New Father Fears the Future

Received this from Anonymous: "I am 27 years old and recently married. We have a three year old daughter and a 4 month old daughter. I live in a duplex, in I guess you would call it the burbs, because I went to school with the owner and he gives me the best rent price possible. My wife is not working now because of the baby, before she was a temp secretary but had work about 60% of the time. I am a
school engineer (really a fix it all guy), plus I do home repairs for the guy I rent from for extra income. Now I need it the extra money more than ever. One of the men I work with taught me about the Survivor Movement with me some magazines to look at and talking about the economy. I am not into guns, recently I have been thinking about getting one and I find myself thinking about what happens if the power goes off and doesn't come back on."

UrbanMan replies: I am curious if you are from the Northeast where a power outage went on for quite a while for some folks. Hopefully, the people who were affected by this used the lessons learned to get better prepared for an alike event,.....or something much worse.

You are wise to start considering what can happen, to include providing for security and protection for your family. Just having a gun is not going to solve everything. If the power goes off and does not come back on, that will only be the beginnings of your problems. Lack of food and fuel, disruption of water utilities, reduced emergency services, a fast and substantial rise in angry, hungry people are can occur quickly if the catalyst for the event are severe enough.

There are four generally categories of Survival Preparation: Food; Water; Shelter; and, Security/Protection. Each with many facets of understanding and preparatory actions.

Consider food for instance. You could have months worth of frozen goods in a freezer, but when the power goes off, what are you going to do? Canned and boxed pantry goods will have an expiration date at some point. Dehydrated foods require water to hydrate. Ready to eat meals like Military MRE's are expensive. You final survival preparation solutions for food, will probably be a combination of all these food items.

One of the easiest things to do is to buy dry and canned pantry goods on sale or when you find good deals.  Put away several months of items and rotate them using the first in, first out principal. 

Security and Protection. I believe all law abiding Americans should own multiple guns. One gun cannot accomplish all your protection tasks as well as possible hunting applications. An individual prepping for survival against many different collapse scenarios would be best served by having several firearms (and ammunition) such as a handgun, shotgun and rifle.

There are other factors of security. Where you live; potential threat streams; refugee routes; defensibility of your home. Protection and security are usually best achieved in a teamwork approach. I say, "Survival is a Team Sport".

And of course, you cannot live without water. You will dehydrate and die without water long before you die of starvation. You simply must have a full time water source, best if not dependent upon power solutions to provide you the water. Some people have a water service where they, like stocking pantry items, buy 15 or 20 five gallon jugs as their stock then reduce the periodic delivery to what they use and use their existing stock again using the first in first out principal.   This is not the cheapest way to insure you have some water on hand when the lights go out or SHTF, but having some emergency food and water on hand gives you time to make a decision,....to stay or bug out.

Shelter is important as it provides protection from the elements and two legged threats. No matter how defensible or strong your survival location is, a Bug Out plan so you can rapidly vacate and move to another safe location are paramount. The Bug Out just doesn't consider where you are going, but how you are going to get there; but what you will take with you.

You can learn much and need to learn much in as quickest time period as you can. This site, as well as many other on-line sites reflect alot of planning tips, lessons learned, techniques, equipment ideas and much, much more. Make use of all these resources. Many of which we are linked to on the bottom right side of this page. Quickly develop a plan. Objectively review that plan continually. And prepare for some unfortunate things to happen to this country be it from an economic/dollar collapse or externally generated chaos. Educate yourself, prep well and good luck.