for help can be priceless.

When will this be available here?

So DuPont is selling a product called "Armura." It is a kit that can be installed on certain cars that resists handgun rounds up to .38 special. This appears to be roughly equivalent to NIJ level I body armor. This is accomplished by adding Kevlar panels to the interior of the body panels, and by changing out the glass. The kit adds roughly 200 pounds to the weight of the vehicle, which would likely have little, if any, effect on gas mileage. It costs about $12,000 to up armor a vehicle with this kit. The kit is available for the: Toyota Corolla, GM Vectra (same chassis as the Buick LaCrosse or Chevy Malibu), Honda Civic, Mitsubishi TR4 (similar to the Montero), Hyundai Tucson, Honda Fit, GM Agile, Kia Soul, Kia Sportage, Mitsubishi ASX, and the GM Cruze.

It makes me wonder if there would be a market for this in the United States. I think if a company get the armor up to a IIA rating, expand vehicle availability, and could keep the cost where it is,there would be a brisk number of sales to be made. Preppers would love it.

Responsibility

As a paramedic who worked in a 911 based EMS system for 22 years, I know about delay. The number of times when I was dispatched to an emergency after a lengthy delay were numerous, I would say that a delay of 5 minutes or more was frequent, and happened at least once out of every twenty calls. The worst such case was an auto accident where a police officer requested our response. We were not dispatched to the incident for 45 minutes. The dispatcher said that she had opened the dispatch window on her computer, and then got busy with another task, and forgot to ensure that we had actually been dispatched.

So it doesn't surprise me that there was an 8 minute delay between the 911 calls and the dispatch of emergency workers in this case. Then, it took police officers an additional 6 minutes to arrive. From the call to the arrival of the first responder was 14 minutes. Let's say, for our purposes here, that this was where you and your family were enjoying some activity, and you were being faced with an attacker trying to kill you. He is armed with a machete, or a gun, or is setting your home on fire with a can of gasoline and a match. How much pain and destruction can he accomplish in 14 minutes?

The sheriff says that if they had properly recognized the danger, they could have shaved 10 minutes off that time. Even so, a lot can happen in four minutes.

THAT is why I own firearms. That is why I own fire extinguishers and wear my seat belt. You are responsible for your own safety. That 14 minutes can last the rest of your life.

Safety is an illusion

I ran across this article about five of the safety measures that we take that do not make us safer. Interestingly enough, number five is the TSA and their airport security measures. According to the article:

There's a reason security expert Bruce Schneier described the No-Fly list as "a list of people so dangerous they cannot be allowed to fly under any circumstance, yet so innocent we can't arrest them even under the Patriot Act."

 So they are so innocent that they cannot be arrested or charged with a crime, but there are plenty of people out there who would add this secret government list to the reasons why you should not be allowed to own one of the best tools of self defense: a gun. Secret lists kept by the government never work out very well.

 It turns out that antilock brakes and bike helmets do not help us, even though they are required by government. Sunscreen is a marketing ploy (because it doesn't block the rays which are most likely to cause cancer). Breast exams actually increase mortality, because the number of unnecessary biopsies and the complications associated with them cause more deaths than the cancer they are designed to detect. Gated communities are also worthless.

In other words, security and safety as it is practiced today is an illusion designed to make you FEEL safer without actually making you safer. I guess feeling safer is better than actually being self reliant.

The point of no return

One thing that I have always been interested in is the page in the instructions for your income tax form that tells you where the money comes from and where the money goes. I use the instructions for the 1040EZ here (pdf warning) and all you have to do is look at page 37 to see what I mean.

According to this page, the government, for fiscal year 2009, took in $2.105 trillion in taxes, with personal income taxes equaling 26% (or about $547 billion) of that. We spent $3.518 trillion, meaning that we borrowed $1.413 trillion. We borrowed three times what we collected through income taxes. This tells me that taxes have nothing to do with revenue. After all, if we can borrow $1.4 trillion, why can't we borrow $1.9 trillion and simply eliminate income taxes altogether?

