"Bugging In" The Best Decision in Most Cases of Man Made or Natural Disasters, When and How

"Bugging In", the opposite of "Bugging Out", (running away, at the onset of a difficult or dangerous event), is the act of remaining in place, and hunkering down at the onset of a difficult or dangerous event, and is going to be the best decision in the majority of those situations. You have all of your "stuff" already in one place with no need to transport it anywhere, you are in a familiar setting with your family, friends and neighbors who might be able to assist you nearby.

When you "Bug Out", once you walk out that door, you become a homeless person and your odds of surviving most of these situations intact are going to decrease each minute you are on the road. When you run out of the limited amount of food or safe drinking water you can take with you, where will you get more? Where are you going, and where will you stay? Where will you get fuel or parts for your vehicle? Do you even have a vehicle? Who will protect you and your family on the road? What will you do if you or a family member get sick on the road? 

There are certainly reasons an individual might need to "Bug Out" and take his family and whatever belongings that can be loaded up and head for parts unknown, such as a hurricane, a fire, flooding, radiation/radioactive fallout, or some other specific reason which would force you to leave your home, but for the majority of cases the best decision is going to be hunkering down, bolting the doors and windows and riding out the event in your own home, in your own neighborhood.

And there are a great many things you can do now, before something happens, to increase the odds of you and your family's survival.

Get a Plan- Think now about the things that you and your family might face in the future, and write out a specific plan for dealing with those events.

Take Action- Don't just think about the things you will need to do, start doing them. Start putting together the things you and your family will need to weather man made or natural disasters, cessation of services or other events that will cause you to be own your own for the care and feeding of yourself and your loved ones.

Talk about This- One of the main things that has come to light from recent events in other countries, is that no one survives these situations intact as a single individual, or even as a family. The only people who managed to weather these events in other nations were people who banded together in multiple family or collective type groups.

How to get started? Take a look at where you live and start running through various scenarios involving events that may put you and your family at risk. What are some of the things that may cause you to close your doors and bolt your windows and hunker down for a while, and what type of a challenge would those scenarios bring with them? What can you do now to prepare for them? 

Loss of or cessation of services- What if the power, water, phones and most other emergency and public services ceased to be available? How will you cope with this?

In order to "survive" you need the five basic tenets of survival. Water, food, shelter, security and energy. Many of these are provided by the government agencies in our cities, counties and states. So if they can not continue to provide these services, you will have to provide them your self.

First off, water. Water is bulky and heavy. A pint is a pound the world around, right? 8 pints to the gallon means 8 pounds per a gallon. And most humans are going to require in excess of one gallon a day just for drinking, not including cooking, washing up, bathing etc. So a family of four would require 32 pounds of water a day just for drinking. 32 pounds a day, 224 pounds a week, 124 gallons, 896 pounds of water a month. Just for drinking.

Start figuring out how you will acquire water and store it for use during a cessation of services. If water is not coming to you, you will have to have it stored, or go for it. One of the easiest ways to get storable water is to purchase it in bulk from one of the big box stores. You can get cases of bottled water for pennies right now, and you can start storing it in your home for emergencies. A case of 24 16 ounce bottles is equal to 3 gallons of water and will run you about $4-$5 a case.

The bottled water will store easily under beds, stacked in closets or just stacked against the wall in the garage. $100 will give you 20 cases, or 60 gallons. About two weeks of drinking water for a family of four. But storing water in cases of bottled water is not the most economical or most efficient use of space. You can get water you have already paid for by getting it out of the tap in your home, before it gets turned off. There are multiple water storing systems available you can check out online. One method is water storage tanks and water "bricks" which are large stack-able containers you can fill from your tap and stack up to conserve space. You can find examples here http://www.thereadystore.com/water-storage/water-storage-containers

Stack-able Water Containers

 
   The stack-able bricks also allow you to take individual tanks of water and move them for refilling or for loaning water to others or taking with you on a journey if needed. The containers on the right are a block of 16 stack-able containers holding 3 gallons each and about 58 gallons total, with a floor weight of 464 pounds. The price is around $328 for the sixteen containers. They are fairly rugged and are 100% non-toxic food-grade HDPE, and are completely BPA free. If you have room for it, and a safe place for the tank to set, you could get a bulk tank holding up to 500 gallons or more. A tank holding 500 gallons would weigh around 3600 pounds on a small square foot footprint though, so you will have to make sure you are placing the tank where it will not cause damage to what it is setting on.       

500 Gallon Water Storage Tank

In an emergency without any prior warning, you can fill every available container, including bathtubs, pots and pans, anything that will hold water before the water stops running. You can use water from the hot water heater in an emergency, from the water storage tank above the toilet, frozen water such as from ice cubes in the freezer can be melted and used for drinking water. Any other sources of water that were not intended for drinking, pools, decorative water ponds etc. will have to be viewed as suspect water and treated before drinking. But this amount of water will not last for long. You will have to start thinking about where you will get additional drinking water when the supply you have run out.

Water Filtration Systems

You can get water from many sources, rivers, creeks, ponds, public fountains, pools and many other locations where water may be freely running or be pooled. However, no water will be safe to drink without treatment. Even the clearest and cleanest appearing stream can harbor disease and parasites that can kill or sicken you. In a case where you may not have access to medical treatment, you do not want to get sick from diseased or parasite contaminated water. So what to do? You will have to treat any suspect water (water not from a sealed container). There are several ways to do this.

You can use systems designed to filter out bacteria and parasites, you can filter water through layers of clean cloth,  you can boil the water, you can treat water with chlorine or iodine. You can treat water by exposing it to solar UV. The best bet is to do a combination of the above in order to insure the removal of viruses, bacteria and parasites before drinking the water. If you have water that is suspect, or cloudy, you can prefilter it to remove any sediment or solids, then boil the water for several minutes to kill any waterborne pathogens. If you can not boil it, you can add chlorine to the water after filtering it. You can use household bleach to disinfect water, but you have to make sure the bleach actually contains chlorine, and that it is unscented and free of other cleaning agents. Below is a diagram showing the amount of bleach to add to water.

Treating water with household bleach containing 5.25-8.25 percent chlorine
Volume of Water to be Treated	Bleach Solution to Add
1 quart/1 liter	5 drops
1/2 gallon/2 quarts/2 liters	10 drops
1 gallon	1/4 teaspoon
5 gallons	1 teaspoon
10 gallons	2 teaspoons

Let the water stand for 60 minutes in order for the process to work before drinking it. The water may taste "flat" after boiling, but you can pour it back and forth from one container to another in order to aerate it.

You can add iodine to water, 5 drops of 2% iodine to each quart of water and let stand for 30 minutes before drinking. The iodine will not be as effective a chlorine against Giardia, but is certainly better than using nothing. Persons with thyroid problems should not drink water with iodine added.

A note about bleach for disinfecting water. Bleach will degrade and go bad fairly rapidly. If you have a gallon of 6% bleach stored outside in 90 degree temperature, it might be worthless for treating water in a little over a year. A better solution would be calcium hypoclorite, a powdered from of chlorine used to treat pool water. You can purchase it in bulk from pool supply companies, and it is a much more efficient way to store chlorine for water treatment. A one pound bag of calcium hypoclorite can treat up to 10,000 gallons of water.

Another way to treat water if you do not have a filter or chemicals or can not boil water is by using solar UV to disinfect water. You can put water in clear plastic or glass containers and leave the containers exposed to full sunlight for at least 6 hours in order for the UV to kill the water borne pathogens.

I will continue to post additional blog posts on each of the five tenets of survival and all the additional information I rustle up on surviving natural and man made disasters.