Level Two Preparedness - A Lot More Commitment
Level Two Preparedness – A Lot More Commitment
As I wrote before, the main problems with Level One Preparedness are three.
1. It doesn’t account for your need for water, beyond what you can store on the shelf.
2. It doesn’t account for a need for shelter (even if that only means heat in the winter).
3. It doesn’t account for your possible need for security.
There are other non-life threatening problems, such as a absence of fresh fruits and vegetables, or lack of a perfectly balanced diet, but for now, let’s not quibble about the small stuff.
Level One Preparedness is a legitimate form, even if it isn’t perfect. It is well suited for allowing you to deal with short-term natural disasters, or a financial crisis, either personal or wide spread. There were folks living on the fringe of hurricane Katrina who didn’t have electricity for several weeks. Your Level One stockpile of staples will allow you to be a big help to your neighbors in such case. In the event of a countrywide depression, where people just go hungry for lack of money to buy food, your stores might mean sleeping well on a full stomach. Or, in the event of a personal financial crisis, where you lose your job for a long period of time, your stores might allow your children to sleep well on a full stomach.
Level Two Preparedness addresses the first two of the problems listed above, water and shelter. Security is what will distinguish Level Three.
It is my contention here that if you live in the city, or a town, excepting for the most mild disaster scenarios, such as economic depression, or localized natural disaster (hurricane), you are going to be hurting (unless your situation is something quite unique for a city dweller). You will be hurting mainly for lack of long term water supply, and soon after that for lack of security. You might have a wood stove, or a fireplace in your house in the city, so shelter is potentially solvable, but the other two problems well might kill your plans.
If you’re serous about long-term preparedness, you must move out of the city. Even if you live in a town, you have to move out. Living in a city or town almost always means you are closely coupled to the municipal infrastructure. It normally means that you are heavily dependent upon on that infrastructure, whether it is electricity, municipal water, or local security services. On a typical city lot, or in a city apartment, you just don’t have the space or flexibility to provide for self-sufficiency infrastructure. You might find an unusually good opportunity in town, such as a home site with a shallow well, or you might even have one drilled, but that will be very a-typical, and still leaves you facing other associated problems.
To get beyond Level One, you really need to move to a place in the country with either a reliable year-round surface water source, or with huge fresh water storage, or with a well and some means to draw water from it when the electricity is out. If you’re lucky, you can find a place with a twenty-foot deep well and install a pitcher pump. Less lucky will be a 100 foot or 200 foot deep well that you can fit with a special deep-well manual piston pump. Most lucky would a be fresh water spring bubbling up on your own property, a few hundred feet up the hill from the house, or a clear-flowing mountain steam nearby. Otherwise, you can install a rainwater collection tank, as is commonly done when people live in the “bush” in Australia. There, it is common to install a 10,000-gallon above-ground cistern next to the house, usually a cylindrical gunnite formed concrete tank, to get through the summer when the typical marginal well runs dry during the summer months. Or you can rely on a deep well pump powered by a small diesel generator. The generator and pump can run for one hour a day and charge multiple pressure tanks in parallel, or pump into a hold tank. Remember to provide for spares of every critical item or part.
Another question to ask is about family. How many people are depending on you? How many children and grandchildren might be drawn to you for support in a time of crisis? If you have an extended family that you need or want to plan for, you aren’t going to accomplish much unless you live outside of town. You will need a lot of space to store provisions. To provide for extended family, you need many more stores than is practical with the Level One Easy Approach, and for that you need space.
To provide for extended family, your approach to food storage must also be different. There is no way that two of you (for example) can rotate through enough of the food you regularly eat, in order to prevent spoilage. You will need to be storing whole grains, powdered milk, sugar, salt, more dried beans, more rice, plus dried and freeze dried foods. You will need to be concentrating heavily on food items with a long shelf life as the core of your food storage plan. These you can supplement with a wide variety of canned fish, canned meat, canned vegetables, and canned fruit. More problematic are those important-to-have items with shelf life of less than two years, such as cooking oil and peanut butter.
There are lots of other things to think about storing, such as flashlights, batteries and first aid supplies, but my intent here is not to cover all of those details that are well covered elsewhere, but to review concepts.
Living in the country, you will also have space for your non-food stores. You will need fuel, whether it is fire wood, or kerosene, or stove oil. Those things take up a lot more space than a typical town lot can accommodate.
And there are a whole lot of good posts around the topics of livestock and home gardening. No need for me to repeat those ideas here, but feel free to respond with any suggestion that comes to mind. Obviously, those things are hard to accomplish living on a city lot, and impossible for the city condo dweller.
If you can’t move to a place in the country, do you have any close relatives who do? Can you interest them in crisis preparedness? Can you contribute enough to the effort (money, improvements, supplies, labor) to make yourself an equal partner if the day ever comes when their country homestead becomes a refuge?
If you can’t move to a place in the country, can you find two or three other couples that share your interest in preparedness? If three or four couples share resources, maybe it is possible to buy or build a “vacation retreat” in the country that would be the “go to” place for all of you when a real crisis comes. Here again, your food storage plans would need to be tailored to the situation. A multi-family approach to preparedness planning is fraught with potential problems, so many that it might very rarely be workable, but it might be better than no plan at all.
This contemplation of a move to the country is a major, major commitment for most people. And this is where the rubber hits the road with regard to our disagreements about how much preparedness is going to be needed. Some subset of all of the readers of this forum think like me, that is, if you live in the city, you are probably going to die when the real crisis comes. But others think differently.
If you are single, or a couple, and are relying on that “bug out” kit you have prepared, tell me to where you are going to bugout? If it will be a localized disaster that you will bugout from, then all you will really need is some money, wheels, gas, and a head start from the crowd. If it is a generalized disaster, where will you go? Do you think that you will camp in the woods until the crisis is over? Are you planning to knock on some farmer’s door and ask to pay for lodging and food? I am interested to hear your thoughts on this, because I don’t see the bugout planners addressing this. Yes, it will be nicer to die quietly in the country than in the middle of the chaos of a city gone mad, but are you setting yourself up to settling for just a couple of weeks until you become one of the starving, wandering homeless?
Maybe I am wrong about a lot of this. I really enjoy this forum for the lack of rude and inflamatory posts. But strong disagreement can evoke strong emotons if you are feeling the need to defend your beliefs. If so, please keep in mind that these are just my ideas, and I respect your right to think differently. Your replies will be welcomed with interest.
In the next segment, I consider Level Three Preparedness, which is characterized by your plans for security. This need for security is an equally compelling reason to move away from the city. To my mind, perhaps even more compelling.
