Starting with primitive stone and bone tools, hollowed-out gourds, bone needles and fishhooks, clubs, and arrows and spears, mankind has been fabricating tools for survival. It is our tools, combined with the skills and knowledge to use them, that enable humans to build and maintain a highly complex society that feeds, clothes, shelters, sustains, and entertains the more than seven billion people who populate planet Earth—a population that is several times what Earth could support were we all hunter-gatherers. In recent times, increasingly complex tools and technologies offer us nearly instant access to a dizzying variety of gadgets, clothing, and foodstuffs, along with a wide array of medical services and pharmaceutical drugs that enable us to attend to our short- and long-term medical needs. However, when disaster strikes, access to this seemingly unlimited supply of modern tools, gadgets, pharmaceuticals, and foodstuffs could evaporate in the blink of an eye. If a major calamity of significant scope and duration casts a shadow upon your portion of the world, causing serious disruptions in the electric power grid, supply chains, and central services lasting weeks or months, the tools, supplies, and skill set that you have on hand would be of utmost importance for the safety, comfort, and survival of yourself, your family, and your friends.
Just a few decades ago, before the advent of just-in-time deliveries precisely coordinated by the computerized flow of information across the World Wide Web, stores in major cities across America stocked their consumable goods nearby in giant warehouses, where roughly a month’s supply of food and other critical items were stored at all times. Not so anymore. Just-in-time deliveries have allowed suppliers to cut costs by reducing local inventories of most consumable stocks to a mere three-day supply. Hurricane Katrina and the Indian Ocean tsunami showed us that when a major disaster covers a broad area, affecting millions of people, governments and local authorities are ineffective and overwhelmed, taking weeks or months to resolve long-lasting grid-down situations coupled with the resulting cascading failures of supply chains and central services that require grid power for their daily operation. In situations when the grid is down and central services have failed for a significant period of time, you are on what is referred to in prepping/survival circles as “YOYO time” (You’re on Your Own). It is during YOYO time that access to quality survival tools and supplies, along with the knowledge and skills for their proper usage, can make the difference between life and death, or in less critical situations the difference between living in relative comfort and ease and living in extreme distress.
There are many different events, some of them man-made and others due to natural causes, that can cause disruptions far larger in scope and duration than those wrought by Hurricane Katrina. For example, a well-coordinated terrorist attack on the U.S. electric power grid, or a naturally occurring super solar storm, or the detonation of a nuclear device at an altitude high above the continental U.S. with its resulting powerful electromagnetic pulse (EMP) could cripple the U.S. power grid for an extended period, causing the collapse of our world as we know it for a period lasting several months to many years. In many communities hard hit by Katrina, it was several weeks and in some cases months before basic services like phone service and electrical power were restored. Eight years later, there are entire neighborhoods that have not yet recovered. When the grid goes down, most cell phone towers will exhaust their backup battery power after three hours. Within three days, most central telephone switching stations, hospitals, and police stations will run out of backup power. Without power, air conditioners, elevators, and the Internet grind to a halt. Without power, there is no water treatment, no gasoline pumping, no bank machine access, and the sewage pumps stop working, causing city sewers to back up and flood low-lying streets. Without power, food spoils and rots in refrigerators and freezers, both at home and in the markets. Without power, where will millions of people in America’s cities buy groceries, obtain drinking water, and defecate?
Solar storms of a magnitude that would cause catastrophic damage to our electric power grid are naturally recurring events, and scientific evidence indicates they tend to strike our planet an average of once every seventy-five to a hundred years. Since the last one of a magnitude that would collapse today’s modern electrical grid took place ninety-three years ago (the Great Geomagnetic Storm of May 1921), statistically we are due for the next one. Odds are that grid collapse due to an extreme solar storm will take place sometime in the not-too-distant future (scientists predict a one-in-eight chance per decade for being struck by a geomagnetic storm of this magnitude), unless another event causes grid collapse first, or our government/private industry spend the roughly two billion dollars it would cost to install the devices to protect our grid from catastrophic failure in the event of either an extreme solar storm or an EMP attack.
Of course, solar storms and an EMP attack are not the only potential causes for grid collapse, which could also be brought on by situations such as pandemic, a well-coordinated terrorist attack, or an act of war. No one can plan ahead for every contingency, but a wise person will plan for events that have a significant chance of occurring. Between our changing climate, potential terrorists, antibiotic-resistant superbacteria, and the probability of an extreme solar storm, it is my opinion that we stand a good chance of seeing a widespread long-term disruption sometime in the next decade or two. Would you board a plane if you were told, “Don’t worry, there is only a one-in-eight chance the plane will crash”?
