Friday, September 1, 2017

Bug Out Packing



Between recent events in the Houston area, and this post by Ryan at his Total Survivalist Blog (formerly Total Survivalist Libertarian Rantfest), the topic of packing to GTFO Of Dodge is floating around. (You should forgive that metaphorical pun.)

Some thoughts:

My bug-out prep would be one for 5 minutes and one for 30 minutes, but with kids, I could see a 15 minute instead of 5 becoming necessary.

It always takes more time to parade the troops.

Anything not important enough to grab and load in 30 minutes isn't vital anyways.
BTW, That's 10 3-minute round trips.

So besides figuring what you're carrying, break down those ten (or whatever, your house may be shorter trips than mine) trips into what you grab with each one, based again on triaging priorities. That way, if things get worse, you still got the most important stuff first.

i.e. Notional trip List

1) Important stuff - briefcase and B.O.B.
2) comms, backups, maps, compass, GPS, etc.
3) Weapons & ammo
4) Water and filters
5) shelter - tent, sleeping bags, etc.
6) medical
7) tools, traps, & gear
8) food
9) more clothes, boots, etc.
10) more food, water, addl. supplies

(And don't forget the carrier(s) for Fido and Fluffy, their food, bowls, leashes, waste management supplies, etc.!)

More trips?
Make a longer list, as appropriate.

Then print it out.
Then put a house plan map, with trip number items color-coded, circled, and pre-packed into appropriate bags/bundles, on the back side.
Then make several two-sided color copies.
Then laminate them, and put them in appropriate places.

Anything not hot/cold/time sensitive, as much as possible, should be pre-staged in the vehicle(s), which saves you needless trips.

(Oh, and it should go without saying, your vehicle(s) should already have a list of items always in them 24/7/365 - tools, spares, flares, fluids, fire ext., first aid kit, etc., and a schematic of where they're stored, and what needs to be checked/replaced, at least twice a year. Just like the .Mil has done with jeeps, trucks, HMMWVs, MRAPs, APCs, and tanks since we stopped using horses. Doing this on the changes back/forth from Daylight Savings Time, which is always a Sunday, gives you winter/summer changeovers, along with swapping out stored batteries, rotating stored food, and changing active batteries in your smoke and CO2 detectors, and checking your household fire extinguisher(s). All of which people have, right? RIGHT?)

Kids bags being "too hard" is a cop out.

If they grow that fast, just put one full set of clothes into the bag once a week with laundry, and swap 'em out. You're gonna wash them and fold 'em anyways, so it ain't that tough. Or even once a month.
So obviously what's really kickin' somebody's butt there is self-discipline.

Excuses are just wallpaper for a pile of crap.

The briefcase idea is always right, going back to the second Bond movie.
Having your passport/IDs, important stuff, emergency cash, and some handy weapons and gadgets in a Get Out Of Dodge case or carryall is Survival 101, going as far back as the WWI precursors to the OSS 100 years ago.

Go over each item on a monthly basis, i.e. one item per month.

E.g., on that list, in February, you'd put fresh road maps, topos, state gazeteers, etc. in your map case, put in fresh stored (NOT kept inside the devices) spare batts for your GPS and handhelds, make sure your personal CEOI (local freqs, buddies' freqs, cellphone, e-mail, and snail mail addys for family, friends, neighbors, important contacts - banks, utilities, credit card companies, insurance agents and companies, emergency resources - Poison control, doctors, hospitals, red cross, state and federal FEMA, and anything else you want/need/think is cool etc. is all up to date and current, laminated, duplicated, etc.

And everything should be in both paper copies, AND a bombproof/waterproof/disasterproof encrypted thumb drive or three. You should have some of those stored/buried/cached offsite in redundantly redundant places, with all your important records archived.

You can also fit more photos than anyone should own on the newer high-cap drives, and save yourself toting cartons of albums of otherwise irreplaceable family pics.

For one example, you can put one or more such drives in one of the cute anodized, o-ring sealed aluminum "pill carrier" tubes (Hint: they don't just hold pills), go to a close relative's house outside your region, unscrew the center latch of an interior door like a closet, get a paddle bit, and put a suitable hole into the jamb. Deposit the tube, put the latch back in place, screw it down on most of the screws, and epoxy in a broken-off dummy screw head for the remaining hole(s), and unless their house burns down or washes away too, it'll be there until you need it, or get old enough to go senile and forget you put it there.

