Good Morning Sir,
My question pertains to a February 24, 2010 blog post, where there was mentioned an EMP ground for one’s vehicle. This is the first I have heard of a ground wire for today’s vehicles that would prevent electronics from being damaged. Is this true sir? Thanks for providing us all the education to survive. - Tim S.

JWR Replies: A grounding strap offers only marginal EMP protection for a vehicle. The type that were mentioned are the sort that you can see used on many trucks, especially fuel delivery trucks, where the concern is a buildup of static electricity.

With a quick web search, I found one vendor on the Internet with straps at reasonable prices. They do eventually wear out, so you should probably buy several. But again, they are more for static electricity discharge protection than EMP protection. Sadly, the only way to make your vehicle truly safe from close proximity EMP is to convert it to a traditional ignition system. Alternatively, if you leave the electronic ignition system installed, you'd have to carry spare ignition components in a couple of layers of Faraday protection. ( Alternating layers of aluminum foil and ziploc bags should work fine.

I should also mention that once parked, while preparing to unload fuel, gas tanker trucks use a separate grounding cable, for even greater protection, from a static discharge kablooey.

It is important to note the EMP is a different animal than lightning, so the grounding rules are not quite the same. For example, a ground connection can actually be counterproductive to EMP shielding if you use a lengthy linear object underground, such as a water or sewer pipe. For anyone with a basic understanding of lightning protection, it may sound hard to believe, but EMP can actually couple with underground linear metal objects! So if you do decide to use a ground for any of your electronic gear, then don't use anything longer that a six foot long ground rod.

A SurvivalBlog reader who is an Electromagnetic Compatibility (EMC) engineer added these comments:
"Many people are under the false impression that a ground connection is some sort of magic sump into which they can dump electric current and electromagnetic fields they don't want. To some degree this impression comes from the fact that power lines and other electrical wires entering our buildings are grounded at the point of entry. The reason for this ground is to give a path for lightning strikes to wires external to the building a lower resistance path back to the source of the electric current (in this case the Earth) than though something inside the building. The service entrance ground rod does not play a part in electrical safety insidethe building provided by the ground wires run with the hot and neutral power wires. The key issue here is that the ground wires are connected to the neutral wire at the service entrance bond point. That same bond point is where the ground rod is connected, but the physical path to earth ground is not why the ground wires in the house help safety.

By the way this is why portable generators do not need to be grounded per the National Electrical Code (NEC). All they need is the internal bond from neutral to the ground wire.

In a similar way, when it comes to electromagnetic energy (radio waves) the important issue is shielding rather than grounding. The most effective shielding is made of a continuous conductive surface that totally surrounds what we want to protect. This is why the advice to wrap equipment that we wish to protect from EMP in aluminum foil is excellent. The continuous conductive surface of the foil with joints that overlap each other provides extremely effective shielding from all types of electromagnetic waves including those from EMP. Grounding the foil to an earth ground makes no difference in its effectiveness.

Static electricity also is stopped by shielding, and discharges to a conductive shield flow around the outside surface of the shield and do not damage equipment inside the shield. Again a connection to earth ground will make zero difference in the protection provided by the shielding.

Ground straps on vehicles provide a path to equalize the local static electric potentials and reduce the chance of a static discharge that might cause fuel fumes or other explosive or flammable gasses or liquids to ignite. A separate ground wire as you mention is even more effective. In both cases they work because they reduce or eliminate static electric potential differences that could cause a spark, not because they are tied to the physical earth."

Jim,
I know your time is valuable,so I will get right to it. The recent post on buying [decommissioned underground US Air Force Intercontinental Ballistic] missile sites raises a question. Aren't these sites vulnerable during nuclear attacks/exchange with a foreign country? Thanks for your site and your service. - John

JWR Replies: They would only be pinpoint targets if the Soviets are still using ancient targeting data, and that is very unlikely. From all that I have read, they simply are no longer included in the "target structure" for any nation states that are potential combatants. (Like Russia, China, and North Korea.) I cannot imagine a nation state being that inept. The only significant threat to some of these decommissioned sites is that they are contiguous to--or immediately downwind of--newer, currently-deployed missile sites. That was case for a old Titan I silo that I researched on behalf of a consulting client, who was considering buying it. This site is near Chugwater, Wyoming--which is also the home of a fairly new, active Minuteman III silos!)

On a related note, I should mention that I was forced to use out-of-date nuclear targeting data in my book "Rawles on Retreats and Relocation", but only because there has been no declassified targeting data (that is, CIA assessment of likely Soviet targets) released since the late 1970s.

Jim,
Sean in Malibu mentioned watching the episode of The Twilight Zone called "The Shelter". Your readers might like to know that the full episode is viewable online [free of charge] at the CBS web site.
Best, - Matt R.

James Wesley,
That episode of of The Twilight Zone a reader mentioned was one of the reasons that prompted me to be very quiet about my preps. I (and my family) use the "need to know" rule.

I'm all for charity, but I agree with your approach of doling it out anonymously, through our church. (We're Baptists.) The characters in your novel ["Patriots"] showed the right approach. Like them, I plan to "give until it hurts", but in the event of a major whammy,, I'll do so very discreetly, through a third party. Thanks for your wise counsel. You truly are the Mel Tappan of the new century. - Alexander G. (Ten Cent Challenge subscriber.)

Hi Jim,
One of the most common failures which will cripple your G.O.O.D. (Get Out Of Dodge) vehicle is a broken fan/accessory belt. Granted, the newer [flat, grooved] serpentine belts last a lot longer than the old V-belts, but failure will mean overheating or the eventual loss of ignition due to battery discharge, especially at night if headlights are needed.

So a spare belt and tension release tool (usually a 1/2" ratchet or breaker bar, for a serpentine belt) is a must for your emergency parts kit. [JWR Adds: Whenever you change your vehicle's serpentine as a part of a regular service, save the old one to carry in your vehicle as a spare. An old belt is better than no belt.]

Also consider some thick, sticky caulk that you can work with your fingers, which can be used to plug a radiator leak. The fire-stop used by electricians works well. Be sure to open the radiator cap to release any pressure (Watch out for scalding steam!) and leave it loose. I have seen a vehicle driven hundreds of miles in that condition after being hit by debris from the road.

Keep up the good work. - Larry P.

Hello James,
Like many others, I've just finished reading "Patriots" for the second time. The first time, 10 years ago, I didn't take notes while reading it, this time I did! I have just discovered your site and was reading a post about your vehicle. While the extra ignition and fuel components are nice, the EMP (electromagnetic pulse) will very likely take out the alternator regulator as well. It could also quite likely take out your car's computer and possibly the electronic dashboard (depending on the model). Even analog looking dashboards these days are full of electronics instead of actual, physical things like speedometer cables, or a capillary tube to a pressure switch. The computer may go into "limp home mode" if it's not getting information from the throttle position switch, mass air flow sensor, or manifold absolute pressure switch, the crank position sensor, etc. Another possibility is that the vehicle won't run at all.

If at all possible, for those who need not go very far to get to their retreat, buy something old like the Bronco in your book or an old CJ or Willys overland wagon. Basically anything that uses points. Tune it up, yank the points distributor, and store it along with a distributor wrench. Install an electronic ignition distributor, and run a jumper wire across the ballast resistor, as electronic distributors need 12 volts and points need 6 volts. If you have a GM product, remove the "resistance wire" that is used instead of the ballast resistor and replace it with a regular wire and ballast resistor from a Ford or Dodge.

When EMP destroys your distributor, install the points distributor and motor happily away for the next 15K miles as the EMP will not affect a points distributor in the slightest. Be sure to remove or cut the jumper wire on the ballast resistor, or you will only motor for 500 miles (Bosch) or 1000 miles (Standard) on a set of points, running them at 12 volts. Just a thought. - Bill J.

Mr. Rawles,
I recently started reading Survivalblog and find it very helpful. In hopes of providing some help of my own, I would like to address the question of survival vehicles especially in regards to EMP survival. I am an ASE certified master automotive technician with a background in not only automotive repair but also agricultural and diesel mechanics as well as welding.

To get right to the point, today's automobiles have so many electronic components and control modules that there is no way to stow enough parts to make them operational after exposure to an EMP. The only way to be confident in your vehicle's ability to function after an EMP is if it is equipped with a carburetor rather than fuel injection (unless it's mechanical like some of the old European autos or an older diesel) and a mechanical fuel pump. As for the ignition system, electronic ignition has been standard since the mid 1970's. However, there is a chance to stow enough spare parts to get an older electronic ignition back up and running if it is a simple design like the old GM HEI that doesn't use an external engine control module. The best and safest bet, though, would be to get your hands on an old points-type distributor that would be installed in your vehicle if it did fall victim to an EMP, especially if a second or third or more might come.

I would also recommend a standard transmission and, if the vehicle is 4-wheel drive, a manually operated transfer case and front wheel locking hubs. The reason for this is because starting in the mid to late 1980's even automatic transmissions are computer controlled and any truck with push button 4-wheel drive is also using a computer to engage the transfer case. In fact, virtually any automobile built since the mid to late 1990's uses computers to do even such basic things as turn on the head lights! There is a reason that the government keeps coming up with things like cash for clunkers and emissions inspections to get old cars to the crusher!

My personal vehicle is a 1985 Toyota Landcruiser with a carburetor, electronic ignition, manual transmission, transfer case and manual front hubs. It's not fast, fancy or efficient but it is simple to repair and super tough. The only weakness from the factory is the electronic ignition but it can be repair with just one part after and EMP or be fitted with an older distributor. Other models that I would consider for my personal use would be a Chevy, Ford or Dodge truck build before 1986 (that's the year electronic fuel injection became pretty much standard on domestically made truck, 1984 for cars) but it would be even better if it were built before 1980 since Detroit was using some super finicky feedback carburetors after that. Most all trucks that fit that production range can be fitted with an older distributor if desired but they all definitely have a simple electronic ignition system. The best thing to do would be to find a survival-minded mechanic and get his advice and help with your plans. - Elijah K.

JWR Replies: Thanks for that suggestion. I am constantly amazed at the depth of knowledge provided by SurvivalBlog readers. I will be including some details on carburetor and timing adjustments for unusual fuels like natural gas distillate ("drip.")in my forthcoming sequel to my novel "Patriots".

Good day, Sir!
What a pleasure it was to see that a like minded individual spoke out about this often neglected aspect of preparedness. It was gratifying to find that your "survival tool set" matches my own core tool collection almost exactly. However... I'm not certain how you get all of that into one toolbox!

I have a two-tray box exactly as you describe with virtually identical dimensions...and there is no way you're going to get all those tools in that one box. I presume you are referring to your "road box" with that description. In my own collection, the 1/2" set has it's own box...as do the pliers/grips, drivers, bicycle tools, my number two 3/8" set came with it's own box, et cetera. Besides what's on your list, I've also got a set of Torx bits for working on newer GM and a 1/2 impact driver (the handheld kind that you hit with a hammer) with a selection of impact bits and sockets. In addition, I've collected a few oddities that have allowed me to minimize my spending on personal transportation. I spent just $1,000 this year on vehicles. I bought four, killed off two, sold one, and am currently driving the fourth as it's engine has been overhauled (by me) and it came with an almost-new transmission (and a pristine body, which is why I bothered overhauling the engine). To do this, I've also obtained items like a ring compressor, coil spring compressors, brake tools, ball joint fork (actually makes a good pry bar in some situations where a crowbar doesn't work as well), and some simple diagnostic tools, like a timing strobe. I've been debating whether or not to invest $100 or so on an OBDII reader.

I've also made the habit of picking out any free information I can find on things mechanical. The Briggs and Stratton mower I purchased a few years back came with a code to the B&S web site where you could download a free brochure on small engine maintenance. I've used this information to keep the mower running like new. You probably know that it's possible to kludge together a gas powered generator with nothing more than a good 4-5 horsepower mower engine, an auto alternator, and an inverter. I got the inverter at a wholesale liquidators for 20 cents on the dollar. It's only a 400 Watt unit, but that will keep a few lights burning. I plan to tinker with it until I feel confident to move up to a more powerful home built rig.

Anyway, enough about me. I enjoyed the article and I will be visiting your site regularly in the future! - Brian S.

