The ability to self-rescue is critically important. A 100-year storm or adverse event isn’t something that happens every hundred years, it merely means you have a 1% chance of experiencing it in any given year. If people had a 1% chance of winning the lottery, they’d play every day and twice on Sunday. Yet with the same chance of seeing extreme weather events, people tend to snooze until a disaster is upon them.
Denying potential threats can result in serious injury or death to you and your loved ones. Or your becoming refugees.
Americans have recently seen the near-biblical damage caused by Hurricane Helene from Florida through the Appalachian mountains to North Carolina. We’ve also seen the feckless response to Helene by the Biden-Harris administration. FEMA complained that it ran out of disaster relief funding not three months after the DHS head Alejandro Myorkas said FEMA was “tremendously prepared” for hurricane season.
Fortunately, the bulk of those in the affected areas tend to be strong people. These folks believe in God, self-reliance, and helping their neighbors and they’ve been doing just that with America’s can-do spirit.
FEMA ineffectual non-response should reaffirm to everyone that the government won’t always be there to help and that self-rescue is everyone’s first priority in a disaster’s aftermath. The prudent person will prepare for emergencies because when seconds count, the first responders are minutes, hours, or even days away.
You’ve heard it before – you are your own first responder. With proper planning and preparedness, you can help yourself and your family turn a life-threatening emergency into a bothersome inconvenience. A failure to plan, though, is a plan to fail. In some cases, there are places for people who didn’t prepare. They are called refugee camps.
Preparedness isn’t hard
Believe it or not, ready.gov has some great information for everyone on how to prepare for emergencies before they happen. These include specifics for those with pets and disabilities, for businesses, and more. Ready.com coaches people on how to build their own emergency kits, make plans, and much more.
The one area they mysteriously don’t cover, though, is defending your family from morally and ethically challenged individuals who might want to take advantage of the chaos that follows a disaster.
Buying a gun for self-defense
While making a couple of my recent firearm purchases, I overheard others there picking up their very first handgun. All of the buyers were in their 20s. One guy picked a GLOCK 19 for his first purchase, a good general purpose gun suited to both carry and self-defense.
Another chose a Walther something or another, going for a more exotic defensive pistol. Finding holsters and spare magazines for it might prove challenging, but he’ll learn that on his own.
The third, a woman, picked up her Smith & Wesson Bodyguard 2.0, an outstanding small handgun well suited to deep concealment and smaller paws.
Clearly lots of Americans continue to vote with their wallets when it comes to recognizing and embracing firearm ownership for self-defense.
Don’t just buy a gun
Buying a gun is good, but it doesn’t make you a gunfighter. It does, however, give you a fighting chance. When you buy a new sidearm, you need a few things beside the gun.
First and foremost, you need a holster. An inexpensive, Kydex outside-the-waistband holster is fine for range work. For those who will carry, something inside the waistband is more appropriate for concealment for both men and women.
A good gun belt will anchor your holster firmly against your body (along with spare mags if you carry them) to make it carrying more comfortable and minimize the chance that other people will notice you’re packing.
Buy a couple of boxes of hollow-point ammunition by one of a major American manufacturers, preferably 50-round boxes. Avoid the not-so-jury-friendly ones labelled with names like “Kill ’em Dead” or “Dead Right There.” Shoot a box to familiarize yourself with how the gun handles with stout loads and to make sure your personal defense gun likes the ammo and doesn’t malfunction. If the ammo you’ve chosen runs flawlessly, load the second box you bought into your magazines for social purposes and pick up a couple more boxes for defensive use down the road.
What else do you need? Spare magazines. Magazines are a disposable commodity. They don’t last forever and with use can become damaged with use over time. Have at least three magazines minimum, and a pair of magazine pouches or other method to carry them on your belt.
Frankly, five mags total is an even better number to have. Number them with a paint marker or metallic Sharpie pen (and maybe put your initials on them too) so if you have a problem with magazine number two, you can toss it it, use it for malfunction clearing drills, or give it to someone you really don’t like.
Then go practice once in a while.
In the gun control utopia of Illinois where I live, we’re required to shoot a 30-round qualification course every five years for a carry license renewal. Yeah, I know all about how carry licenses violate the Second Amendment and all that in a perfect world. However, Ill-annoy isn’t a perfect place and neither are the people who pass our laws, even when they’re sober.
My instructor friends say they have more than a few people in every renewal class who haven’t shot their gun since their last 30-round qualification five years earlier. That’s kind of scary. Don’t be that guy or gal.