If you have masonry bits and some camo skillz plus a glue gun, you can do this with a brick in a pile, a rock, a tree trunk or stump, a plug/switch box in conduit, or about 1000 other places. The places where you can stash stuff you might want, but don't want to carry are mainly only limited by your imagination.

And the fatter aluminum tubes about 3" long hold 30+ quarter-sized coins. Imagine pre-65 silver, or 1/4 oz. gold Canadian Maple leaf coins, and each one is a stash of $90-9000 US dollars of actual money. Just saying.

If you waited this long before you decided to go, you're a little behind the curve, aren't you?
Houston Rita evacuation, 2005. Which is why last-minute evac for Harvey woulda been mega-stupid. This evac killed 130+ people - before Rita even hit.
A day early is always better than an hour too late. Bring snacks, and a piddle bottle.

Your next mission: Your vehicle is already prepped, and in flawless mechanical condition, right?

Your next mission after that: having four to ten ways (P.A.C.E. Plan - Google it) to get out.

The next mission after that: having someplace - an actual destination, not just "in the hills up thar somewherez" - to actually go to.


(And this, boys and girls, is why we regularly read other people's blogs: they make us think, and none of us are smarter than ALL of us.)

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good stuff. From long ago and far away, I still have my USGI map case which holds more than maps; flashlight, grease pencils, pencil flares chemlights. On the strap are a canteen with cup, lensatic compass and a rolled-up goretex parka. There's a sheath knife with wrist lanyard between the clip attachments for the canteen.
Boat Guy

Anonymous said...

One other thing I'd add to to make sure all drivers can perform basic emergency repairs (change tires, jump-start, replace bulbs, wiper blades, etc) AND make sure the car has spares and tools to do so.

There's a commercial for an insurance company that my wife has learned to change channels for the sake of our TV, it involves a woman with her 20-something son talking about how the insurance company was there for them when her son got a flat tire in the middle of the night. WTF, a 20-something with a driver's license who can't change a frikkin' tire? When my wife and I were dating we came to her car and found a flat, she said "Now I have to walk back upstairs to call AAA" (no cell phones at the time). I just looked at her with a "You're kidding, right?" look. Fifteen minutes later we were on the road, and five of that was spent figuring out where Honda hid the stupid jack.

Mark D

loren said...

Yada, yada, yada,
Get real tired of these oh so clever guys telling us all just how to do it.
1) Ever do it in real life?
2) That briefcase full of good stuff just waiting to walk out the door with some dude next week. Overloaded (you just know you'll do it)soccer mom van just waiting to run into...whatever you didn't think of.
3) Most folks, including you, drive around with half a tank of gas. Where's those 5 gallon jerry cans in your plans? Half those cars sitting in that Rita pic weren't going to move anytime soon.
4) What makes you think you'll be ahead of the curve? Special insight or paranoia? A chem accident on the nearest RR at midnight and you're all in the same boat. Same with a dozen other scenarios. Stuck in traffic = refugee. The recent eclipse sure caught me. Right out in the middle of nowhere to go.
5) After many years of road camping (driving down a national forest trail, setting up camp, doing it again somewhere else the next day) I can say that what you're carrying isn't enough if you can't get where you want to go. If you can get there you don't need it and should concentrate on consumables. Gas, water, food, money, more money.
Best bet for you and the family is live where you don't have these kind of things. IE hurricanes, tornado alley, earthquakes, forest fires, BLM thugs.
Easy for me as I chose that place to live but do think more about moving to a safer location than bugging out of a bad one.

Aesop said...

