The survival gear you choose will be based on a number of factors. Your location, your skill set, and the most likely disasters you’ll face all need to be taken into consideration before choosing any piece of gear.
“If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.”—Benjamin Franklin.
When it comes to surviving a disaster, the single most important thing you can do is have a plan. Planning helps take the stress out of the situation and allows you to tackle it with a clear and focused mind, which is vitally important to your survival.
Survival situations can create unimaginable amounts of stress, severely compromising your ability to think clearly and take decisive actions. Creating a well-thought-out plan before the crisis hits can often be the determining factor in your ability to survive that situation.
When formulating an action plan, consider everything you worked on in the threat assessment and SWOT assessment exercises in chapter one. If you skipped over anything that was suggested, you might as well put this book down and hand your survival over to fate. I can’t understate the pre-planning process—your life could depend on it.
In order to formulate a plan that works, go through each and every step, fully understanding exactly what you’re planning for, and then putting contingency plans in place based on everything you identified in your SWOT analysis.
Here are five key things to keep in mind during the planning process:
Carefully examine your threat assessment and SWOT analysis and think about the previous five points. After you have a good grasp on everything, it’s time to formulate a plan of action to face whatever threats might come at you. When it comes to emergency planning, I’m a big proponent of putting everything in writing. Not only will it help you remember your procedures during a time of crisis, but it will also help you find any weaknesses or overlooked vulnerabilities you may need to plan for. During a disaster, your plan can help put your mind at ease and can help you avoid making bad decisions when your mind may be clouded by fear.
After you have your plans in place, you need to practice and make sure everyone in your group or family is on board.
When it comes to survival, far too many people are looking for the easy way out. In an attempt to shortcut the process, that easy way out usually involves buying a bunch of prepackaged garbage that’s being marketed as the solution to survive any disaster. There’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all solution to all your survival and preparedness needs. If you believe that nonsense, I’ve got a bridge to sell you…
A 72-hour survival kit is a collection of emergency supplies that are meant to help you make it safely through a natural disaster. While this may sound like a good thing, I believe the 72-hour time frame sets people up to fail. It gives a false sense of security and grossly underestimates the amount of emergency supplies you’ll need to survive most disasters.
The 72-hour number was first conceived, and is often used, by government officials who estimated it would take government aid agencies at least 72 hours to reach survivors during a disaster. While the government may want to use that as a baseline number, recent disasters suggest 72 hours is really not the number you should be preparing for. For instance, when Hurricane Sandy hit New Jersey in 2012, residents were left without power and essential services for weeks, in some cases months. While the 72-hour kit may have helped them for a couple days, it did little to prepare them for the actual hardships they had to face in the aftermath of the disaster.
Unfortunately, unscrupulous marketers have run with the 72-hour time frame and used it as a gimmick to sell crappy supplies to unsuspecting people. If you see one of these prepackaged survival kits being sold at your local store, do not even consider buying one. Most of the time, these prepackaged bags are complete garbage. They’re usually filled with items that nobody would ever need or use during an urban survival situation. They contain, for example, things like flimsy wire saws that are totally unusable in an urban or even wilderness setting.
When it comes to preparedness, there is no-one-size-fits-all plan for survival. That’s especially true when it comes to buying survival gear. Everyone has unique survival needs that depend on a wide variety of factors.
If you’re serious about preparing yourself and your family for disaster, I suggest building your own emergency stockpile, with the thought process of having to survive for a minimum of two weeks. Later in the book, I’ll discuss why I think you need a three-to-six month stockpile of food and water, but for the purpose of surviving your typical natural disaster, I think two weeks is a pretty good start.
Two weeks’ worth of food, water, and emergency supplies should give you more than enough wiggle room and will see you through most natural disasters. It gives you ample time to either get things back to normal or make alternative plans that may include the need to temporarily evacuate.
This is probably one of the most common questions I receive; in fact, I probably receive at least a couple e-mails every day from people asking for gear recommendations. Survival gear is a highly debated topic on survival blogs, websites, and online forums, but the focus on specific gear sometimes overshadows what’s really important: Your survival gear is only as good as your knowledge, planning, and training.
Newbies, and even some old-timers, often obsess over their gear. Sometimes they put so much emphasis on their gear that it can actually become detrimental to their ability to survive. Many people live under the delusion that they’re prepared to survive anything life has to throw at them because they have loaded up on survival gear. But that’s not how life works, and it’s definitely not how survival works.
If you lack the necessary survival skills or fail to properly plan, all the fancy gear in the world isn’t going to save you during a disaster. If I had to choose, I would take my training, knowledge, and skills over any piece of fancy survival gear, any day of the week.
That being said, I do love my gear as much as the next guy, and provided you’ve put in the work—completing your threat assessment and SWOT analysis, starting your emergency preparedness plan, and training and learning necessary survival skills—the right equipment makes surviving a disaster a whole lot easier.
After you have a good grasp on what’s needed to survive, start choosing the survival gear and emergency supplies you need to buy. If you’re just getting started, focus on the basics first:
These are the fundamental building blocks to any good survival stockpile and should be the foundation on which you start.
While most books will give you detailed lists of the top 101 survival items that will “help you make it through any disaster,” this one will not. In my opinion, most of these lists are worthless. While they can help give you a general idea of the type of items you might need, there is no one-size-fits-all survival plan. Telling you to stock up on beans and rice when someone in your family might have an allergy to those items really doesn’t do you much good, does it?
The survival gear you choose will be based on a number of factors. Your location, your skill set, and the most likely disasters you’ll face all need to be taken into consideration before choosing any piece of gear.
