Survival Kits

Build your kits—and your
skills—together

A survival kit, also known as a bug out bag, survival pack, go bag or the like, is a personal thing. There are many companies that sell pre-assembled kits, but most experienced survivors end up building their own kits. They pick and choose the gear that matches their skills and sensibilities. Many will buy commercially available kits just to experiment, and may adopt one or two pieces.

Notice this: experienced survivors experiment with different gear. Part of what that statement tells you is something even more important than the gear itself: practice. If disaster comes, and you haven’t practiced with a given tool, the time it takes to learn could kill you. Get to know your gear, and own it by the skill you have with it—not just the money you spent on it.

This has more than just the benefit of knowing how to use your gear. A big part of surviving is innovation, improvisation. You may find that disaster has destroyed part or all of your kit, but if you’ve practiced, you will have some knowledge of how to improvise. If you haven’t practiced, you probably won’t have the savvy for innovation.

Building a kit: What’s it for?

After the 9/11 attack, I went into overdrive mentally about what could happen and how to prepare. Ultimately, I got to the point that most serious, survival-minded folks come around to sooner or later: what if the grid is down, the world is toxic, and we are forced to live off the land, wandering around to forage plants and hunt for food among hostile other folks?

So I started building a doomsday kit. I must have made my outdoors goods suppliers very happy. It kept growing and growing, until I realized that a whole family couldn’t backpack around what I had in mind. Worse, when our power went down due to the disasters we faced in 2004 (forest fire in my area) and 2005 (flash floods in my area), we had some things right, but others... we had to learn. Thanks to wonderful neighbors, the lesson wasn’t too nasty.

It isn’t unreasonable to prepare for that kind of event, but the going wisdom among the experts is that staying at home, among people you know in terrain and territory you know, is probably going to be best if that kind of thing happens. Thus, you will have an idea of the group, its various skill sets and equipment, good and bad actors, and how to manage things. Self-reliance is a critical attitude, but so is teamwork; in such a disaster, you will probably be much better off where you can hope for teamwork—other people to complement your own skills, provisions and equipment.

Further, most survival situations are much more immediate than a “Mad Max” scenario: you’re driving in mountain country in the winter, out of cell phone range, and something happens. Your car quits on you; you hit some ice and slide off the road; or you take a wrong turn, get hopelessly lost or while you’re off the right roads, a snowstorm causes drifts that make it impossible to retrace your way back (this last is what happened to the James Kim family in Fall of 2006. You remember that news story, don’t you?).

While calamity might happen at any time, these smaller emergencies are so frequent that to ignore them in favor of preparing for a “Mad Max” world is eventually just irresponsible. Thus, I no longer think in automatic terms of bugging out, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have survival kits! On the contrary; they’re more ever-present today in my life than ever before. They’re just ... more sensible.

Different kits

Most disasters begin to settle down after three to five days from the end of the event itself (storm, earthquake, terrorist attack...). Power and phones are restored, stores open, and basically, we start to see signs of things coming back to life. In worse situations, especially in rural areas, it may be two weeks or more before you’ll even see emergency vehicles. In uglier earthquake scenarios, it could be several weeks. Disturbances based in social unrest could go on for years.

This brings up an incidental, but important, point: a disaster will cause a good deal of damage and human harm, but what happens afterwards can be even worse. Just look at the Katrina situation! Starvation, dehydration, roving bands of thugs (some with badges), ... I trust you have seen the coverage. At any rate, maybe I’ll put up a page with that kind of details about different disasters. Hmm, not a bad idea...

Obviously, in making preparations, we have to make some guesses and assumptions. My plan is to be prepared in my car to survive three to five days to get home, where I will have supply for minimum two weeks, but probably longer. It seems prudent to have supplies to last at least six months to a year, especially as we see tensions rising socially and politically in the country. Some folks say you should have food (and means to grow food) for seven years. Talk about apocalyptic! But if you believe the Bible—and a lot of other sources of prophecy and prediction— you might want to take heed of that.

The minimum time any household should be able to last without ANY outside assistance is two weeks. We were stranded on our property—could not drive onto or off of it—for several days after our floods. If it hadn’t been for a great neighbor with a backhoe, it would have been longer. MUCH longer!

It does make sense to have a plan and a set of gear for bug-out, should you need to. Hurricanes and other semi-predictable events make this practical. However, in the event of a major terrorist attack or sudden major natural disaster, chances are, your route out will be a major traffic snarl, even on the most remote roads, if the attack or disaster is bad enough to warrant bugging out. You probably couldn’t get to your chosen destination.

Modular kits

I have what I regard as a “modular” arrangement, or nested kits. I have a small backpack that is pretty close to me wherever I go. It’s the one I call my “go bag.” In it, I have a headlamp, a flashlight with a more intense beam, a couple of liters of water, a GMRS radio (perhaps soon a handheld amateur radio transceiver), a small binocular, and a toiletries pouch that contains some first aid supplies, a knife, a whistle, medications that I either use or might need in a situation, fire starting supplies (matches, chemical tinder, lighter, BlastMatch), emergency blanket, fingernail clippers and toenail scissors, toothbrush and other such items.

This bag goes where I go, within reason. In the car, I have an additional supply which complements my go bag: more water, two fleece sleeping bags, binoculars, work gloves, rain gear, a warm coat, and some food items, enough to keep me going for a few days.

At home, there are supplies in various places. Most survival-minded people, me included, won’t tell you everything about what they have and where it is, or about how we protect it; that would be seen as unwise, since in a disaster, desperate (but otherwise nice—or not) people do some pretty awful things. You should take the same attitude of not speaking too openly about your supplies and where they’re stored.. But we can still discuss options, and I will share what I know of those.

The home supply can be quite extensive. Many folks have raw grains as well as other foods stored. This is so that they can grow it or grind it, either way, as they need. A food supply based on canned foods, if properly rotated, can provide reasonably familiar meals, and certainly familiar dishes, for up to two years. If you are made of money, so to speak, you could buy a supply of MREs (meals ready to eat—you can even eat them cold, they’re actually quite good, and they keep for years, but they are expensive). Other options are dehydrated foods and freeze dried foods.

One strong recommendation is that whatever foods you store, make sure they’ the same stuff, basically, that you eat day in and day out, at least for long enough that you can smoothly transition to foods that store better. A sudden change in diet can cause physiological problems but can also drive deep emotional difficulty. During disaster is not a time when you want to be fighting the emotional war on even more fronts.

At home, it’s a good idea to have backup hardware, in terms of tools. One hoe, for instance, might not last. And you may want some defensive tools, as well.

“Know your AO”

I sometimes get a kick out of some of the military terminologies of survival folks. The “AO” is “Area of Operation,” a term used extensively by military and paramilitary organizations. Then again, the military is a major source of some of the better survival information out there! Certainly knowing your surroundings, wherever you are, is smart. Having some maps is a good idea.

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