Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

Apparently the eastern portion of the US is getting a unusually large amount of snow. Me, I love snow. It makes everything quiet, pretty and just plain peaceful. Right up until you have to drive in it.

Remember the first rule of surviving a disaster? Yeah, well theres alwyas going to be someone who ignores the weather advisories. The National Weather Service has this advice:

3. IF YOU ABSOLUTELY NEED TO TRAVEL IN AN EMERGENCY…DO NOT TRAVEL
ALONE. LET SOMEONE KNOW YOUR TIMETABLE AND YOUR PRIMARY AND
ALTERNATE ROUTES. CARRY WITH YOU A WINTER STORM SURVIVAL KIT WHICH
INCLUDES A MOBILE PHONE…BLANKETS… FLASHLIGHT WITH EXTRA
BATTERIES…HIGH CALORIE NON-PERISHABLE FOOD AND WATER…AND A
SHOVEL.

4. IF YOU GET STRANDED IN YOUR VEHICLE…DO NOT LEAVE YOUR CAR TO
TRY TO WALK FOR ASSISTANCE…YOU CAN QUICKLY BECOME DISORIENTED IN
WIND DRIVEN SNOW AND COLD. THIS STORM WILL SUBSIDE EARLY THIS
EVENING…SO WAIT IN YOUR CAR FOR EMERGENCY HELP TO ARRIVE.
PERIODICALLY RUN YOUR ENGINE FOR ABOUT 10 MINUTES EACH HOUR FOR
HEAT. ENSURE YOUR EXHAUST PIPE IS CLEARED OF SNOW AND ICE. CRACK
YOUR WINDOWS TO AVOID CARBON MONOXIDE POISONING. TIE A COLORED CLOTH
TO YOUR CARS ANTENNA TO BE VISIBLE TO RESCUERS. FROM
TIME-TO-TIME…MOVE YOUR ARMS…LEGS…FINGERS…AND TOES TO KEEP
BLOOD CIRCULATING.

“Emergency”. Lets think about that. Out of milk? Not an emergency. Wife going into labor? Emergency. Internet is out so you’ll blog from a friends house? Not an emergency. Roof collapsed and you need a place to stay for the night? Emergency.

First rule, man….the very first rule – don’t be there. But I guarantee you we’re gonna read stories in the paper that go something like this “Susie Homemaker and her daughter, Susie II, 9, were stranded for nine hours yesterday when their minivan became stuck on I-2. ‘Susie Junior had a birthday party to go to and we just got stuck!’, said Homemaker.” Or something equally stupid will be in the paper.. someone flipping their car when they were on the way to get wings for their Super bowl party, etc, etc. Once they get pulled out of their wreck someone should ask them if it was worth the Chinese food they picked up or the movie they just had to go rent.

If I said to you “you can either stay home and not have pizza or you can give me $3500″ what would you do? Youd figure that going out for pizza isnt worth $3500, right? So who in their right mind sees nine inches of snow on the ground, high winds, crappo visibility and thinks “Ah, I’ll just drive down to Pizza Hut and pick up a few”? Next thing you know theres a tree where your front headlight used to be and youre $3500 in the hole to get a new radiator, quarterpanel, bumper, lights, etc, etc.

I stopped being a hero long ago. If its 1 am on a Saturday night and the roads are icy Im gonna take a pass on going out for a burger. Why deal with drunks and icy roads over a $5 combo meal? Screw that.

If youre really serious about being prepared then you should probably have a similar attitude. Sometimes the game just isnt worth the candle.

Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

Signs of the times. I spent a year swinging freight at a terminal for a trucking company and some trailers were just useless crap, some were with huge bucks (cigarettes were several thousand dollars per case and we’d get a hundred cases at a time), and some were just a mix. Sometimes we even got pallet loads of bullets and ammo from Speer and Hornady. I remember moving 55 gallon drums full of bullets, weighing them on my forklift, doing the math, and thinking “Wow, theres 125,000 bullets there”.

No surprise that if someone who knows how to hook/unhook a trailer and can drive a truck might find easy pickin’s…esp. in this economy when youc an probably flip the contents of the truck pretty easily what with everyone looking for a bargain. I suppose the very savvy criminals with an eye on the long term would steal stuff they know they can use and keep.

I suppose its not too far a stretch until we see similar things happening to rail freight. A train sits in a yard overnight and the next day all the choice freight is missing. A bit harder in a secured yard, but out here you sometimes see trains just sit overnight on the rails in the middle of nowhere.

Not sure if this is evidence of a slide into a bigger catastrophe but it certainly is interesting nonetheless.

Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

A useful link someone posted.
Self Powered (Shakelights, Dynamo, Solar) from Flashlightreviews.com.