Instead of giving you a list of items that may or may not be useful to you, I will give you some guidelines that will give you a good place to start. If you take the foundation that I lay out—water, food, shelter, medical items, and protection—and start to expand on it based on your unique needs, you will be prepared to face almost everything a disaster can throw at you.
Here are some considerations you need to keep in mind when putting together an emergency supply stockpile.
If at all possible, taking shelter at your primary residence is usually the safest option following most natural or man-made disasters. Most of your supplies are probably going to be at your home, and in most cases you will have a higher level of security inside your home than you will traveling on the streets.
While sheltering inside your home is often the safest bet, there are some considerations to keep in mind.
No matter how badly you want to stay, there will be times and situations that make it impossible. If a Category 5 hurricane is barreling toward your location, the last thing you want to do is shelter in place.
The ability to defend your home from those who wish to do you harm is one of the most important considerations you need to prepare for. Home security is a top priority during any disaster.
During a disaster situation, your not-so-prepared neighbors are going to be in panic mode. While most of these people might not pose an immediate threat, if things get bad enough, those once peaceful neighbors will become unpredictable. You must have a plan in place to deal with those who failed to prepare.
I believe training and preparation are so important to your survival that if you skip over everything else in the book, I hope you at least do this one exercise. The amount of knowledge you’ll gain by doing this exercise is worth the hassle and the stress it’s inevitably going to cause.
You will be far better off making mistakes and dealing with a little bit of stress during a training exercise than making those same mistakes when it counts—when you can’t flip the power back on to save yourself from a bad situation.
To really do this right, you need to pretend you’re living through an actual natural disaster, and you need to do it for at least a couple of days, preferably a whole week. Your family should be on board with the plan, but they probably shouldn’t know exactly when it will happen. The surprise element is important because during most natural disasters you’re probably not going to have a whole lot of warning. Pick a date and flip the switch. For an entire week, act as if you are in the middle of an actual disaster.
Ask children questions throughout the process:
If you do this one thing, you will probably learn more about your level of preparedness than anything else you could ever do. Just remember to keep detailed notes and act on your findings. Going through the process means nothing if you don’t act and improve on what you learned.
Having a get home bag is an essential element of any well-rounded get home plan. Unlike a bug out bag (discussed in chapter five), which is meant to help you survive an immediate evacuation, a get home bag’s sole purpose is helping you get back to your house if you are away when a disaster or emergency strikes.
What goes in your bag is largely a personal decision that should be dictated by your own unique circumstances. In general, it should be a lightweight bag that’s filled with only the items you need to survive the trip home. Keep in mind that depending on the disaster and how far you are from home, you could be walking for quite some time, so pack accordingly. Here are a few things you might want to think about carrying:
Check the contents of your Get Home Bags at least once every three months to restock it with seasonally appropriate gear and replace any expired contents.
If you live in a high-density population center, you immediately put yourself in danger and make your chances of survival lower than if you lived in a rural area. While I’m not saying sheltering in place won’t work in an urban setting, it will become increasingly harder as the severity of the disaster increases.
When planning for any type of disaster, one of the most overlooked areas of concern is what happens during the immediate aftermath of the disaster. Even more problematic is what happens when you find yourself away from home when disaster strikes.
Since a majority of us spend so much time away from our homes, having a get home plan is essential to your survival and your ability to make it home during a natural disaster.
For most people, their workplace is where they spend the majority of their time away from home. So odds are good that if you’re not home when a disaster strikes, you probably will be at work. So it’s extremely important to have multiple routes mapped out that you can use during a disaster to get you back to your home. Your emergency routes should include indirect routes, back roads, and even walking trails, as major highways will probably be blocked or highly congested during any emergency situation.
These resources can help you identify routes:
If at all possible, one of the first things you should do during an emergency where you are going to be walking or traveling through a sketchy environment is to communicate your plan to loved ones. A short call, text, or e-mail letting them know that you’re putting your get-home plan into action will give them peace of mind and ensure they don’t needlessly put themselves in danger looking for you. See chapter four for details on emergency communication planning.
Let’s face it, having a 30-lb. (14 kg) bag full of gear at your side at all times is pretty impractical. Yes, you can have multiple bags stashed at your home, office and even in your vehicle, but no matter how much you prepare there will be times when you become separated from your gear. That’s why I suggest always having an Everyday Carry (EDC) kit.
Every Day Carry kits or EDCs are an essential part of being prepared. I think everyone should get in the habit of carrying one of these kits.
An EDC kit is made up of items you should have on your person at all times. In most cases, your EDC kit should be small enough to fit in a pocket and it should only include gear and supplies that are absolutely necessary to help you survive in an emergency situation where you basically have only the clothes on your back. An EDC kit will help get you to your main source of supplies, or provide you with enough supplies to make it through the emergency at hand, making it an essential part of any good survival plan.
As with all survival gear, your EDC kit needs to be customized to meet your specific location and survival needs. Items that you should always carry as part of your EDC include
I always carry a small metal candy tin (think Altoids tin) filled with survival supplies that would be useful in a survival situation. Because I often travel in remote areas, my kit is filled with items suited for that setting. Likewise your kit should be filled with items that fit your unique needs and location. If you live in an urban area, most of the supplies I carry will probably be useless to you, so keep that in mind when choosing what gear you pack.
My Altoids kit includes (and remember it’s geared for a wilderness setting, so adjust to meet your needs)
In addition to my candy tin EDC, I also always carry a knife sheath kit. This kit allows me to carry a decent size knife while still being able to carry a number of items in the front pocket of the sheath.
In my knife sheath kit, I carry