Urban Survival Planning – Preparing Your Home for a Longer Stay

The primary focus on Urban Survival Skills as been to prepare the individual new to Survival Planning & Preparation to surviving a collapse of society as we know it or some calamity that would sufficient degrade or destroy the existing infrastructure so that individuals would have to fend for themselves or band together in groups for survival.

The basic premise on Urban or even Suburban Survival is the Survivor will most likely be forced to re-locate someplace else in order to provide for a better survival chance.

The problems with surviving in an Urban or Suburban environment are, in part, due to large concentrated population; issues with security that are compounded by buildings and population groups in close proximity; presence of organized criminal gangs that do not exist in rural or remote areas; limited resources to spread throughout a large population.

We have endeavored to help the new Urban Survival Planner with the need to select a safe location, probably with relatives or friends at a rural or remote location; prepare a Survival Bug Out Bag to make the withdrawal or movement to the safe location possible; necessity for firearms for survival and self protection – and in this area we focused on common and simply firearms rather than the need to arm oneself like a para-military unit; we have touched on Survival skills such as map reading, basic land navigation and water purification for example; and, we have wrote about survival gear, equipment, food and books.

We know the individual new to Survival Preparation may be over whelmed with the enormity of preparing for a collapse and the cost associated with procuring Survival Gear, Equipment and material. So we have attempted to consider the cost of completing these preparations and Survival Equipment procurement in our recommendations.

We also know that human nature being what it is, most people will make the decision to move from their Urban or Suburban location to the safe area, in other words, execute their Bug Out Plan much later than prudent. People will natural accept a incremental change decreasing their standard of living, such as shortages of commodities, high inflation for goods and fuel, water shortages, etc. And when the collapse hits, most of these people will be waiting for the government to fix it.

Well the truth be told, the government is made up of people and largely due to bureaucratic problems are at best going to be like a Aircraft Carrier trying to turn – in effect slow and cumbersome, if it does fix anything which isn’t likely. We believe in self responsibility hence taking it upon you to prepare for survival in trying times.

Knowing that people will remain in their known and somewhat comfortable Urban or Suburban homes, even when the threats indicate a growing danger, we now want to focus a little information on preparing your home for an extended stay during a collapse until the Bug Out Plan is initiated.

The first order of business is a Vulnerability Assessment. Don’t be intimidated by this large word, it is simply assessing your home to determine vulnerabilities.

Common vulnerabilities include weak locks on doors and windows; size, location and number of ground floor windows that are more easily breached than doors; vegetation masking approaches to your house and limiting observation from the house to the immediate area; outward signs of “well to do-ness” where possible burglars, robbers, looters or criminal bands would be attracted to your house.

Other vulnerabilities would be lighting. Now lighting strikes two ways. Full time illumination and/or motion detecting lights can serve as a deterrent. It would be nice to have solar powered motion detecting lights in the event of a power failure or utilities grid infrastructure collapse, however if everyone else’s lights are off and yours are on, who does that attract attention to?

We’ll address these things in up-coming posts to help prepare the urban or suburban home for an extended stay before the Survival Bug Out Plan is initiated. Stay safe – stay tuned.