Who am I? In addition to being a professional engineer, I am a carpenter and general building contractor. I grew up hunting, fishing, camping, and climbing in the backcountry of Vermont, New Hampshire, and upstate New York. I have been a hands-on kind of guy for most of my life. My interest in prepping and survival did not really take off until 1997, when an epiphany brought the realization that in spite of all my technical training and considerable skills covering a variety of fields, if the grid were to collapse for an extended period of time, I lacked the knowledge, tools, and skill set that would be needed to reproduce much of anything from our technological world. For example, back in 1997 if I had been dropped in the middle of the Amazon basin with just the clothes on my back, I might not have survived. I needed to stock a supply of high-quality, durable, and repairable survival tools along with detailed information for how to grow or fabricate, store, and repair the essentials for survival.
We live in the age of information. The Internet, iPads, iPhones, and a host of other electronic gadgets and gizmos provide us with instant access to veritable mountains of information, far beyond what was available just a generation ago. In order for information to be useful, it must be trustworthy, practical, and presented in ways that are easily understood. You also must have access to tools for applying that information, whether those “tools” are simply a pair of skilled hands, a well-stocked fabrication shop, or a network of friends and neighbors who have a considerable collection of barterable skills, tools, and raw materials.
When you’re having a lively discussion with your friends, you don’t need to worry too much about whether or not that information is particularly accurate or was derived from a trusted and well-known source because the stakes are low. However, when that information pertains to building a stock of survival tools that you, your family, and your friends may need to depend upon in some future critical situation, the accuracy and efficacy of that information is of utmost importance.
The book you have in your hands is a wealth of this type of invaluable practical information gained the hard way—through experience. It is most certainly worth its weight in gold. Many thousands of hours of practical hands-on experience provide the foundation for its recommendations and “how-to” advice, which have been gleaned from the collective experience of dozens of experts in various fields, plus hundreds of experienced preppers, survivalists, outdoorsmen, soldiers, and skilled artisans who shared their knowledge and experiences on the tremendously popular survival and prepping resource SurvivalBlog.com. With an average of more than fifty thousand independent daily reads, SurvivalBlog.com is the Internet’s most popular—and most comprehensive—survival and preparedness forum.
For many years, Rawles and his family have lived a self-sufficient lifestyle at their remote ranch located in “an undisclosed location somewhere west of the Rockies.” Between his military service, ranching, and dedication to SurvivalBlog.com, Rawles knows and lives what he preaches. Even though he has developed an extremely accomplished and impressive array of knowledge, tools, supplies, and skills covering a wide variety of fields, Rawles is the first to admit that no single individual can know and do it all. Rest assured that the advice and recommendations offered in this book are based on Rawles’s vast storehouse of personal experience blended with that of dozens of accomplished and seasoned experts, and many other contributors to SurvivalBlog.com.
Most of us do not have the luxury of copious amounts of spare time, motivation, and money to devote to becoming an expert in all the fields covered by this book. It is far less expensive and easier to learn from those experts who are willing to share their wisdom and advice. Whether you are an experienced prepper or a neophyte, you will find considerable value within these pages. If you are just starting along this path, and have limited budget and experience, the selection of a few critical survival tools from the multitude of options, such as a practical firearm or chain saw, can be a daunting task. I suggest you use Rawles’s recommendations to help select those tools best suited to your needs and at a price you can afford. Don’t feel you have to do everything at once, but do something. Treat this book as if you’ve had a grizzled old mountain man offering you pearls of wisdom that someday may well save your life. And thank God that you have access to this treasury of collected wisdom while there is still time to do something about it.
MATTHEW STEIN
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Matthew Stein is a design engineer, green builder, and author of two bestselling books: When Technology Fails: A Manual for Self-Reliance, Sustainability, and Surviving the Long Emergency and When Disaster Strikes: A Comprehensive Guide for Emergency Planning and Crisis Survival. He is a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he majored in mechanical engineering. Stein has appeared on numerous radio and television programs and is a repeat guest on Fox News, Coast to Coast AM, Alex Jones’s Infowars, Vince Finelli’s USA Prepares, and The Power Hour. He is an active mountain climber, serves as a guide and instructor for blind skiers, has written several articles on the subject of sustainable living, and is a guest columnist for the Huffington Post. His Web sites are WhenTechFails.com and MatStein.com. He lives in the high country of the Sierra Nevada in Northern California.