Urban Survival Preparation – Home Defense Preparation Re-Visited

Since we just spent some time using a blackboard at work to illustrate some home defense concepts to Jim, we thought we would develop that impromptu discussion into a post re-visiting home defense.

Even if your plan or your Urban Survival Decision Making Matrix calls for an immediate withdrawal from your Urban home to a Rural Safe Location, you still need to be intimately familiar with your home in case it becomes a defensive position if mobs or organized gangs attempt to attack you and loot your home.

You need to identify what sectors of observation, and therefore sectors that can be covered or engaged with small arms fire that can be accessed from every window (fighting position) in your home. If you make a sketch, like the one below, you can determine what areas cannot be covered from a fighting position. These are called Dead Zones or Dead Areas.

If you have a two story home, you may be able to see past the Dead Zones or Dead Areas, however these areas that you cannot see into and therefore cover with small arms fire are potentially very dangerous to your security as they allow approach and access to your home people very well intended to doing your harm.

Typically, military units cover dead zone with indirect fire (mortars, artillery, etc.), anti-personnel mines and explosives, and obstacles. Sometimes surveillance equipment like seismic, magnetic or light beam breaking sensors are used.

The average Urban Survivalist won’t have those type of assets. And prohibited by law and just good common sense, UrbanSurvivalSkills.com will not delve into field expedient or home kitchen explosive or fire mixes other than to say there are a multitude of books available on-line where the average person can, at best, learn a little something, and at worst kill themselves and set their house on fire.

By and large the base method to protect these dead areas are going to be either firing positions outside the home to engage these dead zones, either just outside your home or from another home. (Hey, didn’t we talk abut Urban Survival being a team sport and that it’s take a group to survive?). OR, obstacles such as barbed wire, that force movement around the dead zones into areas covered by your fighting positions.

Assigned positions at windows are actually two assigned positions or two assigned areas of responsibility. The defender should be located off to the side of each window assigned to and covering the areas oblique to the window. At best this requires two defenders. The stupid thing to do is sit below the bottom of the window frame and observe/shoot over the top of the window sill. Instead stay off to the sides of the window edges a few feet back from the interior portion of the house’s exterior wall. See diagram below:

Even better if the interior side can be enhanced for protection with sand bags, steel sheeting, multiple layers of thick plywood, etc. The brown rectangles in the diagram below depict added material that enhance protection from direct fire from attackers.

If you are in such a location that provides a lot of open area from your house where you may be engaging armed bandits or organized and armed groups of looters at various distances, say beyond 100 yards, then a Range Card that allows defenders to remember what the distances are at known and recognizable locations could help you and your defending survival group more accurate engage attackers. Of course you need to be a little better trained on ballistic and how adjustment of your scope or iron sights on your firearms are used to ensure accurate engagement at these distances/locations. The diagram below depicts a Range Card.

Urban Survival Preparation - Celebrities Stocking Food

If you are reading this site and you are one of us preparing for a collapse of society as we know it, otherwise called The End Of The World As We Know It (TEOTWAWKI), then you probably also listen to talk show radio and specifically Sean Hannity, who is also on Fox News Television.

Geting off track here but people with the good sense to prepare for numerous contingencies like a economic, societal collapse or pandemic type event are also people who believe in individual freedoms and responsibility, and, are most likely either fully seated in, or leaning to the right of the political spectrum - that's why you listen to talk show radio which present news and issues far from the government shrill.

Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, G. Gordon Liddy and other talk show radio and television celebrities have long advocated buying Gold and Silver as a hedge against inflation. The same amount of Gold it took to buy a nice suit of clothes of in 1880 will also buy the same quality clothing today even though clothing (and all material goods in fact) have expotentially risen in costs.

On the radio the other day we heard Sean Hannity pushing the purchasing and storing of freeze dried foods as a hedge against emergencies. This goes to show you that the preparation for catastrophic events like a pandemic, nuclear or dirty bomb/EMP attack, economic and societal collapse just ain't for the "radical fringe" anymore - really never was, but it's plain just common sense.

Now Sean did not go into any length about how much food to buy, but we know the considerations are: 1 - how long does stored food have to get you through to when you can plant and harvest or otherwise gain another food supply?, 2 - how many people are in your immediate survival group and what caloric intake and food requirements does this present?, 3 - can you expect urban survival strap hangers, family - friends or not, showing up for you to take care off?.