Sir:
As a former aircraft mechanic and elevator tech, I thoroughly agree with the survival tools articles, which I saw on LewRockwell.com. Also consider the kind of vehicles you want to keep running. I like old air cooled VWs because they are simple and designed to be maintained by the owner. One of mine has 700,000 miles on it. If there is an electromagnetic pulse from a nuclear weapon there are no computers that will fail. The simple carburetor is easily modified to run on alcohol. They will even run on kerosene if warmed up on gas first. In the 1970s many were modified to run on propane, see the MotherEarthNews.com article under "transportation". They even have an article on running cars on wood gas from firewood! A local company converts them to electric power. Many American cars from the 60's are simple too. I also have a 1967 Chevelle with a Straight 6 engine and 3 speed transmission.

Pick up a copy of HotVWs magazine for parts sources and info. - Pat from Florida

Mr. Rawles,
The following describes my background and how it shaped me.

My Parents' Influences
My parents were from the south (Eastern Tennessee)
They were also children of the Great Depression, their families were farmers and it was normal to prepare for winter or hard times.
Both my parents could can food, especially vegetables and fruit.
My father was an avid hunter and trapper.
I learned from a young age from my parents, never take anything for granted, prepare for good and bad times.

My Childhood
My parents moved to Ohio for work, where I was born.
I spent my youth (from birth to 15 years of age), I lived half of the year in Tennessee and the other in Ohio.
I helped out on uncle’s farm in Tennessee, where my Dad and Uncle taught me to work the land, process livestock, harvest honey & wild fruits and vegetables.
My Uncle and Aunt were children of the Great Depression, yep they were preppers too.
Why this is important, this was the late 1960s to early 1970s.
Their farm was on a route road, where electricity was iffy at best, no city water and the closest store was 25 to 30 miles away, it was natural to just prepare, stock up and be ready instead of heading out on long peat gravel back roads, especially in the winter.

I lost my father, uncle, and aunt in a close span of time together when I was 16 years old. But my Dad, Uncle, Aunt and my Mom gave me some great gifts on taking care of myself.

Young Adulthood
We didn’t get to Tennessee to much after the deaths of my Dad, Uncle and Aunt.
My Mom lost the drive to prepare, can and such.
I did for a while, but once I started working two full time jobs I stopped prepping.
I was working maintenance and training to become a deputy sheriff.
But I still prepped with can goods, drink powders and well water.

An Evacuation
In 1986, we had an industrial accident that affected the region, that started me back to be a prepper
A freight train hauling industrial materials derailed, some of the cars were carrying Phosphorus,
Which caught fire and released a poisonous gas, this caused more of the small towns along the rail line to be evacuated, including our town.
This was my first experience in seeing the baser instincts of human nature take over.
You have to remember, these were small towns, not vast urban areas.
The looting and robbery and loss of the rule of law began.
I saw people fight with police at road blocks.
I saw people nearly run officers dow with their cars.
As in New Orleans during Katrina (several years after the derailment event), some cops didn’t show up for duty, because they were worried about their families.
Our town had not been evacuated as of yet. I was told not to report to any of my jobs, and I wasn’t called up to help.
In fact most law enforcement pulled out of the area to a central location.
I decided to send my mom and younger sister to a family members home outside of the affected area.
And I stayed and protected the home and cared for the animals.
This is the first time I used an Israeli gas mask. It worked quite well.
This was 14 years before 9/11 attacks.
I sealed the windows, doors and any other exterior accesses with towels and duct tape. That worked great.
I set back and watched the circus unfold on television and listen to the scanner, with my Ruger Service Six on the couch.
After the evacuation, the scanner traffic slowed down, a lot of local departments were working their bases out of the county seat in a safe area.
We lived near the town square, so I watched this small but busy town turn into a scene from a nuclear war movie. The traffic stopped, the traffic light in the middle of town wasn’t working due to a car wreck.
Then slowly the cloud appeared, white, thicker than fog.
I was stuck in the house for two days until the fire burned out and the cloud dissipated.
According to police friends, several looters arrested, and one was shot and wounded by a home owner.
One of the evacuation centers at a school turned into a free for all and the police had to shut it down.
So I guess I have a taste of the TEOTWAWKI experience. I hope I never have to experience it again.

Prepper Anew
That experience renewed the prepper instinct in me.
But things had changed, I now lived in a more residential area.
Not much room for a big garden to can or live stock to keep.
So I started looking and what the Boy Scouts and military were doing.
MREs were just a dream, C rations were expensive if you could find any.
So I started with civilian canned goods.
Canned goods available in stores keep an average of one year, maybe up to two years if they are kept in a safe, dry place. This works great if you consume the products and rotate in new during that time.
Some people want to get something that will last 5 -10 -20 years, that’s fine, but I think you should check your stores more often.
Presently, I have a mixture of Dehydrated, freeze dried foods, canned meats, seeds (non-hybrid), food bars and MREs.
55 gallon barrels of potable water and a rain barrel system.
I’m working on a 4x4 vehicle, just in case I have to make a run for it.
I prepare to stay, but I have food bars and portable water, brigade first aid kits in a bug-out set up.
Go to the Dollar stores, you can great deals on basic medical, sanitary, and food products.
Don’t be a snob, it all works.

Guns
I don’t know about you, but I’m a working stiff, no longer a sheriff’s deputy I work in the trades. (Another gift from my family upbringing, I can fix just about anything.)
I can’t afford $1.000 to $1.800 weapons. So if you are in a similar financial situation, I would advise you to check your local pawn shops.

I’ve found great deals on used guns. Here is what I've bought, and my costs:
A Interarms Star M30 9mm 15 shot DA/SA auto pistol, a design once issued to the Brazilian military $299.
Mossberg 12ga 20” barrel pump $150
Taurus Mod 66 .357 $169
Hi-Point C9 9mm $130
Ruger 10/.22 $199
The guns at shows are now often much too expensive.
Don’t be a gun snob. Functionality is key, not a gun's looks.

A gun is a tool, if you can’t buy a S&W, then buy two Hi-Point pistols and have money for the ammo.
In the heat of combat, a gun jams and I can’t clear it, I'll leave it, whether it’s a S&W or a Hi-Point,
Plus the more of the same weapons you have, the more extra parts you’ll have if one goes bad.
The cheapest and easiest to get ammo right now is for shotguns and .22 LR rimfires.
No matter what the caliber, bullet placement is the key to survival. In my police training, I was trained to aim for the Instant Neutralization Zone. This starts with ocular window and runs down to the lower edge of the solar plexus
One other important lesson from my training was to stay out of the Immediate Threat Radius. That is anywhere within 10 feet of an armed opponent.
If you are in the Immediate Threat Radius, even if you get the first shot off [with a handgun], you’ll probably still get shot or stabbed by the bad guy.

Tools
Tools are just like guns, if you can’t afford Klein or Snap-On brands, then buy Stanley brand and buy more of them.
Learn to work on everything.
Stock up on fasteners, extra wood, and any thing else you use at a regular intervals.
Store some gas, kerosene what ever you use.

Faith
Get a Bible, and study it.
Most important have faith in God and in yourself.
I pray every day that none of this prepping will ever be needed.
Of what I’ve seen of the baser side of human nature, if the world goes to he**, there will be a lot of death and sorrow that will touch everyone.
Don’t ask for war, things will go their way by nature and will happen in their own time.

Remember;
“The Angels of the Lord encamp around those who love him.
The Lord will deliver him in his time of need. "

Wishing SurvivalBlog Readers God's Blessings - Gary J.

Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) of the regional effect scale is a threat during times of potential crisis with a megaton class nuclear equipped foe who also has near-space launch capability for these weapons. An EMP-like event of greater strength and duration is also possible during extreme solar flare events. These types of event are caused by ionospheric excitation of the upper atmosphere by subatomic particles and plasma ejected from a massive solar discharge, this motion in the conductive plasma generates massive amounts of radio waves.

An antenna is any conductor of electricity which inductively converts radio waves into voltage, usually grabbing signals in the microvolt range, but--like a tuned guitar string vibrates in harmony when another tuned guitar string is plucked--an antenna best resonates to a frequency resonant with its length. I would ask the readers to quickly brush up on antenna theory with one of the many excellent tutorials on the Internet.

Fortunately for off the grid equipment like portable electronics and vehicles an antenna that best receives these high energy HF radio waves is measured in tens of meters, unfortunately that makes things like electrical power lines and long antennas particularly well suited to absorbing and transmitting large induced voltages into your sensitive solid state electronics.

It is important to remember, if you are concerned about EMP follow the old instructions for during a thunderstorm, disconnect all antennas and unplug your electronics. At a minimum filter your mains power and install gas discharge tubes on antenna feeds for mission critical radios.

Why do the tube tech gadgets survive where solid state dies from HERF? When an errant voltage spike enters a vacuum tube it can just discharge itself to ground if strong enough (so ground everything electronic at every opportunity), the other large components can also mostly take a sudden flash of high voltage without being destroyed. In solid state the junction size is almost universally quite small and if a reversed voltage is applied against the bias of the semiconductor or an over-voltage is applied the gate is almost always ruined in a way that requires component replacement.

While tube tech is much more survivable in an EMP environment, and HF (shortwave) radios are at high risk being tuned to the most affected bands, I wish to remind the readers that in nearly all other categories tube tech is far less survivable and is notoriously wasteful of precious off-grid electricity. The several downsides to "hollow state" tech is mechanical fragility and short life span compared to solid state, we are talking about blown glass and incandescent filaments essentially like a box of light bulbs to the uninitiated. In a well stocked retreat a tube type radio could be an asset after serious preps have been completed, although for the price of a quality collectors item several high quality military grade (civilian ham radio) solid state radios, the tools and parts to repair them, and proper antenna line and power input traps for errant voltage could be purchased providing much better reliable communications to your retreat than tube tech could.

I actually like to play with hollow state components especially when whipping up simple DIY radios and electronics with the kids, it is a much better visual learning tool which can be used to explain how the solid state components work.

I highly recommend that any serious survivalist invest in several good butane soldering irons, quality fluxed lead alloy solder, and a good tackle box full of replacement components, these can either be harvested from junked electronics or purchased in large grab bags form most large electronics engineering supply outlets. The Brunton Fuel Tool [lighter filling adaptor] makes keeping butane in a usable form easier for a prepper by avoiding the mostly incompatible gas cigarette lighter refill cans and instead using lantern/stove cartridges. These, combined with quality test equipment means that most damaged, shot, soaked, or even EMP-damaged electronics could be saved if you have the time to spare testing out components.

If the readers fail to procure the required hollow state and solid state components and practice their electronics repair skills by kitting or repairing intentionally damaged electronics they will not be able to use these skills during a crisis where mission critical equipment might be taken offline.

You must intelligently train, equip yourself for, and practice your medical, electronics, on and off-road driving, long range bicycling, cooking, fieldcraft, armed and unarmed combat, loaded hiking, carpentry, navigation, boating, food preservation, butchering, cycling, farming, veterinary, water finding, cooking, hunting, fishing, leadership, metal smithing, mechanical repair and fabrication, engineering and other critical survival skills. Being a real survivor has nothing to do with hobby shooting, wide-eyed fanatics, or overweight dude commandos, it is about living your life with the calm confidence that you are walking in the path that the Lord has set out for you while taking reasonable precautions to protect the life you have been given as well as being a vital asset to your family and community. - David in Israel

Hello Jim,
The History Channel has aired a two-hour long documentary titled 'The Day After Disaster'.

It is a very detailed look at what they describe as our government's top terrorist concern - a 10 kiloton nuke being detonated at/near the Capitol Mall in Washington DC. [JWR Adds: A re-run of this show is scheduled for October 16th at 8 A.M. and 2 P.M.. Tape or Tivo it!]

One of the things that became very clear for me is that, should this event occur in DC or any of the handful of other 'primary target' cities mentioned, our entire country will immediately go into a lockdown that will make the 9/11 aftermath look like a timeout for a five year old. This lock down will mean the immediate grounding of all air traffic, as we saw on 9/11, but also the immediate suspension of all trucking, freight, and port activity. The government will be searching for additional nukes, and to determine how the weapon entered the country. While not stated in the Documentary, there will be no just-in-time deliveries for what could be weeks, and I assume that rationing will be the method of disbursement for a time after that. There is an implied expectation that Marshall Law will be instituted at a national level as well.