This is irresponsible spending at its worst. The Democrats think that the answer is to tax the income of the rich is the answer. However, according to the IRS (excel file- 2005 numbers) the top five percent of income filers made slightly less than $145 thousand per year. That means that the top 5% of earners make a combined total of $2.6 trillion per year. Even if we established an income cap of  $50,000 a year, and confiscated every dime that everyone in this country made over that amount, we would not be able to pay for the government we have now.

The Republicans think that the way to fix this is to cut spending. The size if the cuts that are needed is incredible. A 40% across the board cut is needed to balance the budget. The problem is that we cannot cut the interest that we pay on our debt. Our elderly will not sit still for any medicare or Social Security cuts, but those programs account for over a third of our spending. If we leave them alone, we need to cut Defense, welfare, prisons, and every other expense by 60%. Any politician who suggests the cuts that are needed will find his or her political career cut short.

We owe more money than currently exists. There is no way that we can pay it back, no way that we can stop borrowing, and no way out, except default. The system is broken, and we lack the will to fix it. We will soon lack the ability. Soon, the decision will be made for us. People will refuse to lend us money, and the people will become restless. The government, and the political masters who run it, will become increasingly desperate to maintain their power, and dictatorship will be the inevitable result. In my opinion, we are past the point of no return. We are witnessing history, the fall of the mightiest empire the world has ever known. I wonder if a thousand years from now if we will be studied like the Roman empires, or largely forgotten like the Achaemenid?

Prepare.

Head in the sand policy of Osceola County

Florida Law Enforcement agencies have long followed a policy of denying the existence of gangs in the state, even though it is at odds with the opinion of the Florida Attorney General's office [pdf alert] Florida police agencies say gang members use any information released about the crimes they commit to glamorize their lifestyles and attract new members. The Osceola County Sheriff's Office generally follows that policy.

That policy, it seems, is failing.Hardly a day goes by when there is not a reported shooting in the Central Florida area, and many other violent crimes go unreported. Due to the long standing policy of ignoring gang related crimes, it is impossible to get an accurate picture of gang related crime in the area, but I can tell you from personal experience that it is growing.

The frequency of gang related graffiti is growing, as is the frequency of gang member sightings. The Outlaws Motorcycle gang has a clubhouse not far from where I live. A couple of friends of mine were recently riding their motorcycles and were stopped by five Outlaws, who told them that no one is allowed to ride motorcycles in the area as a part of any motorcycle riding club, unless that riding club paid dues to the Outlaws. They then demanded that my friends remove the leather jackets, and pay a fine of $50 cash on the spot. Outnumbered 5-2 by armed gang members, they paid.

The Latin Kings have staked out Poinciana as their territory, as well as parts of Kissimmee. The Bloods own other parts of Kissimmee. Saint Cloud has problems with white gangs like the Aryan Brotherhood. Orlando has similar gang and violent crime problems.

Your odds of being a victim of a violent crime in Osceola County are 1 in 100. In Orange County, the odds double to 1 in 50.Obviously, there are things you can do to reduce those odds. Don't go into bad neighborhoods like Pine Hills (aka Crime Hills), Paramore, McLaren Circle, Waterway Village, and other notoriously unsafe areas. Don't be a gang member, sell drugs, or engage in other highly risky behavior.

It is more likely that you will be a victim of a violent crime than involved in a car crash or a house fire with a fatality.You don't hesitate to wear a seat belt, or own smoke detectors, fire extinguishers, and other safety devices, yet the odds favor your using a firearm to defend your life more often than any of those other items.

Preparedness

Hurricane season approaches. Hard times are coming. As we discussed in our last post, the government advises us all to have three days of supplies, so that we can be self sustaining until the cavalry arrives. I have a disaster plan, and I keep updating it as I change my opinion or as my needs change.

This is not about being a survivalist or about surviving. Surviving is a part of living, but surviving is not the main goal, it is merely a path to our goal. This is about being able to survive a disaster and being able to recover as much of your life as possible. We must survive, recover, and rebuild.

Recovery is the area where most people spend the least effort, but where a little preparing goes a long way. You need to safeguard the documents and other things that we need to live in the 21st century: Documents, family photos, licenses, certifications, and other important records. We also need to have meeting places (rally points) and other essential details worked out in advance. For more on that, see this post.