Seek out quality training to make yourself harder to kill. Learn the standards by which you will be judged if it comes to using a firearm in self-defense to make yourself harder to convict in the aftermath of a defensive gun use. Lastly, carry some sort of legal insurance to cover your legal representation should the worst happen.
Besides a gun, what do you need for self-rescue?
Common sense goes a long way, in addition to the stuff they recommend at Ready.gov. Another really important life-saver is good friends. Not “Facebook friends” but the sort of friends who will help you move (or move a tree off your house). People like that who will come when you need them are priceless. Of course, you have to reciprocate when the situation arises.
Good neighbors are invaluable as well, which is why it’s important to build bridges with your neighbors, even the ones who can be problematic at times.
Take care of yourself. Don’t cheap out or overlook personal safety gear for you, your spouse and your kids. Gloves will protect hands so have lots on hands, because they can get wet or misplaced. Good boots will protect your feet. Throw in some clear safety glasses for low-light cleanup. Then there are things like a bump cap or helmet (falling objects can be a thing in the aftermath of storms).
Chainsaw chaps cost real money, but provide cheap insurance against serious, potentially crippling injuries when you’re tired, wet, and uncomfortable while running a saw. Remember that emergency medical care will likely not be available by calling 911 in the aftermath of a serious emergency.
That means first aid supplies will also be very important. At the very least, you should have a tourniquet (or a few) and Israeli battle dressing (aka “The Emergency Bandage”) for the really big boo-boos.
No matter whether you live in an apartment, a trailer or a house, keep your car’s gas tank full whenever you can. Fill up when it gets to half empty. If you live in a house or trailer, keep some extra gasoline on hand. Stabilize it with PRI-G or Star Tron fuel stabilizers, and keep it in tightly sealed containers. Winter-blend gas is preferred as it will start easier in cold weather. You’ll appreciate that when pull-starting your generator in zero-degree weather.
What else applies to everyone, no matter where they live? Don’t get dehydrated. Drink plenty of water. The first thing to go when you get dehydrated is your ability to concentrate. If you’re using a chainsaw, generator, power tools or heavy equipment, a loss of concentration can turn crippling (or shocking) in an instant. Be sure to store at least a case of bottled water for every member of your household for emergencies. And yes, you can get dehydrated even in cool or cold weather.
Kiddos (pre-teens, at least) often love to help. Get them appropriate sized work gloves (procured ahead of an emergency) and give them a task that’s relatively safe to keep them occupied. Don’t forget the reward for following through. Failure to keep them busy might result in them hindering cleanup rather than helping.
If you’re doing damage assessment or storm cleanup after dark, light is your friend. Frankly, if you’re working indoors, there might not be electricity for light. Make sure you have a headlamp to keep your hands free, in addition to lanterns, flashlights, and batteries.
Also have some sort of backup communication. This includes battery chargers for your phones, walkie-talkie UHF/VHF radios, and even potentially a Starlink receiver.
The bottom line
Prudent planning will help your family survive and maybe even thrive in the aftermath of a disaster. Better yet, it will keep you and your family alive and out of a refugee camp.
Don’t rely on the government to save you. Even if they get there, you may learn first hand the nine scariest words in the English language: “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”
All boxes checked here. Good stuff to be reminded of from time to time.
In a scene from one of the Lethal Weapon sequels, Mel Gibson’s character meets his blonde girlfriend in a supermarket and chats while she peruses the produce section. He notices that she is only placing a few items in her hand basket, and inquires about it.
She replies, “I come here every day to buy what I feel like eating at the time. I don’t want to buy food for future use if I won’t be in the mood to eat it and will want something else, so I just buy day to day.”
Gibson gives a quizzical look and a “okay, I guess” shrug of his shoulders.
I actually know some people like that, who don’t go to the store until the fridge is almost empty. Anyone who didn’t learn his/her lesson during 2020’s COVID supply shortages will be doomed to repeat it.
“Give it to spmeone you don’t like.” I like it. I shoukd”ve done that with my ex-wife.
The glock 19 is the K frame of this era. Just about perfect. S&W makes a good semi but their mags are stupid expensive. Food, water, tools and some medical supplies. Know your neighbors.
Slow down? I’m posting too quickly? It’s my second comment. What kind of bs is this?
Never less than 30 days worth of food, 150 hundred gallons of water with multiple ways to purify more. 2 full trauma kits with supplies for 2 people each. Radios for communication and solar to charge batteries and this is just a few of the preps we have. My Ol’Man grew up during the Great Depression and instilled in me to always be prepared for the worse case scenario.