If your not ready, this is yet another reason to get ready. Long term larder, and keeping out of the way will make for a much less stressful life than those who stand there like deer in the headlights.

Thank you Jim for all that you do, our prayers are with you and your family. God Bless, - D. McD.

Mr. Rawles,
I have read your blog for awhile, I would like to know if you about the following: I was diagnosed with Graves Disease over two years ago. They cured the Graves Disease and the way that was done was to completely remove my thyroid gland, If the main concern with radiation is thyroid cancer, without a thyroid what would radiation do are what organ would it damage the most. I would like to also know if there would be any need for myself to take Potassium Iodide (KI).

JWR Replies: There would be no need for you to take KI, since it only serves to "load" a thyroid gland with iodine and hence prevent the accumulation of radioactive isotopes that would otherwise accumulate there. Beyond that, in terms of "internal emitters", all that you should remember is to avoid fresh dairy products (since isotopes like Strontium-90 tend to accumulate in milk), and to drink a regular quantity of fluids, to keep your kidneys flushed.

Since you are post-operative, you can jokingly refer to yourself as partially "radiation proof." (At least you don't have to worry as much as the rest of us about radioactive iodine isotopes.)

From a preparedness standpoint, you should look into stocking up on your regular hypothyroid (glandular replacement) prescription, (assuming that you have one). Do so as much as possible, up to the maximum shelf life. And of course you should consistently rotate this supply, using the first-in, first-out (FIFO) method.

Good Morning!
Thank you for the info you provide for all of us in your web site. I live in the Kansas City Area in a beautiful suburb which is one of the nicest cities in the country. till doing okay in the depression too. My work is secure and I do well and I own my own twp-story with basement frame home and have been making it a retreat for the past five years. I have no debt and am 60 days ahead with my mortgage and insurance and utilities. Am I absolutely crazy to try to stay here when things go bad?

First, let me tell you what I have done. I have a new roof ,which is fireproof. I have two large fire extinguishers in each room and more in the basement and garage and attic and I have a 2-inch fire hose with Honda generator to pull water from my 2,000 gallon swimming pool/fountain as well as from my 2,000 gallon [combined capacity] plastic tanks under the deck. Yes, they will freeze in the winter so I may add a new tank in the basement. I have 100 50-pound bags of sand which can also put out fires [and double as ballistic protection].

I have a strong 7' wood cedar privacy fence around my back and side yards and I have landscaped them such that it is difficult to see into my yard from any point but still need to add a few more tall bushes to screen my home. I brought in 80 [cubic] yards of great topsoil for the backyard to level it and to add garden areas so I can grow lots of food. I have a gutter system hooked up to the water storage and I have 3 months of water stored now in the basement and when the time comes new 55 gallon water barrels with hand pumps will be in each of my 4 bath rooms and kitchen. There is a pond and active stream 200' from my home and 5 of my neighbors next door and up hill from me have large swimming pools that I can siphon water from. I can produce clean water for 25 for 20 years with my water filters. So I have five ways to get water when the tap stops running.

I can feed my family for more than five years and then grow food too. I have all the stuff you buy in the stores weekly. I can grow food inside or outside and in a greenhouse too that is next to the house which can be heated with the natural warmth of the earth /basement and wood-burning stove, and sunshine.

We can protect ourselves better than anyone you might know, night and day. I have tried to set up my perimeter in my yard using the fence and bushes and trees and berms, etc. without anyone seeing the difference so that a stray bullet or two will not hit us easily. I will build gravel plywood walls in key places inside when TSHTF to reduce stray bullets. My fireplace is 5' x 5' x 4' deep so I can burn 4' foot logs and keep half my home warm and the firewood is placed outside on the side yards to slow down a bullet or two. The fireplace outside is 10' wide and goes above the roof. I have a wood stack 10 yards long, half of it is 4' long wood. I built a barbeque grill/water fall/pool that is solid 12' concrete that works well to stop bullets and it is 20' long and 8' high and looks really cool too.
In my basement I am finishing I added some 12" concrete walls to also give more strength to the floor above and to
slow down a bullet or two.

There are thick forests within 200' of my neighborhood to hide in if necessary and they run the stream for 50 miles. I have a nice "wine room" that is built to Joel Skousen standards [per his book The Secure Home] just in case the web bots are right and we have a problem with radiation.

I may have missed to say a thing or two but have been through others check lists to cover it all.

Can I make it in the city? Or do I want to be a refugee or try to live with friends four normal driving hours away without my stuff?

Thanks, - B., Near K.C.

JWR Replies: Your preparations are excellent for someone living in the suburbs. I believe that your plans to stay in place will probably suffice for all but a true worst-case scenario. But it is important to get to know your contiguous neighbors well, including the neighbors behind your back fence. Having neighbors that you know on a first name basis, and that you can trust in times of Deep Drama will be crucial in the next decade. At present, my best estimate is that we will likely experience an economic depression that will be on a par with the Great Depression of the 1930s. Crime will be rampant, and you will need to institute a Neighborhood Watch on Steroids. That necessitates solid familiarity and trust.

Attached greenhouses are wonderful for situations where there isn't much home invasion crime, but they are a huge security risk in inimical times.

I recommend that you hedge your bets by pre-positioning some of your supplies with your friends, in anticipation of worst-case grid down collapse, where the municipal water will not be available. This is not a major issue for you, since you have an abundance of stored water, and rainwater collection system. But "grid down" will be a true disaster for your neighbors within just a few days. They will likely abandon their houses, leaving you by yourself to defend against large numbers of very desperate looters. You mentioned that you have a five year food supply --which is quite commendable--I'd recommend that you store up to half of it with your friends in the country. Keep in mind that you may only have the opportunity to make one trip Outta Dodge, so it is important to have some crucial logistics stored at your backup retreat.

In the summer of 1995 I decided to build an underground multipurpose survival shelter. I purchased the book Nuclear War Survival Skills by Cresson H. Kearney and went to work. If you want to know about shelters and what it will be like living in one, then purchase his book. My brother helped me for a while with the construction, but I did the majority of the work alone and it took me two years to complete the project. Let me say up front that I’m an amateur who used a brilliant book to build a shelter. Along the way I made many mistakes and had some unanticipated problems. Hopefully if you decide to do something along these lines you can learn from my many mistakes.

I purchased used 40 foot x 12foot diameter and 20 foot x 8 foot [galvanized steel ] road culvert pipes. The 20 foot long culvert would be used as the entrance to the larger pipe. The first step of my project was to enclose the ends of the 40’ pipe. In the back I used heavy angle iron to frame the end then 2x12s to enclose it. Welding on galvanized metal was a problem for me so I also bolted the braces to the pipe. When I finished enclosing the end it didn’t look right so I placed black roofing felt over the 2x12s and covered it all with a layer of plywood, painted it and then tarred it. I cut a hole in the back at floor level and inserted a 12’’ plastic pipe into the hole and ran the pipe up to the top for airflow. In the front of the pipe I framed it in with angle iron and just used 2x12s. I used 2x12s so that my front solid core entrance door would be right.

I used metal channel iron to enclose the floor of the pipe. I cut the floor frame channels to the proper length so that the floor was about 8ft in height so that I could walk and not hit my head. I installed a plywood floor and placed 4 foot square inserts in the center that would pull up and out for easy access to the lower level. This lower level gives me 4 foot x 40 foot storage under the floor with 8 feet of headroom on top. Along the sides I used two 2x12s wide for bench seats the entire length of the pipe on both sides. This is more than enough seating and is not in the way when you walk around in the pipe. I don’t want to gloss over this part but it took about a year for me to complete the inside.

After I completed the construction of the pipe I was ready to bury it. To accomplish this I rented a 988 Cat[erpillar brand wheel loader with a excavation bucket] and dug a hole for the 40 foot long section. I then buried it to the proper height so the 8 foot piece would match the door and then buried the whole thing. The 20 foot x 8 foot piece extended out the end far enough to prevent the soil from burying the front door. From the bottom of the pipe to the top of the soil is about 22 feet. After burying everything the front didn’t look right. There wasn’t anyway to secure the entrance to the pipe so I then I built a 20x20 wooden shed on the end to secure the entrance. I placed the pipe west to east so the airflow would work and buried the pipe with about 10ft of earth on top of the main 40-foot pipe being sure to protect the plastic air pipe on the end. The book says you only need three feet of compacted earth to protect you from radiation but 10 feet works for temperature control. [JWR Adds: In my experience, only foot depth of clay or loam soil is required to take full advantage of the ambient ground temperature, at least outside of permafrost zones.] The temperature is constant summer and winter and it is pleasant inside. I checked the level of the ground for drainage and adjusted the drainage away from the entrance.

Alongside my buried pipe shelter I placed a Santa Fe Railroad boxcar for storage. This was the real deal and made of solid metal. I filled the boxcar with lots of stuff that could be used for barter or just be used to keep us comfortable. After loading the boxcar with stuff, as a precaution, I welded the two large solid metal doors shut. The doors slid sideways to open so I felt it wouldn’t take much to prevent them from opening.

After I finished construction, my pipe complex was 80ft long, with a storage boxcar alongside. There was water, food, bedding, clothes, everything I could think of that I might need, I stored in the pipe shelter. There is water close by and I also had 8 - 55 gallon. used white plastic Coca-Cola syrup barrels filled with water inside the pipe. When I open the entrance door and the 12’’ plastic air flow pipe you can feel the air flow but according to the book that isn’t enough air for [very] many people and the book tells you how to increase the airflow for more people. On the right side of the pipe there is electrical plugs for 12 volt DC power and 2 Heavy equipment 12 volt DC batteries for power. On the left side of the pipe is 120 volt AC power [conduit and outlets] to be plugged into a generator.

The boxcar was for extra, non-essential items. My family and I could go to my pipe shelter without bringing anything with us and stay there for at least one year.

Lessons I have learned:
My first and biggest mistake was in believing that my property was secure. There is no possible way to secure property if you aren’t there to secure it. I have 120 acres fenced in and the pipe location is out of sight of the main road. I thought the location was secure but it only took the druggies a couple of years to find it. Once the word got out what was there everything went down hill fast. Now the property is always being broken into and trashed. They will steal anything and everything and then trash the rest. I live in the city and the [unoccupied] pipe [shelter] is 200 miles away from my home in the country. The pipe is located in the middle of my land but it doesn’t matter. (Hindsight) When you use wood to enclose your shelter eventually the Prairie dogs and druggies will find a way into it. 4 Wheeler [ATV]s can go anywhere and they do. Not only did they break into my pipe [shelter] and destroy and steal everything, they used a bumper jack to attach to the bottom of my metal door on my boxcar, jack it out and steal everything they wanted. Then when they had everything worth something they burned the boxcar. The interior walls and floor of a boxcar are lined with heavy wood and burns real hot.

So here is where I am now: I had to rebuild the front of the entrance to the pipe. I originally had some windows in front of my pipe complex to help add a little illumination so I used crusher screen cloth to cover the windows and doors. After the druggies broke into the pipe they left it open and the prairie dogs ruined everything left inside. I have cleaned out everything in the pipe and threw it all away. Now the pipe is empty but at least it is still usable, but my boxcar is a burned-out shell and unusable.

If you want to have a place in the country to escape to Good luck. You have to be there to be able to protect it.
I also buried some plastic 55gal barrels with some extra #10 cans of food in them. They have been in the ground for about 10 yrs and I have learned another lesson. There is enough moisture in the barrels to rust through many of the #10 cans. The barrels didn’t leak water but many of the #10 cans still rusted through. If you want to do something like this dip your cans in wax and that will protect the metal #10 cans from rusting. You can buy lids for 55 gallon barrels that snap on to the top of the barrel. They are thin but if you place a piece of rolled plastic on top of the lid and then some ¾’’ plywood over the top of the barrels they will be fine. Mine were buried on end with about two feet of soil on top. You can bury 8 barrels with a single piece of plywood over them and have a lot of #10 cans of food safely stored in a cool temperature. 10 yrs. of storage isn’t a problem if you store wheat, rice and beans as you can fill in the gaps later with storage easer to get to.
I find that this type of storage in 55gal plastic barrels buried in the ground works for many different things.