Now we can start thinking about supplies and kits. Remember that preparedness is not a kit. Don't think you can put a kit together, and you are all set. The kit is a means to an end. Here are the categories that I recommend for a kit:

Records: The aforementioned documents, photographs, and other needed items. I include a moderate amount of cash on hand ($300 or so) in this category.
First Aid: Medications, drugs, bandages, disinfectants, etc. Nothing elaborate. Simple is better here.
Heat and cooking: You can live on cold canned goods and MREs, but they are simply not tolerable for more than a day or two. Hot meals are best.
Light: Flashlights, lanterns, fire, batteries for them, chemlights, and other ways of creating light.
Tools: People are tool users. Screwdrivers, knife, hammer, hatchet, etc.
Communications: There are many ways to communicate. Cell phones, radios, flags, spray paint, chalk or grease pencil markings left on buildings, signs stapled to telephone poles, etc.
Food and water: Obvious. From half liter bottles of water to reverse osmosis, MREs to farming, we need to consider short and long term food and water needs.
Shelter: Tents, homes, hotels, tarps, even your vehicle. Any way to get out  of the weather.
Security: Weapons, cameras, sensors, rotating watches.
Energy: Solar, fire, electric, generators, etc. Anything that helps us power our equipment or our selves that is not cooking or heating related.


The exact contents of those categories will vary depending on the length of time we are to be self sufficient, our finances, the amount of space we have for storage, and the disaster we want to be prepared for. My two week hurricane kit is in yesterday's post.

Prepping

The government advises us all to have three days of supplies, so that we can be self sustaining until the cavalry arrives. From my personal experiences during my responses to various disasters, I can tell you that three days is a minimum. If you are further away from a distribution point than average, it may be more like 4 or 5 days. More if the disaster is more serious.

So, I have put together a bunch of supplies to get me through a disaster. Here is what I have come up with:

Food: I have 8 cases of MREs, and 2 cases of Mountain House freeze dried meals. I also have 3 cases of freeze dried meats and eggs. Round that out with a couple of cases of canned goods (tuna, soup, veggies) and I have enough non perishable food for 172 people meals. That is enough food for 6 people for 9 days. Two weeks if I stretch it.

Food prep: I have propane cooking equipment and enough propane to cook 3 meals a day for a week.

Shelter: Other than the house, I have 3 two man tents, and tarps to make more lean-tos.
Communications: In addition to cell phones, I have 4 FRS radios and 2 HAM radios in the 2 meter band.
Power: I need to work on this. I am thinking about solar chargers for the radios and flashlight batteries. I don't need to run the whole house just yet.
Water: I have 30 gallons (at one gallon per person/day, this will last 6 people for 5 days) of water containers, and we can and will fill 2 bathtubs for non drinking water. We can boil that water for cooking if needed. 
I have ample firearms for security, and plenty of ammo.
There are also medical supplies, lights, and other supplies. 

Even though there are only two of us here, I have enough to supply 6 people for two weeks. Longer if I want to cut it down to subsistence rations. Living in hurricane country, it is just prudent.

Evacuation groundwork

Continued from part one
The first thing you need to do in order to have a successful evacuation is to prepare. I fully believe in the seven P's: Proper prior planning prevents piss poor performance. To really prepare, your significant other MUST be on board, but don't force it. My convincing the wife to get into preparedness started as a "Hurricane Kit" and now the wife is as into it as I am. Don't overdo it, or the wife will think you are nuts and will not help you.

When you evacuate, the event will be much smoother if you can safeguard your life and not be living as a refugee for the next few years. To do this, we need our vital documents. This is how I did it.

I got three 4 GB USB thumb drives. You can get them for about 5 bucks each. I installed a strong encryption program (TrueCrypt- it works, and the price is right- free) on the drive, with a 1 GB partition. Instructions come with the software. I put a copy of the software on the drive, so I could use it from any computer that I could find.

In that encrypted partition, I put a copy of my Quicken file, along with scans of birth certificates, licenses, certifications, transcripts, credit cards (front and back), medical histories, credit records, diplomas, and any other documents I could think of. In the remaining unencrypted space, I put copies of things like pictures I didn't want to lose, and other keepsakes that were not sensitive in nature.