Darkman,
I also have solar panels. I have three panels rated at 440 Watts each (1360 Watts total) already operating on mounts facing south. I have five more of those panels “in reserve”–not yet mounted/operational although ready to produce electricity within hours if I really need them. While the power production numbers sound quite high, those numbers refer to perfect conditions:
brand new panels at the equator in unrealistically cool temperatures and with the sun directly overhead. I figure that each of my three panels can produce (on bright sunny days) about 350 Watts peak from early April to early September and about 250 Watts peak late October through through February. Of course they produce a LOT less on cloudy days. I figure that each of those panels can produce about 50 Watts during typical winter cloudy days and about 60 Watts on typical summer cloudy days. I scaled my current three-panel system so that they can operate my medium size deep-freezer indefinitely if the electric grid is unavailable longer than I can run on gasoline generator.
Water is fairly easy for me: I have a well which I can operate with my gasoline generator. If something happens where I anticipate that the electric grid will be down for several months, I will stop running my gasoline generator when I am down to four gallons of gasoline and then only start the generator for run times of about 15 minutes as needed to pump water out of my well into storage containers (such as several 5-gallon buckets and never-used 20-gallon horse manure “muck buckets”.) In that scenario, I will have clean water for many months. And if that fails, we have a neighborhood park with a pond that is spring-fed about 330 yards away. (I have ways to purify that water for drinking of course.)
I have additional resources at the ready which I will not disclose on an open forum such as this website. Where things get really difficult is if a tornado severely damages my home. At that point I leave the area and connect with family/friends in other locations. Fortunately where I live, floods, hurricanes, forest fires, and severe earthquakes are an impossibility so I don’t have to worry about complete widespread devastation due to natural disasters. The only complete widespread disasters that I have to consider are man-made infrastructure catastrophes at the hands of terrorists or foreign military forces.
“Winter-blend gas is preferred as it will start easier in cold weather. You’ll appreciate that when pull-starting your generator in zero-degree weather.”
I like to think that I am extremely well informed on a lot of topics–especially gasoline and generators. I also have a ton of experience operating my home on generator (likely in excess of 800 hours thanks to our horribly unreliable electric utility) spanning very cold to very hot temperatures. While I have heard of “winter-blend gasoline” many times, I had never heard that winter-blend gasoline is easier to start in small engines in cold temperatures.
I will try very hard in the next week to drain the summer-blend gasoline still in my generator and replace it with winter-blend gasoline. Thanks for the tip Mr. Boch.
I will add one consideration to this article.
If you are only concerned (for all intents and purposes) about having a handgun for self-defense in the aftermath of a disaster–meaning that it will sit in storage until the disaster and you will not shoot it until the disaster strikes–I highly recommend that you acquire a revolver rather than a semi-automatic pistol. The truth of the matter is that semi-automatic pistols can be finicky: some need 200 shots to break-in before they are reliable, some are reliable from the get-go although only with certain types of ammunition, and still others are reliable from the get-go with some magazines and not reliable with other magazines. Of course some semi-auto pistols are 100% reliable from the get-go with all magazines and all types of ammunition. The problem: you have no way of knowing how the semi-auto pistol that you plan to acquire will function.
Don’t get me wrong: I like semi-auto pistols, I own a few, I carry one every day, and I like shooting them. I have also seen a significant percentage of them be unreliable until I invested a non-trivial amount of time and effort to get to the point that they are reliable. That being the case, if your plan (realistically–be honest with yourself) is to buy one handgun and store it until a disaster, a revolver is the most reliable option for that use case.
Don’t forget perimeter security for when you can’t be everywhere at once.
Perimeter security is a very tough nut to crack where I live and I have yet to think of any solution that is doable.
I will have cameras around my home giving me the ability to see out of all sides of my home. And I have pretty significant outdoor lighting (via LED floodlights) providing usable light to all of my yard with the exception of one back corner that is about 70 yards away from my home.
I have been meaning to purchase some sort of minimalist trauma kit with a tourniquet, gauze pad, and clotting powder. This article is reminding me to redouble my efforts to identify such a kit and finally buy one (or two, or three, or …).
I put together my 2 trauma kits for about $300 each. My Medic is a good source. Also take advantage of the interweb to get training. Prep Medic, Dark Angel Medical, and Skinny Medic are some good sites
Darkman,
Thank you for the suggestions. I will check them out.