[Some information on another topic deleted, for brevity. It will eventually be posted separately.]

I hope this information is helpful. - BB

JWR Adds: I've heard may similar tales about unoccupied retreats being ransacked. BB's experience underscores the oft-repeated need to either:

1.) Live at your retreat year-round, or

2.) Have a retreat caretaker, or

3.) Have a trustworthy year-round resident neighbor that lives in a house with line of sight to your retreat buildings.

Anything less than that cannot be relied on! There is some utility in motion-queued web cams, but there is no sure substitute for the Mark I Human Eyeball. I consider web cams just a good backup, and a means to capture images of would-be burglars and their vehicle license plate numbers.

If it is an underground shelter, then you might get away with a completely hidden entrance. Typically, this is done with a large scrap/junk pile. (Two of my consulting clients have done this, thusfar with several years of success.) Although it is labor intensive to remove, the "scrap pile camouflage" technique is fairly practical for a property that you visit only infrequently. But all it takes is just one untrustworthy person that knows about the shelter's existence to make this approach ineffective. (The goblins will keep looking until the find the entrance.)

Given enough time, miscreants can reduce just about any obstacle to entry to an unoccupied and unobserved structure. They will come back with a cutting torch or even a backhoe, given enough time!

James;
I need your advice. I am worried about power failures, and even EMP while I'm sleeping. This could take out my security system, and leave my family vulnerable. Is there any sort of device that'll alert me if the power goes out? Thanks, - Nolan S.

JWR Replies: There are fairly inexpensive commercially-made plug-in power failure alarms available via mail order for under $15. (Or under $20 each at larger home improvement stores.) I recommend buying one for each bedroom, and one for your generator house. (The 86 dB alarm is not loud enough to be heard from far away, but having a light on for you at your generator house on a dark, snowy night is a very welcome sight!) Needless to say, these are a must for sleep apnea patients that use a CPAP machine, or for anyone else that uses other 120 VAC medical devices for chronic health issues. These alarms work fine for houses with grid power, or for houses with backup generators. (The alarm will trip before an auto-start backup generator kicks in.) If you have a grid-tied alternative energy system, you would of course need to plug one of these into an outlet that is exclusively grid-powered. If you live off-grid, you won't have any way of knowing, but then again, if your level of concern for such an event will probably be minimal.

If your specific concern is a power failure in the event of EMP, then you could always wire up a battery-powered traditional buzzer with a "normally closed" relay. (When the grid power is disconnected, the relay closes, and energizes the DC buzzer circuit.) That is 1920s-era technology that would be EMP proof.

Dear JWR,
I read the EMP article by Andru and thought it very well done with one minor correction in the power generation area (worked in the nuclear power industry for 20 years before changing careers). The EMP E3 pulse is very dangerous to the transformers in the transmission and distribution system, and hydro-electric and nuclear will also be severely affected. Commercial generators of any output run at 8,000-10,000 volts which is fed immediately to step up transformers to feed the transmission system. The most common voltage for the transmission system is 250,000 to 500,000 volts (3 phase) which reduces amperage and therefore reduces line losses. The power goes from the power plant through the transmission system to one of the many interchange grids which direct and control where the power is going to. The power is bought and sold in commodity markets by these interchange systems. Even if you live next to a power plant its output will go through the transmission system first, and then to a series of step down transformers in the distribution system before finally being delivered to the customer. Much of the time my home power was not supplied by the power plant I lived next to and worked at.

The transformers are the weak link. A severe solar storm can induce currents that will destroy them (this has happened). Safety interlocks may not work as the pulse can increase current too fast for the breaker to trip before the contacts get welded shut or else it can cause winding damage before it trips. As Andru says the extent of the damage will be the problem. None of the high tension step up/step down transformers are made in the US anymore. And the lead times for their manufacture are measured in years. I expect in such a scenario desperate measures will be taken to produce transformers (or repair them – very difficult and not possible if the damage is severe enough).

If we suffer an EMP attack plan for the power being off for years. I would suspect that power recover would be prioritized in the major metropolitan areas as that is where most people and industry are. The rural areas will probably be the last to be worked. This is standard operating procedure (SOP) for power restoration, you do what brings the most people back online first. - James J.

Mr. Rawles,
Mention was made in your blog of an article entitled, "EMP 101 - A Basic Primer" concerning the results of an EMP attack on the United States. The article was written by William R. Forstchen, the author of the novel One Second After.

I followed the link and read the article. For the most part it was very informative, especially the part about all modern airliners being "fly by wire" and controlled by computers. From my aviation background I know that the control surfaces of most large aircraft today are simply too large to be moved around by the pilot's own strength, as they were in aircraft designs up to the 1950s. Still, it was a graphic reminder that most large aircraft today are completely dependent on their on-board computer systems to operate. There is no "manual backup", just another spare computer system that could possibly also be damaged in an EMP incident.

But there was one section of his article discussing advance preparations to mitigate the effect of an EMP blast that I did not understand. That was the paragraph:

"An off the shelf purchase of hand held two way radios by every local police, fire, sheriff, and emergency response department in the country would mean, that if then properly stored along with a large stock pile of batteries that within minutes after an attack, a nation wide network of communications would be back up and running. This can not be emphasized enough, that proper communications and what the military calls "command and control," will go a long step towards maintaining public order."

I'm not quite sure what Mr. Forstchen is referring to with the term, "off the shelf purchase of hand held two way radios"? If he is referring to the commonly available Family Radio Service (FRS) and General Mobile Radio Service (GMRS) walkie-talkies that use AA and AAA batteries, then he is not aware of their severe limitations. FRS radios only have 14 UHF channels and 0.5 watts of RF output power. The GMRS radios have 22 UHF channels and typically around 2 watts of RF output power.

Both radios operate on relatively low power and on UHF frequencies, a combination that will limit their effective range to a few miles typically. At best perhaps 10-miles with the higher powered 2-watt GMRS radio (don't believe the advertising hype on the package). The UHF frequencies do a better job of penetrating building walls, but they don't propagate as far as VHF signals. They provide "Line of Sight" operation - if you can see the other person in the distance, you should be able to reach them on the radio.

Based upon these obvious limitations, I don't understand where the author comes up with the statement that equipped with these consumer-grade walkie-talkies, "within minutes after an attack, a nation wide network of communications would be back up and running." With their short range and limited channels, it is impossible to create a "nationwide network of communications". When used from inside a vehicle, the range of the low power FRS radio can be measured in feet! Usually the range is only a few car lengths, which makes for limited convoy use. In addition, the limited number of available radio channels will ensure a pandemonium of signals and the resulting radio gridlock reminiscent of the peak of CB radio activity in the late 1970s. This is especially true when you realize that every man, woman, and child could potentially be attempting to communicate on these same channels with their personally owned FRS or GMRS radio. The public service functions will no longer be operating on radio frequencies reserved and licensed exclusively for their use.

If the author is referring to the purchase of additional two-way radios of the type already in use by police, fire, sheriff, and emergency response departments, then he is unaware of how they operate. Most "business band" or "professional" hand held radios have a RF output of 5-to7 watts. They are still limited in range by their inefficient "rubber duckie" flexible antenna, frequency band, and power output. The only reason they seem to operate so well over many miles of varied terrain is because of the supporting infrastructure, mainly the radio repeater system. The radio repeater extends the range of the low powered hand held radios by retransmitting their signal [typically] from a mountaintop repeater site. A network of repeater stations located on high terrain can vastly improve the coverage of a hand held radio, providing excellent range throughout a county or even an entire state depending on the size and extent of the repeater network.

Unfortunately, the weak link in all of the radio systems used by public service agencies is their radio repeater system. With all the repeater stations off the air due to EMP damage (or even a lightning strike) the entire radio network falls apart. Most public service radios are programmed to operate exclusively through the repeater system. If the repeater system is down, the radios no longer work. Sometimes a sheriff's department will have their radios programmed with a "car-to-car" channel, which is a simplex frequency where the radios transmit & receive on the same frequency (without the need for a repeater radio). But these "direct" channels are very few, and are often the only simplex channel available out of a radio system with five or more radio channels. To provide adequate coverage over a large city or county, all the normally used channels are duplex frequencies going through the radio repeater system. An additional limitation is that each public service function is limited to their specific allocated and assigned radio channels. The radios are pre-programmed by a radio technician at his shop. The radios are not field programmable by the user.

In addition to this vulnerability, professional two-way radios use rechargeable battery packs - usually Nickel-Cadmium or Nickel-Metal Hydride. The sealed battery packs are designed to work with a specific model of radio. The radios do not use AA, AAA, C, or D-cell batteries. So unless there is a back room filled with chargers and a person assigned to keep all the spare batteries charged up and rotated out of the charger at all times, there is no simple approach to having charged batteries ready to go to support a stash of spare radios. In fact, most public service agencies can barely afford the minimum number of portable radios needed to equip all their personnel. There is no budget for an additional stash of spare batteries and radios.

The only radio service I know of that has the flexibility to adapt in a "repeater down" situation is the Amateur Radio Service. Instead of specific frequencies or channels, "Ham" radio operators are allocated entire radio bands to operate on. The VHF and UHF radios used in the Amateur Radio Service can be user programmed to operate on any desired frequency within a radio band, and all will switch to simplex operation at the press of a button. Manufacturers of ham radio equipment often offer an optional alkaline battery case for use with their hand held radio models. While looking like the typical Nickel-Cadmium (NiCd) battery pack from the outside, these battery cases can be opened up and AA batteries inserted into the slots. The battery case is then attached to the radio the same way as the regular NiCd battery packs do. This allows the ham radio operator to stockpile a stash of spare AA batteries for use during an extended power outage that prevents the usual recharging of the NiCd or Nickel-Metal Hydride (NiMH) battery packs.

So, unless you are a ham radio operator, expect a long delay before normal radio communications are restored. Due to the limitations and vulnerabilities of public service two-way radio networks, reestablishing a nationwide network of radio communications is going to take time. Sincerely, - Bruce C.

James:
Andru’s outlook about EMP is in part misleading. The main item that Andru got correct is that an EMP attack will be more devastating that any other attack on America. I am an engineer and have read the Critical National Infrastructures (CNI) Report and this report is based on educated opinions without large scale testing since large scale testing has not been performed due to banning of nuclear testing. Localized EMP testing generally wipes out the electronics depending on how close the EMP generator is to the electronic equipment. It is all supposition as to the amount of damage that an EMP attack will create but it is know from a nuclear weapon test in 1962 that was 800 miles from Hawaii and the EMP created damage to Hawaii even with the minor amount of [microcircuit] electronics existing at that time. Think what the damage would happen in our electronics world of today.

Nuclear Electromagnetic Pulse by Jerry Emanuelson: "Although nuclear EMP was known since the earliest days of nuclear weapons testing, the magnitude of the effects of nuclear EMP were not known until a 1962 test of a thermonuclear weapon in space called the Starfish Prime test. The Starfish Prime test knocked out some of the electrical and electronic components in Hawaii, more than 800 miles away.

When the 1.44 megaton W49 thermonuclear warhead detonated at an altitude of 248.5 miles (399 km), it made no sound. There was a very brief and very bright white flash in the sky that witnesses described as being like a huge flashbulb going off in the sky. The flash could be easily seen even through the overcast sky at Kwajalein Island, about 2,000 km. to the west-southwest.

In a phenomenon unrelated to the EMP, the radiation cloud from the Starfish Prime test subsequently destroyed at least five United States satellites and one Soviet satellite. The most well-known of the satellites was Telstar I, the world's first active communications satellite. Telstar I was launched the day after the Starfish Prime test, and it did make a dramatic demonstration of the value of active communication satellites with live trans-Atlantic television broadcasts before it orbited through radiation produced by Starfish Prime (and other subsequent nuclear tests in space). Telstar I was damaged by the radiation cloud, and failed completely a few months later.

EMP is a potentially massive, severe problem that can essentially devastate our nation. America as we know it can not survive even a moderate EMP attack. Society will collapse.