I then put a copy on my keychain, and one each in my glove box, and my wife's glovebox. (I later bought a fourth, and store it at work in my locker). I update them as needed, including a monthly update of the Quicken file. That way, if I evacuate due to a Katrina style disaster, I have everything I need to get started rebuilding my life.

Then, we plan out our rally points. The closest could be the mailbox in the front yard. Then, in order of distance, my friend's house (1 mile away), her mom's house (5 miles away), my office (12 miles), a friend's house (40 miles), her dad's house (200 miles), and a certain undisclosed hotel that is about 230 miles away. Depending on the disaster and its scope, we can head for any one of these places.

The 90 second plan is an emergency evacuation plan where there is not much time to get out- like a house fire. Emergencies that are high risk and short time are what this is for. This plan involves nothing more than us each grabbing a pet, our keys, and (optional) a sidearm and getting the heck out of the house. We meet at a rally point in the front yard, or if that is dangerous, we head for one of the next two closest ones.

Shelter in place, or run?

Anyone who is into personal preparedness has go to have a contingency plan. A plan for what, you ask? Whatever happens. One of the best tools in your arsenal is the ability to get the heck out of dodge. There was a man at the World Trade Center by the name of Rick Rescorla. If you are not familiar with the man known as the "man who predicted 9/11," you can go read about him later, because he is not the subject of this post, but I will say that I admire the man. He single handedly saved 2,700 lives on 9/11 by knowing when to get out, and he gave his own life in the effort.

I was watching a show about him on 9/11, and I was reminded of what happened to folks in the South Tower of the WTC on that day when they tried to evacuate after the first plane struck the North Tower: as they were trying to evacuate, the police herded them back into the building, claiming that the untouched South Tower was safe. They were performing an act called "shelter in place." Many people returned to their offices, only to be killed when the second plane struck the South Tower 18 minutes later. Those who ignored the cops and left, lived to see another day.

Shelter in place is not put into motion for the benefit of the people being sheltered. Primarily, it benefits the people who are charged with controlling the disaster, who do not need large amounts of refugees underfoot, getting in the way of rescue efforts. Yes, there are times when it is safer to to stay put where all of your supplies are, but there are also times to run. It is up to you to determine when that is, and have a plan to do so. Remember that hesitating will mean you are going to be in the middle of the fleeing herd, or possibly trapped in the disaster area, instead of being safe somewhere else.

When it is time to go, go. Don't wait, don't dally, and don't hesitate. If your instincts are telling you to go, then go. The key to an orderly evacuation, as opposed to a panicked flight is easy: preparation. The first thing is to have criteria that you will use to determine when you will go, and when you will stay. Make it flexible, because when that time comes, it may be an event that you have not planned for.

Evaluate the disasters that will force you to consider evacuating, and rate them according to warning time and risk- with the ratings of low, medium, and high. This is the same system that emergency professionals use:

For example: A fire in your house is Little warning, high risk. A hurricane in Florida's interior is long warning time, medium risk, but on the coast it may be high risk. Once we do that, we come up with plans for evacuating or dealing with the emergency, based on the time we have to evacuate and the severity of the disaster.

For example, in the event of a break in to our home while we are sleeping, we have plans to "shelter in place" in the bedroom and call 911. Anyone who enters the bedroom gets shot. That works for us, because the police have an average 6 minute response time in my city, and I can hold out for 6 minutes with the two handguns we have in the bedroom. I don't need to take the risk of clearing the house, I will let the cops do it for me.

On the other hand, we evacuate for any hurricane above class 3 that is due to hit in my area. Being 50 miles inland means that the risk is one I can bear in my location for a three or less.

Our evacuation plans vary. We have four plans, each one named for the amount of time we have to execute it. These plans are: 90 second, 9 minute, 90 minute, 9 hour. The next post will deal with evacuation plans. In the hurricane example I just gave you, we would activate the 9 hour plan (the 9 hour plan includes taking the time to board up windows). The last time we considered evacuating, I boarded up the windows and pre packed my vehicle when we were 5 days from landfall. My neighbors thought I was nuts. I was the only boarded up home in the neighborhood, but had we decided to evacuate, I could have gotten out of here with the 9 hour plan fully executed in only 90 minutes.

More on that later in part 2...