We banter around the stored six month food supply idea. The Mormons usually recommended something like the minimum of a year. And remember that food is not the only Urban Survival consideration. Other items like firearms for self defense and hunting, a dedicated clean water source other than city water pipes, and other Survival Gear and Equipment,...first aid and medical items, clothing and boots, etc. But back to food. If you have celebrities pushing for the buying and storing of food, then you know alot more people are now thinking like us.

What have you done to prepare this week? I bought another case of dehydrated fruits and vegetables from Honeyville Grain; also bought two "AA" flashlight to work with my rechargeable batteries,; and a buddy of mine gave me 100 rounds of .30-06 rifle ammunition which I do not have a gun for that cartridge, however I'll just put it in my ammunition box of odd ammunition which will be barter things in a collapse.

After Armageddon 3 of 9 - A History Channel Program and Lessons Learned

The third segment of After Armageddon covers weeks 12 through 14 of the pandemic that finds the U.S. has over 100 million dead. We see Chris' wife pushing to Bug Out for Idaho. Television and other electronic means of communications, which are overwhelmingly our primary source of information, gone.

Power blackout throwing everyone into chaos and despair. With chaos and despair you have a dynamically dangerous situation. People dying in houses; pets eating bodies; bodies creating diseases; individuals or groups of armed people looting and robbing (how far would you go to provide food and water for your family?).

As the Pandemic burns itself out other health problems come to the surface, among them cholera and dysentery. Lack of Medical infrastructure adds greatly to the suffering and death.

As the Grid goes down, Chris and his family become frantic. Power grid down means no cold food storage; water and sewer systems quit working;

We see Chris venture out to check and information at stores.




Lessons learned: Chris should have moved to a safe location long before week 12. The longer he waits the more dangerous the situation becomes. The longer the time period, the greater the control over areas that organized armed criminal gangs or just plain armed groups of people will have. Neither will look favorably on transiting refugees.

Chris ventures out by himself, apparently unarmed. Breaks the two man (okay, two person) rule. During the preceding weeks, he could have scavenged containers and siphoned fuel from abandoned vehicles in preparation for what should have become apparent, the need to Bug Out to a Safe Location.

Urban Survival Skills – Wilderness Survival

I am often asked for recommendations on wilderness survival training courses and references on back country survival.

I was a Wilderness Survival Instructor for a military course where we presented two days of hands on round, robin type instruction on various desert survival related subjects including: Survival Sheltercraft; Building expedient weapons; Traps, Snares and Hunting; Water procurement and Purification; Edible Plants and Medicinal Uses; Poisonous Plants; Poisonous Dwellers (predominantly Rattlesnakes); Fire Starting; Navigation without mechanical aids; and, Recognizing and treating Dehydration and Heat Injuries. We then placed these individuals in small teams into a desert environment where they had to move 60 miles in 8 days to a pickup point for recovery. They were not given anything other than 2 one quart canteens and knife and some parachute suspension line, and, only eat or drank what they found or caught.

Anybody going through this training will have the skills and understanding to survive not only in Desert environments or also other wilderness’ as principles and techniques are essential the same even as some of the environmental concerns, animals and plant life changes.

But understand that being stranded in a wilderness and surviving until recovered is much different is living in degraded society after a collapse. To put it another way, anybody with sufficient training and skills can survive like an animal but living with any quality in an environment without packaged foods, services provided electricity and greater threats such as overtly operating gangs of criminals and lack of medical infrastructure is going to take a lot of planning, preparation and the acquisition of Survival related Gear, Equipment and Supplies.

Having said that, learning about surviving in the wilderness is something for the Urban Survivalist to consider especially if the Bug Out plan following a collapse may include transiting rural or remote areas, and possibly moving overland on foot. The Survival Bug Out Bag, which consists of essential Survival Gear and Equipment, should ensure you have the tools to survive until you get to your prepared Safe Location, but your movement may be much slower than you anticipate and you may run out of essential supplies and/or lose some of all of your kit.

So it pays to have the Wilderness Survival training and skills. Barring that the next best step is to have some decent reference material on Wilderness Survival.

For General Wilderness Survival there are three excellent books among many that we recommend: Tappan On Survival, by Mel Tappen; US Army Field Manual on Survival; and, John Wiseman’s SAS Survival handbook. These are available through the Recommended Reading link to the left and also on the bottom of this page.

For specific topics such as Edible Plants, three of the best resources we have found are; Wild Cards: Edible Wild Foods, by Linda Runyon; Edible Foods Master Class (book and DVD); and, an old time classic, Stalking the Wild Asparagus, by Euell Gibbons. Other good edible plants book are a available as well.