The EMP pulse flows through the air at the speed of light until it hits antennas, power lines, cabling, etc. then the pulse flows through this cabling at the speed of light into the electronic equipment and the electronics fail.

[Here is a roughly analogous event that is illustrative:] Our television cable system was struck by lighting and all electronics that were on and all electronics that were off and that were connected to the TV cable were fried. Similarly, EMP will fry any unprotected electronics. The only way to protect your electronics is to have the equipment inside an adequately grounded Faraday cage (metal box) that does not have power or cabling running into it. Your electronics that are not in use should be stored in a grounded Faraday cage everyday.

Even if repair parts for your electronics were available, how would you obtain the repair parts since there will be no mail or transportation services. If you have an auto that still runs after and EMP attack, the last thing that you will wish to do is take your vehicle out and show everyone that you have an operating vehicle.

We are acquiring extra [CPU] "brains" for our diesels and SUVs. We also are acquiring carbureted vehicles.

Even if an EMP strike only caused the death of 10% or our population (30 million citizens) just how do you survive this as a nation? Prepare for EMP and pray that it does not happen.

Analysis:
Severity of potential failures: From least to greatest [Some causative details and conjecture deleted by JWR, for brevity]

1. Swine Flu – World Wide – Population loss 1 to 10% – could trigger Item Number 3.

2. Civil War – America – Population loss of up to 40% – could trigger Item Number 3.

3. Financial Collapse – World Wide – Population loss up to 40%. Loss of 50+ years of progress. Will probably lead to nuclear war or EMP strike. No economy remains.

4. EMP Attack – America – Population loss of up to 80% - No economy remains.

5. Nuclear War – World Wide – Population loss up to 60%. No economy remains.

Regards, - TD

One topic I have paid close attention to for the past 10 years has been our nation’s risk to Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP).  There are a few points I would like to make that are often overlooked—mostly dealing with the magnitude of the threat.  I don’t claim to be an expert on the subject, but I have consumed as much information as possible that doesn’t delve into the high-level physics—the kind of knowledge required to truly be an expert.  What may set me apart the most is the simple fact that I actually read the 181 page Critical National Infrastructures (CNI) Report released in April of 2008 and in my opinion, it has shed more light on the subject of EMP effects than any other research conducted since EMPs were first discovered more than 60 years ago.

Had this information been available a few years earlier to authors like William R. Forstchen in his novel One Second After would have likely painted a different picture of the effects of an EMP and how it would impact a society.  His lessons are still valid, but a little more accurate information can have a huge impact on our preparation decisions.

Anatomy of an EMP:
Among the most commonly listed elements that determine the magnitude of an EMP, one deserves special emphasis and that is altitude.  In most discussions, altitude is correctly identified as a significant factor in EMP effectiveness as a weapon but there are two distinct reasons why altitude is so important.  The first and most obvious is the LOS (line of sight) influence of electromagnetic pulse.  The higher you go, the greater distance the pulse can affect across the curved surface of the Earth.  However, the point that most people don’t understand is the impact the atmosphere has upon the strength of an EMP.  Logic would suggest that the closer you get to an EMP, the greater the impact upon sensitive electronic equipment.  This is not necessarily the case and this is why a high altitude detonation not only increases the range of the EMP, but actually increases the magnitude as well.

An EMP is actually created when gamma particles from a nuclear explosion interact with the earth’s atmosphere at a sufficient altitude to cause a uniform disturbance in the earth’s magnetic field.  It is the fluctuations of the earth’s magnetic field that causes the EMP and not the nuclear explosion itself.  If the detonation occurs within the earth atmosphere, the gamma particles are absorbed by the air before creating a significant enough fluctuation in the earth’s magnetic field. Generally speaking, a detonation within the earth’s atmosphere will not produce a significant EMP beyond the actual radius of the nuclear blast.  In other words, the radiation will kill you before the EMP fries your I-pod.

To be most effective, the detonation needs to be outside the earth’s atmosphere—even higher than the International Space Station and many satellites.  This allows the gamma rays to interact with the earth’s atmosphere (and magnetic field) over a broad area at roughly the exact same time. 

We could spend time discussing the three different types of EMPs generated by a nuclear detonation (E1, E2, & E3), but suffice it to say that E1 tends to quickly damage sensitive electronics, E2 is slower and not so much of a threat with modern fuses and surge protectors, and E3 is slow but massive and turns the earth’s magnetic field and any long continuous conductors (long-distance power lines) into a huge electrical generator—overpowering surge protection and destroying connected transformer equipment on either end of the line.  Individuals tend to be concerned with the E1 pulse and infrastructure professionals tend to be concerned with the E3 pulse.

Consumer Technology Risks:
Most people think that anything with a computer chip will be wiped out by an EMP attack.  The findings of the commission who produced the CNI Report actually prove otherwise.  While the most sensitive equipment almost always failed, the failure was sometimes resolved with a re-boot, or with the replacement of a few damaged parts.  Due to the unpredictability of the EMP effects, we can assume that many televisions and radios would still work and public broadcasting capabilities of one degree or another will likely be available—if not immediately, then shortly after an event for as long as power can be supplied for the broadcast.  This can also be attributed to the fact that the strength of the EMP will vary from one place to another.  For example, the further north you travel, the more intense the earth’s magnetic field and resulting EMP.  You could expect the impact felt in New York would be more intense than that of Atlanta.

According to the CNI Report, modern automobiles are not nearly as susceptible to EMP as previously thought.  It seems that while equipment and circuitry has become more sensitive, manufacturers have also beefed up the shielding on these components to reduce electromagnetic interference from non-EMP sources thus reducing susceptibility to an actual EMP.  According to the report, only 10% of the vehicles on the road will stop functioning even temporarily after an EMP and one third of all vehicles won’t even suffer any nuisance failures such as a blown fuse or damaged radio (pg. 115 of the report).  The risk here is still significant, but mostly overstated when compared to other risks.  For instance, we’ve all seen what one accident does to rush-hour traffic.  Now imagine 10% of the cars on the road shutting down at the same time—accidents would result and gridlock would be intense on the major highways—stranding even those with operable vehicles.  But if your car was parked at work at the time of an EMP, chances are you would be able to start your car and at least attempt to drive home.

What are the Real Risks:
To put it simply, there are really two big threats we face as a society when it comes to EMPs.  The first involves the entire electric grid as long-distance power lines convert the slower E3 pulse into extremely high-voltage power surges.  These surges subsequently blow out transformers at either end of the lines and render the grid virtually useless until these custom-designed transformers can be repaired or replaced.  Based upon the current rate of production for these transformers worldwide, it would take 20 years to replace all the high-capacity transformers in the US power grid (see report pg 49).  Now imagine the difficulties of trying to make these repairs in a society that has collapsed.

The other significant threat posed by EMP lies in a commonly used automated control system called supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA).  In essence, SCADA systems are similar your typical computer except that they are designed for specific uses—such as monitoring and controlling our electric grid, telecommunications infrastructure, oil and gas transmission lines, and even our water treatment plants.  Under the testing conducted by the EMP Commission, every SCADA system failed to one degree or another (see report pg. 6).  While some failures might be as simple to fix as rebooting, others would permanently disable a particular control unit.  Taken together at the exact same time, this combination of minor and major failures becomes catastrophic to whatever infrastructure these SCADA units control.

The Reality of a Post-EMP Attack:
Obviously, the risks to our electrical and utility infrastructures are sufficient to categorize an EMP attack as TEOTWAWKI.  However, the picture painted by most EMP alarmists doesn’t do us any favors as we consider our own personal preparations.  I’m convinced that many preparations are either completely ignored, or resources are allocated in less-effective ways because we haven’t focused clearly on what a post-EMP society will look like. 

First of all, the lights will likely go out; and for most of the grid they will stay out for a long time.  However, most of the cars we drive will keep working with minor electrical problems.  Most gas-powered generators will start up, and as long as the back-up power supply holds out, we might even have land-line and perhaps even cell phone telecommunications.  If service stations have back-up power generation, then gas will still be pumping (plan on paying with cash though) until the tanks run dry.  A national priority will be getting the gasoline distribution lines back up and running and with back-up power at key points, this could be accomplished in a matter of weeks or months.  If we can get the gasoline flowing, then harvesting equipment will work, the food supply will begin flowing again, and crews will be able to repair the electrical grid. 

Don’t get me wrong, an EMP attack would be catastrophic and would probably be the worst attack ever to affect our nation.  Millions would die as a result, but I don’t expect it to be the end-game that some make it out to be. It should be entirely survivable for a well-informed and well-prepared groups and individuals.

Lessons for Preppers:
Preparing for an EMP can be overwhelming—especially when one fully grasps our reliance upon technology.  Few of us are in a position to buy and move to a resource-rich piece of farmland and then be able to plow, plant, and harvest a decent crop with nothing but 19th century farm implements.  The good news is that even after an EMP, society may remain intact—at least initially.  And just like we see in the novel Patriots, some areas of the country can be expected to escape societal collapse indefinitely.  For those of us who can’t relocate to a retreat property, the proper selection of our current residence can play a significant role in how we might fare after an EMP attack.  Here are some considerations:

• Do you know where your power comes from?  How far does it travel before it gets to you?  Hydroelectric, nuclear, and wind -powered generators will likely be back online soon and have enough supplied fuel to run indefinitely.  If you live close enough to one of these, then less equipment needs to be repaired before getting your town or city back online.
  
  
• Do you know where your water comes from?  How much treatment is required to make it suitable for human consumption?  Those living in mountainous areas will likely see minimal impact to their water supply after an EMP.  Fresh gravity-fed water usually requires less chemical treatment and no electrical pumps to fill water storage tanks.  Those living in flat areas and who rely upon treated river or ground water pumped into water towers will likely suffer the most from water shortages after an EMP.  Hygiene-related diseases will spread quickly; and if you also happen to live in a relatively dry climate, then dehydration deaths will soar as well.
  
  
• Do you know where your gasoline comes from?  Do you live close to a refinery, or does your fuel come from a combination of pipelines and tanker trucks.  If you live close to a major gas pipeline terminal then your location will likely be better supplied than areas located off the main trunk lines.  Refining capacity will be limited and gasoline will be rationed, but expect those towns closest to the source to be in better shape than those further away and to be among the first areas where order is restored—if lost.
  
  
• Do you know where your food comes from and could your area be food self-sufficient if needed? Those living on the fringes of America’s bread basket will be better off than those living in the large cities on the East Coast.  Your grocery store has about three days worth of food without an EMP and about three hours worth of food with an EMP.  Regional food distribution warehouses carry about 30 days worth of food—much of which is dependent upon refrigeration.  Do you know how close you live to one of these regional warehouses?  Living close to the regional food distribution centers could buy you and your town some time, but the best solution is to live close to a productive agricultural region—supplemented with your own stored food.  The apple you eat today could have been picked 3,000 miles away almost 8 months ago.  It has been stored in one of these warehouses in a carefully climate-controlled environment.  How will your location be affected by a lack of modern food distribution?
  
  
• Do you know the kind of people who live in your area?  Not all demographics are created equal when it comes to EMPs.  Do you live in an area where people are looking for an excuse to riot or loot or do you find yourself among hardworking, religious people who tend to support each other?  Notice the different responses between a tornado hitting a small town in Oklahoma and a flooded neighborhood in New Orleans, or even something as inconsequential as a national basketball championship in Los Angeles?  Not all big cities are created equal and not all small towns are created equal either.  If there is a large number of welfare-dependent residents in rental housing nearby, I would seriously consider moving.  A demographic with a low-income, highly liberal population will pose different threats than a demographic with a high-income, conservative population after an EMP.  Populations who support a larger role of government in providing security and livelihood tend to react negatively when neither is provided on demand.  A good resource to analyze these risks on a state by state and county by county basis is the book Strategic Relocation by Joel Skousen.

When it’s all said and done, we need to accurately understand the threats we are preparing for in order to make wise decisions regarding our limited resources.  An EMP would be catastrophic for sure; but the reality of life “post-EMP” is likely to be much different than the most-common pictures being painted these days.  Do your own due diligence, research the risks and how they affect you specifically, and you will be much better off than just taking the arm-chair advice of even the loudest prognosticators—this author included.