For what its worth, I’ve always stuck with the Baygen/Freeplay branded stuff and when i’ve had occasion to use them or test them out I’ve always been pretty pleased.

Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

Finally went and saw ‘The Road’ yesterday and, unsurprisingly, it was as unfocussed and incoherent as the book. I see some folks in the blogosphere saying this movie is terrible in regards to the way the main characters try to survive. You know, that’s absolutely true except that this isn’t a movie about survival..or preparedness..or even father/son relationships. The movie certainly has a message, although I haven’t figured it out…but the post-apocalyptic setting is just stage dressing to deliver the message. The setting is just more symbolism for the metaphors that are being shown. So what is the movie really about? I have no clue. It isn’t about survival, that’s pretty obvious. It isn’t about relationships..at least, not the obvious father/son relationship. Is it about good versus evil? Meh…not really sure on that score. I think it may be a movie about the ‘nature of man’ versus the ‘nature of hope’. Really, its far more brainpower than I was planning on devoting to this movie.

If you read the book there’s really no need to see the movie. The book is, of course, better (which is a subjective term in this case) because you have a better understanding of whats going on in the characters head. Otherwise, skip the movie and, if you can, skip the book.

Speaking of movies, I did go see ‘The Book Of Eli’ last week. A bit more of what you expect in a post-apocalyptic action movie. A cross between Mad Max and Waterworld. For me the only nit to pick was the heavy religious message but you gotta take the good with the bad, I suppose.

Both movies do have one thing in common, they both portray a disaster that created an extremely prolonged time of crisis. ‘The Road’ takes place ten years after the end of the world and ‘Eli’ takes place almost thirty years after. In both movies society has, apparently, made almost zero progress in re-establishing itself into anything more cohesive and functioning than Bartertown in Mad Max.

While I can believe that there’s the possibility of huge catastrophic end-of-the-world scenarios actually occurring, I have a hard time believing that much of anything will happen that will put such a global whammy on the planet that decades later we’re still wearing plastic bags on our feet and eating cockroaches. Are there events that make that sort of thing possible? Maybe…a ‘Lucifers Hammer’ type of disaster, perhaps. The asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs, maybe. But something that drops humanity into the stone age for a few decades before it can have electricity and antibiotics again? That would take some serious damage.

Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

You guys remember Bambi The Backstop from this years hunting season?

Couple hours in the slow cooker this evening.

Yum.

This meal brought to you by PTR-91 and and a deer ‘A’ tag. Dang, its good to be a carnivore.

The first rule of preparedness in regards to surviving any disaster is this:
Don’t be there.

“I’m going to visit my Aunt Selma tomorrow. She’s three hundred miles from here and the news is forecasting enormous flaming rocks falling from the sky for an area covering the whole length of my trip. How much food and water should I take for the trip? You know, just in case?”

a) Three days worth of food and water
b) seven days worth of food and water
c) Don’t make the trip, moron.
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“I’m going elk hunting tomorrow. The area I’m hunting in was just discovered to be on an ancient cursed Indian burial ground. And there’s an escaped axe-murderer who they think may be in the area. And the forecast is for six feet of snow and toxic gas. Should I take my .300 Win. or the .30-06?”

a) The .300 Win. for those long flat shots
b) The .30-06. Its heavy timber up there. It’ll all be close in.
c) Stay home or go somewhere else, idiot.
=====
“The news says there was a 10.1 earthquake about three miles offshore from our beach house. We can see the water receding waaaaayyy back from the shore. Theres all sortsa fish and clams just sitting out there. We’re going to go grab some for dinner. Would you like to come along?”

a) Sure, I’ll be right there
b) Ok, but I have to pass on the shellfish. Keeping kosher.
c) Can’t hear you, I’m driving 100 mph uphill and inland as far as I can.
=====

Most disasters aren’t nice enough to make an appointment. (Although some do.) A lot of times you have to play the hand your dealt when its dealt. No choice. But….many times you do have a choice. If youre terrified a hurricane is going to eat your house, dont live near the beach. If youre terrified an earthquake is going to swallow your car, move out of California. If tornadoes make your wet you pants, get outta Kansas. If violent crime makes you scared, move outta NYC.

The folks who sat through Katrina had a couple days notice that things were going to get ugly. “Oh, but they were the poor and underpriveledged. They had no way to leave!” Sure they did. I guarantee you that if I put a gun to your head and told you that if you cant find $50 in the next three days Im going to kill you, you’ll come up with fifty bucks. Those people could have taken a bus, a train, or just bought a cheap bicycle and gotten far enough inland in three days that they weren’t stuck on rooftops baking in the sun waving at Coast Guard helicopters.

