Survival Site Security - Obstacles and Early Warning

UrbanSurvivalSkills.com received the following question,....."I have a small cabin about 2 miles on a dirt road, over two small hills from a state highway. The State Highway is mainly used for traffic between two towns,...one of a population of 70,000 and the other of a population of 18,000 and more of a resort town. As you get off the highway onto the dirt road accessing my cabin, and there is no nothing else on this road, you head towards my cabin where you would have to crest a small hill about 300 yards from my cabin, which would then be into my site. The area is forested with pine and smaller deciduous trees. I am debating on blocking (barricading) the dirt road, like felling some trees, to create a barrier to people driving to my cabin, but know that it may draw attention to our location. There will be five of us here initially, me, my wife, my 12 year old son, and another couple. Any ideas or suggestions?"

UrbanMan replies: I think I know where you are at. Just kidding. Sounds like you are not going to be on a major refugee route, although you may think it if tens of thousands of people start heading towards the smaller resort town.

You are right to consider not drawing attention to yourself with a barricade on the dirt road near the State Highway. I would be very careful to sterilize signs of driving off the highway onto your dirt road. Erase or sweep away the tire signs. The leaves from the deciduous trees may help hide any sign as well.

Near the highway, you can position some deadfall to make it look like the road has not been used and is impassable or at least hard to get through without a flat tire. You will need to make it look as natural as possible. Still, you need to be ready for some people who may be taking this road to get off the highway for safety. Best case is if gas is at a premium or even if they are walking, they may not walk the two miles to your cabin. It is probably necessary to sterilize signs of travel all the way to the cabin as well.

Speaking of flat tires,... spike sets are good anti-vehicle obstacles. There are three types:

Man Made commercial - we use these to stop vehicles we are pursing and you have probably seen these on TV. I don't know if they are available for purchase to the public. These are made with hollow, large sharpened needles (like hypodermic needles) to allow the air to rapidly escape a punctured tire.

Man Made Field expedient - these wooden boards with nails pounded through and as someone drives over they get a flat. Large 16 penny nails work well. You can even build hinged spike board that as a tire drives over it the weight bears on the hinge and drives the sides of the board up and projects nails into the lesser protected sidewall of the tire.

Natural Spikes - fabricating from all natural material such as branches, cut and sharpened smaller branches. The sharpened "spikes" are then rubbed with dirt to reduce their signature and make them appear old. The idea is to make it seem like it was a natural obstacle that caused the flat, otherwise these people, who may intend you harm, will be suspicious, more careful and ready for any other obstacles or booby traps, as well as your other defensive capabilities.

You can position deadfall and logs, making it seem natural and channelizing vehicle traffic into your anti-vehicle traps. A 30 to 36 inch length of 8 inch diameter log, or larger, can be buried so that only 12 to 16 inches are sticking out of the ground to create a obstacle to high center or rip out crank cases or damage half shafts as vehicle drive over them. These can be made to look like just stumps of trees that were cut down.

You can dig a ditch in the road making is impassable for a vehicle and have a covered and camouflaged bypass. This ditch could be effective if it is hard to see, like around a corner or bend in the road, and looks natural like it was created from water run off.

I know a gent who buried a series of extension cords in PVC piping from his house to a curve in his entrance road that he couldn't see his from his house, and placed a simple IR beam light unit so that when the beam is broken a buzzer rings at his house alerting him to approaching traffic.

And I know another guy who did a little more of a professional job wiring a pressure plate over a cattle guard and that when a vehicle's weight pressing the plate down it makes a connect, it either turned on a light or activated a buzzer at his house (can't remember which). I believe both these guys use 110/115 v power and do not know if they have made allowances to use batteries if/when the power infrastructure shuts down during a collapse.

Obstacles on avenues of approach (roads, trails and natural lines of drift) are good ideas, but more professional or trained adversaries will approach your site from covered and concealed routes. Ensure you manage these and have a plan if attackers occupy positions of advantage around your cabin.

For legal reason, I am not going to get into field expedient explosive booby traps or pre-placed charges. But it is a common technique to emplace command detonated explosives, usually devices that produce anti-personal fragmentation, where people will seek cover once a vehicle is disabled...as well as emplace in dead zones where you cannot observe nor provide direct fire onto any potential attackers.

Anyway, I hope this gives you some ideas. Sounds like you found yourself a good Survival location - just work on mitigating the risks. Some additional resources would be any of the series of excellent (and cheap) books by Ragnar Benson on a wide range of related Survival Topics. The one's I find most useful are below:

Urban Survival Firearms - How Much Ammunition Should You Stockpile?