Mr. Rawles,
Within our Christian survivalist group in Washington State, we use your novel Patriots, as a primer for friends. Keep up the great job you do.

Please consider the following statement with your readers. I believe that an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack by satellite can happen to the U.S. without any notice at all, and many nations already have the satellites in order to produce the end result. This is not meant to scare, but just an observation on how our great country can be taken back to the 1800s technology and a Third World country economic level, in a microsecond. Please consider my train of thought on this line of reasoning which I send you. I think you "have" to agree that this method is so, so simple.

Can the U.S. be hit without any notice whatsoever by an EMP attack? Yes, and the answer is in the line of thinking to follow. Before you can read this reasoning statement post to it's conclusion, we could be back to the 1800s in technology. And by the Congressional report of 2008, 90% of Americans could be dead in 12 months [following a nationwide EMP attack.]

I just didn't realize how many satellites were orbiting the earth at 200 miles up and from so many different nations until today.

Another question to ask oneself: Does another country hate the U.S. to the extent to want to destroy us? Yes, several nations.

Can EMP be delivered by [a nuclear weapon onboard] an already existing and orbiting satellite to devastate our economy? The answer is yes. We’re on borrowed time, preppers.

For a comprehensive assessment of likely damages to electronics equipment and electrical infrastructure, see the 2008 Critical National Infrastructures Report written by the EMP Commission of the Federal government.

A cataclysmic attack throws the United States back to the dark ages, with no electricity, no communication or transportation networks, and no medicines. The most vulnerable members of society—the very young and the very old—begin to die off first, but soon hundreds of thousands of people, and then millions of people, begin dying. Rogue bands of lawless predators, living by rule of force rather than by rule of law, prey on weakened communities. The government, crippled, can’t come to anyone’s rescue. And all it takes is a single bomb detonated high above the atmosphere, two hundred miles above the continental United States.

At first thought, it might seem far-fetched to imagine a single bomb wiping out the entire country. But it wouldn’t be the power of the explosion, per se, that would cause the problem. Instead, the real problem would be the EMP generated by the explosion. Traveling at the speed of light, the EMP would act like an enormous ripple in the earth’s electromagnetic field. As that ripple hits electrical systems, it would get coupled and be way beyond anything hat a typical circuit breaker could handle. William R. Forstchen, the author of the popular novel One Second After in an article titled "EMP 101" A Basic Primer & Suggestions for Preparedness writes of high altitude EMP: “This energy surge will destroy all delicate electronics in your home, even as it destroys all the major components all the way back to the power company’s generators and the phone company’s main relays,” Forstchen writes. “In far less than a millisecond, the entire power grid of the United States, and all that it supports will be destroyed.” And if the power grid goes, then everything goes.

In July 1962, a 1.44 megaton United States nuclear test in space, 400 km (250 miles) above the Pacific Ocean, called the Starfish Prime test, demonstrated to nuclear scientists that the magnitude and effects of a high altitude nuclear explosion were much larger than had been previously calculated. Starfish Prime also made those effects known to the public by causing electrical damage in Hawaii, more than 800 miles away from the detonation point, knocking out about 300 streetlights, setting off numerous burglar alarms and damaging a telephone company microwave link

According to Wikipedia, there are several major factors control the effectiveness of a nuclear EMP weapon. These are:
1. The altitude of the weapon when detonated;
2. The yield and construction details of the weapon;
3. The distance from the weapon when detonated;
4. Geographical depth or intervening geographical features;
5. The local strength of the Earth's magnetic field.

A Federation of American Scientists (FAS) article stated that an EMP "can easily span continent-sized areas, and this radiation can affect systems on land, sea, and air. A large device detonated at 400–500 km (250 to 312 miles) over Kansas would affect all of the continental U.S. The signal from such an event extends to the visual horizon as seen from the burst point.

Could a Satellite with a nuclear payload already be orbiting Earth? So let’s ask the question, do any satellites orbit at 200 miles above Earth and how many countries have satellites at that altitude? Look at North Korea and Iran, Why are they so interested in building small-scale nuclear missiles? Only one model fits. Forstchen says: ”It’s the fact that the U.S. is so vulnerable that our enemies are even contemplating such an attack." Iran is in the space race. North Korea is in the space race.

Earth is ensnared today in a thick spider web of satellite orbits. Satellites with different assignments fly at different orbital altitudes. Russian and American navigation satellites orbit from 100 to 300 miles altitude. Civilian photography satellites, such as the American Landsat and the French SPOT, orbit at altitudes ranging from 300 to 600 miles. American NOAA and Russian Meteor weather satellites are at these same altitudes.

Does this seem too difficult for other nations? No. Just load up your nuclear weapon payload, orbit it as long as desired, and then hit the button when the satellite is above Kansas.

If Osama bin Laden - or the dictators of North Korea or Iran - could destroy America as a twenty-first century society and superpower, would they be tempted to try? Given their track records and stated hostility to the United States, we have to operate on the assumption that they would. That assumption would be especially frightening if this destruction could be accomplished with a single attack involving just one high yield nuclear weapon, and if the nature of the attack would mean that its perpetrator might not be immediately or easily identified. Unfortunately, such a scenario is not far-fetched. Frank Gaffney, in an essay titled: "EMP: America's Achilles' Heel" wrote: "...a report issued last summer by a blue-ribbon, Congressionally-mandated commission, a single specialized nuclear weapon delivered to an altitude of a few hundred miles over the United States by a ballistic missile would be "capable of causing catastrophe for the nation." The source of such a cataclysm might be considered the ultimate "weapon of mass destruction" (WMD) - yet it is hardly ever mentioned in the litany of dangerous WMDs we face today."

JWR Replies: Iran and North Korea are currently developing fission bombs, not fusion (hydrogen) bombs. A large fission bomb would produce an order of magnitude less EMP than a typical fusion bomb. High Altitude (space-based) EMP with a hydrogen bomb is presently a capability of only a handful of nation states. China is the biggest threat, in my opinion. As for fusion bombs concealed inside satellites, that is conceivable, notwithstanding the Space-Based weapons treaty. (The US and the former Soviet Union were signatories, but China was not.)

In my opinion, of far greater concern is EMP from a nuclear bomb on-board an aircraft. Assuming detonation at a high altitude, detonated suicidally, inside the aircraft, rather than being dropped) that would provide a broad line of sight (LOS) for EMP to provide a "footprint" radius of perhaps more than 200 miles, and far beyond line of sight (BLOS) indirect EMP coupling (via power lines and telephone cables) to a much larger radius. I first discussed LOS calculation for EMP in SurvivalBlog back in October of 2005, and I wrote the following more detailed piece in April 2007. Since it is relevant, I'll post it here again:

The [LOS] answer is both easy and impossible to determine. Let me explain. First, the easy part. The basic line of sight (LOS) footprint range calculation is really simple. It is essentially the same as the calculation that is used to determine the maximum effective range for a VHF or UHF radio onboard an aircraft. Referring back to one of my unclassified notebooks from my Electronic Warfare (5M) course at Fort Huachuca, I find: Assuming level terrain, the maximum potential radius of LOS in nautical miles (nmi) = square root of the emitter's altitude (in feet) x 1.056. Hence, that would be 149.3 nmi at 20,000 feet above sea level (ASL), or 191.8 nmi at 33,000 feet ASL. (A typical jet or C-130's service ceiling.) SurvivalBlog reader "Flighter" mentioned: "...some of the larger business jets such as the Airbus ACJ, Gulfstream, Challenger, and Citation are certificated to fly at or above 41,000 feet. The Sino Swearingen SJ30, is perhaps the highest flyer with a certificated ceiling of 49,000 feet. Hypothetically, a dangerous parabolic flight profile could with supplemental oxygen for the flight crew and perhaps even supplemental JATO rockets might push apogee to 75,000 feet in a few aircraft models. (Hey, it would be a suicidal flight anyway.) That is probably the highest altitude that could be expected for a terrorist to touch off a nuke--at least in the near future. That would equate to a footprint with a 280 mile radius. Oh, yes, they might also get really creative and use an unmanned balloon. (The word's record for those was 51.82 km (170,000 feet / 32.2 miles) But that is highly unlikely. What is likely? A ground level detonation. The EMP footprint of fission bomb detonated near ground level on dead level ground (plains country) might be no more than a 45 mile radius.

Now on to the part that is impossible to predict: long range linear coupling.  Because telephone lines, power lines, and railroad tracks will act as giant antennas for EMP, the EMP waveforms will be coupled through those structures for many, many miles beyond line of sight (BLOS). Just how many miles BLOS is not yet known. I believe that if it were not for the advent of the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963 (which banned atmospheric and space nuclear weapons tests), the DOD and AEC would have had the opportunity to conduct far more extensive tests to further characterize the panoply of potential EMP effects. But those test bans have kept us in the dark. In the absence of practical data, there is a lot guesswork, even among "applied physics" expert nuclear weapons physicists. We may not know the full extent of the EMP risk until after we see that bright flash on the horizon.

For planning purposes, you can probably safely assume that if you are living more than 280 miles from a major city, then your vehicle electronics will be safe from a terrorist  nuke's EMP. (Since you will be BLOS to the EMP footprint of a nuke that is set off below 75,000 feet ASL.) Your home electronics, however, anywhere in CONUS might be at risk due to long range linear coupling--that is if your house is on grid power. This, BTW, is one more good reason for you to set up your own off-grid self sufficient photovoltaic (PV) power system. The folks at Ready Made Resources. offer free consulting on PV system sizing, site selection, and design.

There may be other high altitude delivery methods that I haven't considered, that would provide a broader LOS. But at least the hydrogen bomb club appears fairly small, so there is less risk of widespread EMP . It is conceivable that a Russian fusion bomb might have fallen into terrorist hands during the chaotic 1990s, but if one had, then it probably would have been used by now. Thus, at present, the terrorist and rogue state threat is just for fission bombs, which makes the EMP threat much smaller and more localized.

Dear Jim and Family,
I recently read your book "Patriots". It was a great read and really scared me too. it brought to light all of fears I have in the back of my mind on how fragile society is and our economy. It is spurring me into action now although it will have to wait as I am deploying to Afghanistan in the next couple of months.

I just read your section on the Swine Flu and the question of N95 masks and wearing them. As an 11-year veteran career firefighter and sergeant in the Army National Guard, I felt I needed to inform your readers of one glaring life and death point about those masks that is being missed: You need to be fit tested for any mask, the word mask is a misnomer, they are respirators, if they don't fit right, they won't work. When it comes to diseases don't accept anything less than a 100% fit. Not all masks work for all people, I'm sure you and your wife aren't the same size, for example. Also, if you go on the International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF) web site there is Flu Pandemic information. The IAFF also recommends P100 masks, not N95 masks. This is because the P100s catch pretty much 100% of the [2 micron or larger ] particulates, so they are the best bang for your buck. Also a P100 is a long duration use filter, by that I mean, as the filter gets more and more saturated it will get harder and harder to breathe. The mask could be used for a day or a couple of days if need be. P100 masks are made by Moldex [, 3M, and several other makers] and sell for about $40.00 for a five-pack.

I live in Stamford Connecticut right outside New York City (NYC) and work for a large Fire Department. I fit test all 300 guys every year and about 20 size changes occur each year due to weight loss or gain. Hence another reason to be fit tested. I hope that this sheds some light on the issue of a proper-fitting mask.

Be Well, Stay Safe, and with God most of all, - SGT Joe L.

James,
An N95 or N100 mask is actually only good for a few hours of use. Once they become saturated with water from your breath, they loose their effectiveness as well as become a health hazard that makes it easy to literally asphyxiate you. The wet keeps air from going through that part of the mask and you end up breathing the air that makes it past the seal between your face and your mask. Also those of you (like me) with facial hair, out comes the razor. If you plan on spending a long time out in public during what ever the epidemic of the day is, you should carry several. This is good advice to those that have bought a single box of them and consider themselves "prepared". The best bet during a pandemic is just to stay at your retreat, away from others.. N100 masks are quite expensive even by the box and are the best choice. N95s will do if you don't have any N100s. - Frank B on the Border

Jim;
Referencing the letter: Recent Experience with an N95 Protective Mask: This may be a case of "pilot error". The standard N95 mask has a bad reputation, as a retailer of N95 masks there are several drawbacks to these masks, they are:

* Fit
* Filter
* And Fouling

First let's look at fit, because they are designed as a one-size-fits-all consumer product they obviously don't fit every face, and they tent to gap around the edges, especially if making facial movement like talking.