I’ve had times when I wanted to travel to gun shows that were a hundred or so miles from here. Roads were a bit icy, blowing wind, snow, cold, the whole nine yards. I easily have enough gear that if I went off the road into a ditch I’d be perfectly fine. Warm, fed, hydrated, comfy, and probably even sleep well. But why buy trouble? I skip the trip and figure I’ll go to the next one.

Im not saying everyone who gets in a disaster and stuck on a FEMA food line is responsible for what happened to them. Sometimes Mom Nature can be a nasty old broad. But there are plenty of situations out there that a little common sense and self-preservation would suggest you avoid.

The best way to survive any disaster: do not be there.

Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

Haiti continues to be in the news, which makes sense considering its a pretty big deal as far as disasters go. I said that Katrina would be the paradigm, the baseline, the benchmark for measuring and comparing disasters for quite some time and I still think it will but mostly for domestic ones. Realistically, a disaster like what happened in Haiti probably wouldnt have had nearly as severe repercussions in the US. So, while Haiti will be the standard for measuring disaster response in international (esp. Third World) scenarios I think Katrina will be the benchmark for US disasters.

Of course, certain parallels are shared…infrastructure failure, major logistics failures, many cases of ‘all dressed up and nowhere to go’ rescuers sitting idle because no one knows where to go or has the ability to get there, etc, etc.

Does this mean there aren’t lessons to be learned out of Haiti that are applicable to those of us living in the US? Nope, there are plenty of lessons. Whats the biggest one? Stuff happens. Be prepared.

Haiti is very much worth watching because disasters like these are incredible opportunities to see what works, what doesnt and what unforeseen problems arise.
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A fella I know returned from the SHOT show (which had its own drama with a few arrests being made by the feds. Most notably a S&W suit. Go Google it.) with a few catalogs and such. One of the interesting things was the folks at PTR (makes of the fine HKlones of HK-91s) have, of all things, a version in 7.62×39. Yeah, makes no sense to me either. I mean, why spend around $1100 for an HK91 in 7.62×39 when any garden variety AK will be just as reliable. Sure, accuracy will probably be better but Im just not seing a need for a 7.62×39 HK91 clone. However, as someone who used to own an original HK93, I gotta tell you…a .223 variant would be mighty nice. Reliabile and accurate, it would be a great alternative to the piston AR’s that seem to be all the rage these days. No moving parts on the barrel to affect accuracy so theyd shoot quite nicely. Get it to take AR mags, price it around $1000 and you’d have quite the seller, me thinks.

Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

I’m having some intellectual difficulty between ‘looting’ and ‘scavenging’. Some of it is pretty clear-cut to me – a fellow climbing out of a shattered Best Buy lugging a big-screen television is not scavenging for the essentials of survival. (Although one apologist opined that he was going to possibly sell the TV to get money to buy essentials.) That person is, by any definition, I think, a looter.

The person who grabs a gallon of milk and a bag of fruit out of a collapsed bodega? Well, it is stealing…or looting. But it’s a bit more understandable and, to some folks, excusable.

The argument that Im seeing is that if you are taking items necessary to your immediate survival then it isn’t looting. I’m not sure I agree with this. Right now there’s homeless people living on the street. If the temperature plummets tonight will it be okay for them to walk into the local WalMart and walk out of there with a sleeping bag they didn’t pay for?

“But that’s different”, you say. “We’re talking about during a disaster.” Are we? If your need is that critical, what difference does it make if its during a disaster or not? Haiti, in every news report I have seen, is listed as the poorest nation in the western hemisphere. Even before the earthquake there was poverty, hunger and disease. All that has happened now is that it is on a grander scale. So, before the earthquake, would those Haitians living in squalor, hungry and sick, been scavenging if they ran into their local market and took what they needed? Or would that have been looting and stealing?

I do recall that one belief system has mortal and venial sins. Felonies and misdemeanors, I suppose. Some sins were sending you straight to hell and some might get you a stern talking to from the imaginary man in the sky. I am inclined to think that looting is like that. Steal a Rolex and youre going to jail, steal a case of bottled water and you pay a fine and try to keep your nose clean for the next six months. Give the clerk of the court $25 on your way out the door and don’t forget to write your apology note to the storeowner.

All unlawful taking of property is stealing. (And, honestly, theres some lawful taking that Im not terribly approving of either.) Whether it’s a PlayStation or a package of diapers, it is all looting. However, I would probably be far more…lenient…to the person stealing diapers, baby formula and drinking water than I would be to the person stealing Nikes, Nintendos and Heinekens.

If I was stuck in such a situation would I crawl into a shattered grocery store and loot food and water? If I genuinely needed it, absolutely. But I’d also understand what I was doing and be prepared to pay the consequences. This is one of the reasons I try doggedly to make sure Im not put into that position.

Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

Haiti, before the earthquake, was a Third World toilet and even after the outpouring of aid will continue to be a Third World toilet. Truly, if the world is so moved by the plight of the Haitian people why weren’t they as concerned when they were suffering before the earthquake? Why? Because, at the moment ‘The earthquake in Haiti’ will be the trendy thing to be concerned over. Remember the whole ‘We Are The World’ nonsense back in the 80’s?

I’m more interested, naturally, in what happens in terms of social dynamics and infrastructure. What sort of problems arise, how are various problems overcome, etc, etc. And, of course, it makes one think of how they’d fare in such a situation.

Montana isn’t the most geologically stable place on the map. Sure, we’re not built on terrestrial Jello like California, but we’ve been known to shimmy a bit from time to time. Just recently there was a quake around 4.1 not all that far from here. The Californians among us will chuckle and say that they don’t get out of bed for anything less than a 5. I think a 7.3 is probably about the worst we’ve had since folks started keeping track of this stuff here. Montana, being fairly sparse in terms of population, didn’t suffer too much…a road was closed, a new lake was formed, and 28 people died, including a few campers when a boulder landed on their tent. But, as people like to point out, once the superubermegadeluxevolcano in Yellowstone goes all of Montana will be deposited into the atmosphere and we’re all doomed. I don’t believe that, but that’s what the doomists say.

Montana, being 14 times bigger than Haiti and about 1/10th the population would probably fare just fine. Rather than deal with bad water, unsanitary conditions, lack of food, no power and that sort of thing, some of us would simply get in our trucks and drive a couple hours out of the affected area. After all, the number one rule of surviving a disaster is….dont be there. If we did have to stay for a few days for the roads to get cleared, or if we just decided to stay because we’re contrary bastards, we’d do pretty well, assuming we had access to our gear and supplies. Even in midwinter we’d still be able to provide heat, light and cooking for at least a week or two. Plenty of drinking water and the filtration to make more. More food than we could possibly need for such an emergency. Plenty of first aid gear. Bedding, blankets, tents and clothes. And personal protection on an absurd level.

Come to think of it, I think we have enough gear, ammo, guns, food and water to, were we there, effectively become the new government.
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Speaking of not starving to death, in the immortal words of Leeroy Jenkins “at least I have chicken.” Remember that case of chicken I was oohing and ahhing over at CostCo? Yeah. That thing is sitting in the deep freeze as we speak. A total of 54 sealed packages of chicken, two chicken breasts per pack. Total weight, approx. 63#. That should last us a nice while. Into the summer most likely. Its not like we have chicken every day. But we’ll be in a position now that, should things get a little tight or bizarre, we’ve got yummy animal protein just a few footsteps away from the stove.

Gotta pick up an equal amount of pork and beef and then, by Crom, I’ll be a happy little camper. At least, until the power goes out and I have to can all of that but even then it still beats starving like the Haitians.

Hey, speaking of food, here’s some weirdness. The missus and I were in WallyWorld getting some groceries and there was a curiosity in the dairy case. Grabbing a quart of milk, the expiration date (or ‘best by’ date if you prefer) is around Jan. 27. About two weeks. Okay, that makes sense. Look over at the Darigold milk. Same thing – one quart, whole milk. Expiration? March something or other. WTF? First thought was that it was a mistake on their part in the dating process. But, no, it was consistent across the board. Why was the Darigold milk clocking in at over a month longer shelf life than the other brands?

A quick trip to Google provides. It seems that if one looks closely, you’ll see the Darigold is labeled as ‘super-pasteurized’ or somesuch. Essentially, they use the UHT process of pasteurization. Whats that mean? Go look it up on wiki. The practical upshot is that the unopened container will keep for a lot longer than a similar container of the regularly pasteurized stuff. However, and this is a big caveat, once the container is opened the milk goes bad at the same rate as the regular stuff. So, it’ll keep unopened in the fridge for quite a while but once you crack it open you gotta use it up as fast as you would regular milk.

Wheres the advantage? Well, for me, I only use milk on cornflakes and a little bit in cooking. So its entirely possible I can buy a quart of milk but not use it for a couple weeks. For me, this is a good choice. If you’ve got three kids and go through a couple gallons a day, no real benefit.

The more savvy of you out there will recognize this as the claim to fame of the Parmalat milk products and indeed UHT is the process that is used by Parm. I’ll be contacting Darigold Monday to ask them some more questions about this.

Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – “If you don’t kill the criminals, they will all come back,” a Haitian police officer shouts over a loudspeaker in the country’s most notorious slum, imploring citizens to take justice into their own hands.

Positively medieval.

On a side note, the weapons I see most in terms of firearms are shotguns. I’m guessing thats what most of the cops carried there. Guy with an AK, a 55-gallon drum of water, some gas, and a pallet of freezedrieds could be the new president down there.