UrbanSurvivalSkills.com recently received a question from an Emergency Services Professional on why did I suggested stocking 4,000 rounds of ammunition for each primary battle rifle. We're counting M-4 and AR variants as battle rifles for the purpose of Survival, as if say an M-4 is your primary gun, and that's what you are going defend you and your families lives with,...then it's a Battle Rifle as far as I am concerned. This same Emergency Services Professional stated that his primary battle rifles are AR gas pistons platforms in 6.8 caliber and wanted to know why I recommend the .223 Remington, aka 5.56mm.

Okay, fair enough questions, here's what I think:

The gas pistons AR platforms are great guns. I have shot many of them, just don't have a privately owned one, yet. Even then, it'll probably be in 5.56 caliber. No doubt the 6.8mm SPC is a much better stopper, but 5.56 ammunition is cheaper, more available, and you have a wide choice of bullet configurations for diverse needs: Full Metal Jacket (Ball); Frangible; Jacketed Hollow Point; Reduced velocity Tactical loads, and, soft nose lead bullets up to heavy bullet in a 77 grain for those longer range or precision needs.

I've had a civilian version of the CAR-15 in 5.56mm for decades, and several years ago, upgraded to a couple Rock River gas tube M-4's that function well. So part of my decision to stick to the 5.56mm is financial - I already have several, and after 33 years of using, training on and teaching the AR variants, I guess I am just used to it.

I recommend the 4,000 rds per battle rifle as a Basic Load, as after a collapse, ammunition may just not be available. A serious firefight may take up several hundreds of rounds up to a thousand. Would not like to find myself low on ammunition after one or two serious dust ups. Avoiding fights when I can, but surviving the one's that are unavoidable. Would be great to have 10,000 rounds per main gun.....I am not get there I would surmise that most people simply are not that dedicated to Survival Preparation, nor financially able if they wanted to or have the financial will power to spend money on and stock these amounts.

Note: A Cursory search of 5.56x45mm ammunition prices show that 1,000 rounds of 55 grain FMJ (M193) to be around $460; while 1,000 rounds of 62 grain SS109 steel core penetrator (M855) to cost around $500.

Plus you should account for ammunition needed for training. If you bring in new people to your survival group, making them proficient or at least usable on your main rifles would be a good idea.

Urban Surival Planning - New Pandemic Threat: NDM-1

A new pandemic threat has cropped up with a SuperBug originating from India that could spread around the world -- in part because of medical tourism -- and scientists say there are almost no drugs to treat it.

Researchers said on Wednesday they had found a new gene called New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase, or NDM-1, in patients in South Asia and in Britain . U.S. health officials said on Wednesday there had been three cases so far in the United States -- all from patients who received recent medical care in India , a country where people often travel in search of affordable healthcare,….or Medical Tourism. By the way, we may see more of that as Health Care in America gets more expensive and scarcer.

NDM-1 makes bacteria highly resistant to almost all antibiotics, including the most powerful class called Carbapenems. Experts say there are no new drugs on the horizon to tackle it. "It's a specific mechanism. A gene that confers a type of resistance (to antibiotics)," Dr. Alexander Kallen of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta said in a telephone interview.

With more people traveling to find less costly medical treatments, particularly for procedures such as cosmetic surgery, Timothy Walsh, who led the study, said he feared the new superbug could soon spread across the globe. "At a global level, this is a real concern," Walsh, from Britain 's Cardiff University , said in telephone interview. "Because of medical tourism and international travel in general, resistance to these types of bacteria has the potential to spread around the world very, very quickly. And there is nothing in the (drug development) pipeline to tackle it."

Almost as soon as the first antibiotic penicillin was introduced in the 1940s, bacteria began to develop resistance to its effects, prompting researchers to develop many new generations of antibiotics. But their overuse and misuse have helped fuel the rise of drug-resistant "superbug" infections like methicillin-resistant Staphyloccus aureus, or MRSA.

In a study published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases journal on Wednesday, Walsh's team found NDM-1 was becoming more common in Bangladesh , India , and Pakistan and was also imported back to Britain in patients returning after treatment.

" India also provides cosmetic surgery for other Europeans and Americans, and it is likely NDM-1 will spread worldwide due to the Medical Tourism," the scientists wrote in the study.