Second, the filter material they are using is deemed "to stop "95% of all particulate matter larger than 2 microns". There are several articles that show the manufacturers use every conceivable way to make their product match those standards and few of them are on actual human test subjects. [(The tests are done with mechanical test fixtures with tight edge seals.)]

Third and most important as your letter writer pointed out is "Fouling". With out an exhalation port the filter material becomes clogged with the water vapor you breathe out. This then forces you to either force your air in and out through an increasingly "full" mask or more likely, breathe around the gaps in the mask, making it completely ineffective.

Then you may be asking "Why buy them if they don't work"? Well the truth of the matter is that they do work, if you use them correctly and for the right reasons. The inexpensive N95 masks come in boxes of 20. That is so that you change them often. With heavy use, i.e. heavy breathing, they should be changed at least once an hour. The greatest utility for these masks is to help you to not touch your nose and mouth with your hands!

Although the Flu virus can be airborne, you are far more likely to get it by touching a contaminated surface like a door knob, stair rail, or a grocery cart handle [and then unconsciously touching your face]. So for that purpose they do a great job.

There are more expensive disposable masks on the market, (Those made by Triosyn are the best in my opinion, although very expensive and hard to find.)

Don't count out the great standby, the N95, I stand by them, but only if they are used correctly! - Kory

Dear Mr. Rawles-
I am writing to tell other Survival Blog readers about a recent experience I had with an N95 mask (with no exhalation port.) My husband and I just bought a 30 year old single wide trailer with 30 years worth of dust, mold, and cat hair. After day of being in the trailer I could feel my allergies start to grow worse by the minute. To clean up the dust, cat hair, and other allergens we went to the local hardware store and rented a Rug Doctor to shampoo the carpets. While shampooing the carpets (which was a bit labor intensive) I wore an N95 mask and let me tell ya' it was an experience. After 30 minutes I felt like I was breathing in thick jungle air. After one hour I felt like I was going to pass out. After two hours I began to feel claustrophobic. If there are readers out there who think they are going to throw on an N95 mask when the swine flu hits their area and run from room to room while caring for sick and dying relatives/friends they better think again. My suggestion is to put on an N95 mask this afternoon, mow the lawn, rake some leaves, take the dog for a brisk walk and see how you feel afterwards. Having survival gear is great but if you have no real world experience with it then it's useless. Know your personal limitations and the limitations of your gear. God bless!

More prepped than ever for the swine flu, - Heather

JWR Replies: In my experience, it takes time to acclimate to wearing a respirator mask. There is no substitute for hours in a mask. Particularly for a full-face military mask, and even more so for a full MOPP suit, limited field of vision, dehydration, claustrophobia and sensory deprivation are well-known effects, but heat build-up up is also an issue, particularly in summer weather. In full-face masks, being deprived of prescription lenses is also an issue, unless you have a prescription lens inserts. (BTW, these hard-to-find inserts are available from JRH Enterprises.) Also be particularly wary of dehydration. Even with masks that include a drinking tube, most wearers have a tendency to drink less than usual.

The bottom line: Practice wearing a mask regularly, in a variety of activities.

In descending order of frequency, the 78 readers that responded to my latest survey recommended the following non-fiction books on preparedness, self-sufficiency, and practical skills:

The Encyclopedia of Country Living by Carla Emery (Far and away the most often-mentioned book. This book is an absolute "must" for every well-prepared family!)

The Foxfire Book series (in 11 volumes, but IMHO, the first five are the best)

Holy Bible

Where There Is No Dentist by Murray Dickson

"Rawles on Retreats and Relocation"

Making the Best of Basics: Family Preparedness Handbook by James Talmage Stevens

The "Rawles Gets You Ready" preparedness course

Crisis Preparedness Handbook: A Comprehensive Guide to Home Storage and Physical Survival by Jack A. Spigarelli

Gardening When It Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times by Steve Solomon

Tappan on Survival by Mel Tappan

Boston's Gun Bible by Boston T. Party

Seed to Seed: Seed Saving and Growing Techniques for Vegetable Gardeners by Suzanne Ashworth

Survival Guns by Mel Tappan

Boy Scouts Handbook: The First Edition, 1911 (Most readers recommend getting pre-1970 editions.)

All New Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew

When Technology Fails: A Manual for Self-Reliance, Sustainability, and Surviving the Long Emergency by Matthew Stein 

Back to Basics: A Complete Guide to Traditional Skills, Third Edition by Abigail R. Gehring

Preparedness Now!: An Emergency Survival Guide (Expanded and Revised Edition) by Aton Edwards

Putting Food By by Janet Greene

First Aid (American Red Cross Handbook) Responding To Emergencies

Making the Best of Basics: Family Preparedness Handbook by James Talmage Stevens

Nuclear War Survival Skills by Cresson H. Kearney (Available for free download.)

Cookin' with Home Storage by Vicki Tate

SAS Survival Handbookby John "Lofty" Wiseman

Root Cellaring: Natural Cold Storage of Fruits & Vegetables by Mike Bubel

Outdoor Survival Skills by Larry Dean Olsen

Stocking Up: The Third Edition of America's Classic Preserving Guide by Carol Hupping

The American Boy's Handybook of Camp Lore and Woodcraft

Emergency Food Storage & Survival Handbook by Peggy Layton

98.6 Degrees: The Art of Keeping Your Ass Alive by Cody Lundin

Seed to Seed: Seed Saving and Growing Techniques for Vegetable Gardeners by Suzanne Ashworth

Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life by Neil Strauss

Five Acres and Independence: A Handbook for Small Farm Management by Maurice G. Kains

Essential Bushcraft by Ray Mears

The Survivor book series by Kurt Saxon. Many are out of print in hard copy, but they are all available on DVD. Here, I must issue a caveat lector ("reader beware"): Mr. Saxon has some very controversial views that I do not agree with. Among other things he is a eugenicist.

How to Stay Alive in the Woods by Bradford Angier

The New Organic Grower by Eliot Coleman

Tom Brown Jr.'s series of books, especially:

Tom Brown's Field Guide to Wilderness Survival

Tom Brown's Field Guide to Nature Observation and Tracking

Tom Brown's Guide to Wild Edible and Medicinal Plants (Field Guide)  

Total Resistance by H. von Dach

Ditch Medicine: Advanced Field Procedures For Emergencies by Hugh Coffee

Living Well on Practically Nothing by Ed Romney

The Secure Home by Joel Skousen

Outdoor Survival Skills by Larry Dean Olsen

When All Hell Breaks Loose: Stuff You Need To Survive When Disaster Strikesby Cody Lundin

The Last Hundred Yards: The NCO's Contribution to Warfareby John Poole.

Camping & Wilderness Survival: The Ultimate Outdoors Book by Paul Tawrell

Engineer Field Data (US Army FM 5-34) --Available online free of charge, with registration, but I recommend getting a hard copy. preferably with the heavy-duty plastic binding.

Great Livin' in Grubby Times by Don Paul

Just in Case by Kathy Harrison

Nuclear War Survival Skills by Cresson H. Kearney (Available for free download.)

How to Survive Anything, Anywhere: A Handbook of Survival Skills for Every Scenario and Environment by Chris McNab

Storey's Basic Country Skills: A Practical Guide to Self-Reliance by John & Martha Storey

Adventure Medical Kits A Comprehensive Guide to Wilderness & Travel Medicineby Eric A. Weiss, M.D.

Rodale's Ultimate Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening: The Indispensable Green Resource for Every Gardener  

Special Operations Forces Medical Handbook (superceded the very out-of-date ST 31-91B)

Wilderness Medicine, 5th Edition by Paul S. Auerbach

Four-Season Harvest: Organic Vegetables from Your Home Garden All Year Longby Elliot Coleman

Back to Basics: A Complete Guide to Traditional Skills, Third Edition by Abigail R. Gehring

Government By Emergency by Dr. Gary North

The Weed Cookbook: Naturally Nutritious - Yours Free for the Taking! by Adrienne Crowhurst

The Modern Survival Retreat by Ragnar Benson

Last of the Mountain Men by Harold Peterson

Primitive Wilderness Living & Survival Skills: Naked into the Wilderness by John McPherson

LDS Preparedness Manual, edited by Christopher M. Parrett

The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century by James H. Kunstler

Principles of Personal Defense - Revised Edition by Jeff Cooper.

Survival Poaching by Ragnar Benson

The Winter Harvest Handbook: Year Round Vegetable Production Using Deep Organic Techniques and Unheated Greenhouses by Eliot Coleman

Jim,

I'm not very certain Solar Panels or photovoltaic (PV) Modules if you prefer) are up to surviving electromagnetic pulse (EMP). Solar Panel manufacture is akin to basically creating large scale photosensitive semiconductors and few manufacturers will quote even static electricity resistance, much less EMP resistance. Additionally, most PV modules have bypass diodes to protect cells. Some designs put these diodes in the junction boxes, while others incorporate them more integrally in the PV assembly.
Obviously the controllers are at great risk, but the modules themselves are not free from risk.

About the only references to PV and EMP you can find are discussions concerning space deployed PV Modules being at risk to solar flares, which have many characteristics of an EMP event.

I just made some queries with contacts at University of Manchester and Michigan Tech. They told me that there that almost no EMP test results have been released to public domain, but that their Aerospace departments feel that PV Arrays are vulnerable at the junction level as well as the wiring diode matrix and controller levels.

The [PV-powered] satellite literature repeats the observation that even a minor solar flare can wipe years to decades off of the life of a PV array and a full coronal mass ejection (CME) will take the array out. Though an EMP [cascade waveform] is not exactly the same radiation, the corollary is there.

Several of the Disaster Shelter Builders state that PV Panels are at risk in EMP and include shielded storage for "after the event panels." I wonder whether that is marketing hype or good science? For now, this is the best that I can find. - Steve W.

Mr. Rawles,
There is a very detailed 4-part article about EMP protection for Amateur Radio equipment. It's a study that was done by the ARRL in the mid 1980s. Product model numbers and such have changed, but the basic concepts haven't. If you want to just skip to the recommendations, go to "Part 4 of "Electromagnetic Pulse and the Radio Amateur".

In a nutshell, they make the following recommendations:
1. Your equipment will not survive a direct lightning hit no matter how well protected. EMP or near-misses can be protected against.
2. Install a high-quality surge protector on all AC power cords. You'll need to shop around to find one with the highest possible rating.
3. Install coax surge protectors (available from most ham radio suppliers) within 6 feet of the radio equipment to be protected.
4. Install a grounding antenna switch and keep the antennas grounded when not in use. (Note: antenna switches are often used when folks have multiple radios/antennas, such as a CB and ham radio or a 2 Meter VHF radio and a scanner. Make grounding the antennas part of your checklist when shutting down the station after use.
5. Get a piece of Copper plate or thick sheet metal, install it on the wall or workbench your equipment is on, and attach all equipment grounds and protection devices to this. Install a good Earth ground, per their guide. This basically consists of 2 or more standard electrical grounding rods connected with #6 solid Copper wire that is buried. I've found that the electrical panel bonding lugs sold in [building] contractor stores work great for this.

Finally, the book Nuclear War Survival Skills by Cresson H. Kearney [Available for free download] states that equipment such as hand held radios with short antennas (less than 14") should be okay against EMP. Grid connected electronics would be more vulnerable, and stuff with long antennas worse still.
Here are some quick links to EMP protection devices:

Solar Panel charge controller protection.

Coax lightning protection (manufacturer)

Cheers, - JN-EMT

Hello Jim,
I recently finished reading [the recently-released novel] One Second After [by William R. Forstchen].The potential realities of this story can grab you. [In the novel] a young girl who dies because her insulin supply deteriorated. Lack of adequate refrigeration degraded the quality and effectiveness of the insulin.