1) Yes, twice, and another close call. The second (prepared) time went much better than the (unprepared) first.
2) That's why they make safes and floor bolts.
Nobody's saying overload your vehicle. But stuff you don't have when you need it, is stuff you don't have, when you need it. No one was ever saved by the tons of stuff they left 200 miles away, in the garage.
3) 3/4 full at all times, and another tank and a half in 5-gal jerrycans, with preservative added, rotated 1@month.
All those cars in the Rita pic waited until it was too late, and the .gov said "Evac!". Waiting to be told is already too late 95% of the time.
4) Unprepared is the same everywhere. Stuck in traffic with a car load of supplies is anything but a refugee. Ask the folks who're driving and get trapped in a blizzard.
5) The place that has no hurricanes, tornados, earthquakes, forest fires, or BLM thugs is called Utopia. (And you left out riots, power failures, tsunamis, floods, blizzards, chem/nuclear accidents, and volcanic eruptions.) If you find it, please call. Every place has some potential problem, most have more than one. And most of the places away from people, there's no way to make a living, other than bare subsistence, because you're away from people. (Good luck with that plan when you get appendicitis, or have a heart attack or stroke.) Point is, a moderate local or major regional disaster (like Harvey) means jack and shit in, say, New Mexico, Missouri, or Tennessee. Being able - and willing - to get out of someplace that is totally pooched before it becomes impossible to get out beats hell out of waiting for the guy in a jonboat to come pull you out of your pool home in 5 feet of water, or off your roof.
So thinking about this at a point before you're up to your ass in alligators because the river rose twenty feet is probably a good idea for everybody not living in Utopia. That's about 95% of America, looking at the census.
Anybody in the other 5% can rest easy.
Stay or go, it's always the unprepared and stupid who pay.
I would humbly suggest not being either one.
YMMV.

loren said...

I was talking about the author you referenced, not you who I have respected since I viewed your comments on Weaponsman, though you apparently live in LA sucks.
Yeah, I do live in Utopia. Off grid and all that. No jobs though as being an old fart don't need one. We do get the odd F1 but nobody has ever died from one in this county. The hills here seem to kill storms. Even the rain and snow comes down gentle. I (almost) got used to it coming down sideways in Colorado so this is boring. Boring is a good place to be nowadays.
Every place does have some potential problems. Not every place has obvious ones. Get the difference?
I've got a get home bag in the 4x4 but no bug out bag. Built the retreat so I don't have to leave it for some place I don't want to be. Shit hits the fan, somebody will have to walk up 1500' of drive to let me know, not that they would. Course nobody will tell you till it's too late either. They told the folks in Houston to shelter in place - remember?
"Stuck in traffic with a car load of supplies is anything but a refugee. Ask the folks who're driving and get trapped in a blizzard."
Disagree entirely and I'll bet I've lived through a whole lot more blizzards than you have. Only idiots get stuck in blizzards and anybody stuck in traffic is a refugee till they get rescued or they die of CO poisoning from running the engine-which they all do. A car is damn cold place in a blizzard. Insulation factor zero.
I'm thinking people who do live in places like Shithole TX or CA (no offense) get real irritated by folks who can't understand why you don't put more effort into getting out of there. Jobs I guess. Family? Inertia?
"Stay or go, it's always the unprepared and stupid who pay" Truer words never spoken. I might add unlucky and poor.

lineman said...

Stay or go, it's always the unprepared and stupid who pay.

Along with those of us who don't live in areas prone to natural disasters that cannot be mitigated...😁

Mike_C said...

> WTF, a 20-something with a driver's license who can't change a frikkin' tire?
Oh yeah, that commercial. Provoked a strong, but resigned, response in our house too. I would have been more surprised and annoyed by that depiction of youthful masculine resourcefulness had the following not happened at work: So I got a flat pulling into the office parking lot coming back from getting takeout lunches with an office buddy. Crap. Went into the building to drop off the food (it was a hot summer day) then started to head back out to change the tire. This surprised the other people in the office. (You're going to change it? What? Is it safe? You should call AAA!) I started to bristle, thinking I was being mocked, until it was revealed that no other person there had ever changed a tire, or knew how to. (This simply had not occurred to me, though now I know better.) And only one person (male as it happens) was interested in learning. Sheesh. I ended up buying cans of Fix-a-Flat for the women in the office. The other men were on their own. Yeah, I'm sexist that way.

Anyway, those same folk think I'm insanely paranoid for having blankets (both mylar and wool ones), as well as two sets of winter clothing (fleece, Goretex jacket and pants, wooly hats, gloves, and insulated boots you can walk at least few miles in) in the car in winter, even though it's New England. Horse to water and all that, I guess. Sigh.