Walsh and his international team collected bacteria samples from hospital patients in two places in India , Chennai and Haryana, and from patients referred to Britain 's national reference laboratory from 2007 to 2009. They found 44 NDM-1-positive bacteria in Chennai, 26 in Haryana, 37 in Britain , and 73 in other sites in Bangladesh , India and Pakistan . Several of the British NDM-1 positive patients had traveled recently to India or Pakistan for hospital treatment, including cosmetic surgery, they said.

NDM-1-producing bacteria are resistant to many antibiotics including carbapenems, the scientists said, a class of the drugs reserved for emergency use and to treat infections caused by other multi-resistant bugs like MRSA and C-Difficile. Kallen of the CDC said the United States considered the infection a "very high priority," but said carbapenem resistance was not new in the United States . "The thing that is new is this particular mechanism," he said.

Experts cited two drugs that can stand up to carbapenem-resistant infections -- Colistin, an older antibiotic that has some toxic side effects, and Pfizer's Tygacil. For many years, antibiotic research has been a "Cinderella" sector of the pharmaceuticals industry, reflecting a mismatch between the scientific difficulty of finding treatments and the modest sales such products are likely to generate, since new drugs are typically saved only for the sickest patients.

But the increasing threat from superbugs is encouraging a rethink at the few large drug makers still hunting for new antibiotics, including Pfizer, Merck, AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline and Novartis. Anders Ekblom, global head of medicines development at AstraZeneca, whose Merrem antibiotic was the leading carbapenem, said he saw "great value" in investing in new antibiotics. "We've long recognized the growing need for new antibiotics, he said. "Bacteria are continually developing resistance to our arsenal of antibiotics and NDM-1 is just the latest example."

What does this mean to the Urban Survivor faced with possible wide spread viral outbreaks? Minimize contact with personnel outside your Survival Group. Develop safe protocols for handling or communicating with refugees as well as standard operating procedures for disinfecting people and material or equipment. Plan on a quarantine area and measures to provide water, food, shelter and warmth to personnel who have to be placed there for the general safety of the Survival Group.

Urban Survival Planning - More Economic Indicators of a Coming Collapse

Two recent economic indicators reached out of the newspaper and banged me on the head this week, indicating not only are we not on an economic recovery as President Obama promised, but we are heading for rougher times and a lot of people know it,...maybe not intellectually, but at least they know something is wrong.

Not only from the newspaper, but from a friend of mine who went to the gun show this weekend. He said he has not seen as large as crowd in memory. He told me he saw a 60 year old woman buy a folding stock Mini-14, then bought eight 30 round magazines at another table. My friend said he later saw her empty handed except for a heavy sack which he thought she put the Mini-14 rifle in the car and was buying ammunition. He had many examples of this. Some of the vendors told him they could not keep ammunition on hand.

There is a just published financial report on Americans wanting to be closer to their cash. They are cashing out Certificates of Deposits (CDs) and putting the money in bank checking and savings accounts so they can have it closer and more ready at hand.

People have pulled a reported $145.3 Billion dollars out of mutual funds in the first 8 months this year. That jives with my first and second hand information on many government employees borrowing money from their Thrift Saving Plans (TSP). I know maybe a dozen people who did that just to purchase Survival items,..solar power generators, canned dehydrated foods and Gold - Silver bullion.

A VP at a financial analysis company states "At times of uncertainty, there is a natural human tendency to stay liquid and have money easily accessible."

Certificates of Deposit have declined by $200 Billion in the first six months of this year. Savings accounts have increased by $171 Billion, but we have not seen the difference invested into consumer spending that is tracked by government and public organizations. My bet is that it is going into the untracked markets such as firearms, ammunition, survival and camping gear, and related Survival material such as power supplies, batteries, and solar panels....maybe even land purchases.

To make the economic indicators much worse is the record increase in the U.S. Poverty rate, expect to move to the 15% level when the final report is finished.

This is what the news states: "2009 figures are likely to show a significant rate increase to the range of 14.7 percent to 15 percent. Largest increase on record and highest it has been since pre-1973 levels which spawned massive Government welfare program development and spending."

"Should those estimates hold true, some 45 million people in this country, or more than 1 in 7, were poor last year. It would be the highest single-year increase since the government began calculating poverty figures in 1959. The previous high was in 1980 when the rate jumped 1.3 percentage points to 13 percent during the energy crisis."

This is in keeping with our assertion that a very probably spark of either a gradual collapse or a dynamic collapse will be when the gap between the "haves" and "have nots" (also know as the people below the poverty level) get so big as they government cannot tax us enough nor divert spending enough to provide the basics for the people below the poverty line. This is a recipe for full blown anarchy and violence.

Get ready for it.