I was reviewing some bug out literature and ran across a list of equipment that included a portable 12 VDC cooler unit. This would be great for transporting heat sensitive pharmaceuticals during a move of some distance.

My question is this: What effect would an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack have on this kind of machine? Does it contain modern circuitry that would be susceptible to the EMP effect?

The second question:
Are solar panels susceptible to EMP effect?
I am referring to just the panels and not associated secondary storage, control and electrical connections.

The third question:
The chargers that come with solar panels, spotlights, hand held radios, scanners and the like seem to be simple transformers.
But do they contain any circuitry that an EMP wave would destroy?

I read your site every day. Cordially, - JWC in Oklahoma

JWR Replies: In answer to your questions:

Even if your refrigerator has some microcircuits, it is probably not at risk to an EMP waveform, especially if it is running from a stand-alone 12 VDC power system. (Generally, devices that are connected to grid power are at greater risk of EMP coupling.) But just to be safe, when your compact refrigerator is not in use, you should store it in a galvanized steel garbage can (with a tight-fitting lid), to act as a protective Faraday cage.

Solar panels themselves are not at risk, but charge controllers and possibly inverters are, because they use microcircuits. Since protection via zener diodes is not always reliable, the most practical solution is to buy a couple of spare charge controllers, and store them in ammo cans.

As a follow-up to my recent Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) newspaper interview, a German blog for ex-pats (and would-be ex-pats) called Auswandern - Adieu Deutschland! posted an interview, in both a German edition, and an English edition.

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The bidding ends at midnight (eastern time) tonight! The high bid in the SurvivalBlog Benefit Auction. is now at $1,350. This auction is for a large mixed lot, which includes:

1.) A Three-Color Desert Camo Interceptor OTV (Outer Tactical Vest) size XL only, and a spare Woodland camouflage outer shell, kindly donated by BulletProofME.com. These items have a combined retail value of $960!

2.) A vehicle detection system, which includes: one MURS Alert Probe Sensor (MAPS) with 50 foot probe cable and one MURS Alert Hand Held (M538-HT) transceiver. The MAPS unit's probe can be covertly installed under the surface of a driveway or road to detect vehicular traffic and a voice alert is sent to the hand held transceiver when a detection occurs. Donated by MURS Radio. Retails for $303

3.) Two cases of Yoder's Canned Bacon, courtesy of CampingSurvival.com. (12 cans per case.) A $276 retail value.

4.) A NukAlert compact radiation detector donated by at KI4U.com (a $160 retail value). 

5.) Three Garden Security Collections, and two Garden Bean Collections, donated by SeedForSecurity.com. With included free shipping to any US postal address, this is a $100+ retail value.

6.) Two America Stone knife sharpeners (with belt pouches), donated by the manufacturer. (A $60 retail value.)

Thus, this auction has a combined value in excess of $1,800. Bidding ends at midnight (eastern time) tonight! Please e-mail us your bid. Your bid will be for the entire mixed lot.

James,

That was a great article by "J. Paramedic" on CBRNE events. Not that any of your readers have overly rosy predictions of first responders, but I wanted to add a few points.
All in our agency are issued PPE gear. One suit, one mask, one cartridge. We are better funded. Some agencies issue individual gas masks, but issue PPE gear "per squad" (as in, kept at station, enough for squad on patrol plus some.) The decision was made that it was better to lightly equip everyone rather than heavily equip a select team, especially due to extremely large patrol area and the need to have reduced response time. We do have a better equipped response team for larger, drawn out events, but it is not big. A few of us made it a point to purchase extra canisters, and keep them with us. This came to fruition after breaking the seal on my cartridge for [entering] a meth lab. After being told that a replacement "would come next fiscal year", I was able to secure one when a fellow officer transferred agencies and turned in his gear. Policy states we "SHALL" carry our PPE gear with us. Only about half actually do.

In the event of a CBRNE event as a individual incident, the immediate response would actually be fairly decent. As the incident wore on, in the 6-8 hour range, initial cartridges would be running out. Hopefully, as a backup team arrived, etc, good scene management would be continued.

My concern is a CBRNE event as part of a larger disaster, like a chemical leak after a natural disaster, when responders are already busy and taxed, and supplies are running low. The response would be less than stellar, to say the least.

My recommendation for people is to have PPE gear on hand, and have spare. Have an extra suit. They rip. Stuff falls on cartridges. Get a Camelbak [hydration pack], and keep it with your PPE gear. Those suits are saunas, and if it is a hot day, you run a serious risk of dehydration. We write the time the suit is sealed on the persons back in large numbers with a black marker, both for reference for cartridge life and dehydration prevention.

If you need to bug out in a CBRNE event, it may be wise to gear up depending on the threat. With certain types of exposure, we are told we will get none of our gear back (guns, etc) once you go through decon. Having two sets of PPE gear, while not a priority for all, would be wise for those that are fine tuning stores, and can spare the expense. Suits are not reusable, and masks are not fun to decon. Having a "throw away" gun (something easy to operate with gloves on....) would not be bad either.

J went over it, but Decontamination is very important. Anyone who has experience of removing bloody rubber gloves understands the idea.

Thanks, and God Bless. - Eli

CBRNE is an acronym for Chemical-Biological-Radiological-Nuclear-Explosive events. [It is most commonly spoken "Sea-Burn"] This article gives a general guideline for responding to such incidents, geared toward the individual or small group with basic medical/trauma care abilities and little to no rescue capability. Some details about each type of event are also included. Note that I am a paramedic; my training is geared toward that venue, and this essay reflects that. However, many of the same principles are relevant to anyone forced by circumstances to respond to such incidents, not just public safety personnel.

Deliberate Attacks Versus Accidents
Most CBRNE events will be accidents or natural occurrences - chemical spills, pandemics, etc. Some, however, may be deliberate attacks. The most likely candidates are explosive devices, which are relatively cheap, do-it-yourself, low-risk endeavors. Chemical, biological, radiological and especially true nuclear attacks are expensive and high-risk. For example, creating a nuclear device requires obtaining plans, a large team of scientists in multiple specialties, esoteric materials, and so on. And that is just to build the device - a delivery system is still needed. Bringing these elements together is expensive, difficult and time-consuming, and likely to attract unwanted attention. Overall, the cost and risk-to-body-count ratio is much better with conventional arms and explosives; accordingly, these are the most likely forms of deliberate attack.

Safety
The first priority must always be making sure that you and yours do not become victims. If you become injured, you cannot help others; furthermore, you require assistance, which draws resources away from other victims. Consider the following:

Scene Safety: Look for fires, unstable structures, weapons or dangerous persons. Look up, down, and all around - remember that not all threats come from ground level. If you do not have the training or equipment to help safely, then wait for those who do. Leave the area if necessary. Do not try to provide aid in an unsafe area - move victims if necessary. In some cases, you may even have to leave them behind. Remember, you cannot help others if you become a casualty.

Contamination:
CBRNE events pose a high risk of contamination. Do not expose yourself to chemical or infectious agents or to radiation. If you do not have appropriate personal protection equipment (PPE) - do not approach the incident site. PPE is discussed in more detail later. Keep in mind the "Rule of Thumb" - get far enough away from the scene that you can completely cover it with your outstretched thumb. Remember to go uphill and upwind of the affected area.
Secondary Devices: In the case of a deliberate CBRNE attack, be aware that there could be additional threats or devices waiting for responders. While these are generally directed at police, fire, EMS or other official agencies, if you are trying to help, or have the bad luck to be at the scene, you share the danger.

Organization
In the case of CBRNE event, public safety agencies – police, fire and EMS – will have initial responsibility for scene management. Whatever you believe the long-term consequences will be, initially these agencies will be functioning. What follows is a description of their organizational model. If they are on the scene, you will be expected to function within that structure, if you are permitted to assist at all (for safety and liability reasons, you may not be). However, even if a CBRNE event occurs where public safety agencies cannot respond, the principles of this structure are still appropriate for your own use.

Overall responsibility for managing a given event will, at least initially, fall to a single person, designated as Incident Command. If the event can be managed with less than 7 or so responders, this person (and perhaps a Safety Officer) may be the only command personnel needed. However, a CBRNE event is likely to require a considerably larger response. It has been found that a single individual cannot effectively direct more than 3-7 people; 3-5 is an even better number. This is referred to as an effective span of control. Accordingly, for an event of large size, additional levels of organization will be introduced in order to maintain an appropriate span. Regional or functional divisions are used as necessary. For example, the Incident Commander may appoint a Rescue Chief, a Medical Chief, and a Fire Suppression Chief for a large-scale response. (Note that regional or functional elements and leaders are appointed by Incident Command. Some are standardized across the nation, while others will vary geographically depending on local organization, preference and tradition.) Each of these individuals will in turn direct about 3-5 subordinates. Depending on the number of responders, each of those subordinates could in turn direct a team of 3-5 responder, et cetera. The keys are that (1) each responder reports to one and only one supervisor, chief, or other leadership element; (2) each leader directs no more than 3-5 subordinates directly; and (3) overall responsibility for the scene falls to a single Incident Command. It is essential that there is no freelancing – a disorganized response can lead to inefficiency, an unsafe scene, oversights or mistakes resulting in poor outcomes, additional injuries [, needless contamination] or even deaths.

Zones
Geographically, a scene will be divided into three zones: a central hot zone, a surrounding warm zone, and a safe cold zone.
The hot zone is the immediate site of the incident, and may expand based on wind, spill or rainwater runoff, etc. Only trained responders with appropriate equipment should be in the hot zone. Depending on the incident type, this could mean fire department, HazMat or other type teams.
The warm zone surrounds the hot zone. Operating in the warm zone may also call for specialized training and equipment, but not always and not as much. Decontamination, which is discussed below, is usually performed in the warm zone.
Finally, the cold zone is the [ostensibly] safe area surrounding the warm zone. Basically this is the rest of the world. Additional resources and treatment centers will normally be located in the cold zone.

Decontamination
Decontamination will be necessary when it is likely that victims or responders have been exposed to chemicals, biological agents or radiation. The most common method of mass decon is gross decon. Essentially, victims are instructed to disrobe (it is estimated that in many cases this can remove up to 90% of contaminants) and are run through a large “shower” area, then given clean garments. On a smaller scale, you or your family members can self-decontaminate by disrobing and showering. It is recommended that garments that must normally be pulled over the head be cut off, instead. In some cases more detailed decon may need to be performed, for example a wound contaminated with radiological material. In this case, wash the specific site with soap and water, making sure not to contaminate others or other areas of the body while doing so (wear appropriate PPE). Note that victims should in most cases be decontaminated before receiving medical care or first aid. The exception is an immediate life-threatening condition, such as a severe hemorrhage, which may receive preliminary treatment prior to decon.

Personal Protective Equipment (PPE)
This discussion will deal with two forms of PPE: medical PPE and chemical protective gear. It is essential to wear appropriate PPE in any CBRNE event to avoid becoming contaminated or spreading contamination to others.
Medical PPE includes gloves, masks, gowns and eye protection. Follow the Universal Precautions philosophy – assume that everyone is a potential carrier of dangerous infections, and behave accordingly. Wear gloves whenever providing treatment, and change them between patients. Also be aware of the following “special” situations:

Splash protection – when “splashes” are anticipated (for example with childbirth, massive hemorrhage or vomiting) wear eye protection, a mask and a gown
Contact precautions – some infections, such as certain MRSA varieties, can be passed skin-to-skin, and call for contact precautions; wear gloves and a gown
Droplet precautions – infections spread in mucus or respiratory secretions may be transmitted over short distances by coughs and the like; wear a surgical mask when in close proximity. (The CDC says within three feet [but coughs can project droplets 10 feet or more.])
Airborne precautions – infections with airborne spread, such as tuberculosis, call for an N95 mask; ideally, the patient should be in a negative pressure room

Chemical Protective Equipment comes in four levels:
Level A calls for a Self-Contained Breathing Apparatus (SCBA) and a sealed chemical protective suit. Note that no single suit type protects against all forms of exposure. Generally, Level A protection is used only by trained HazMat Technicians.
Level B calls for an SCBA and a non-encapsulated (non-sealed) chemical protective suit, such as a Tyvek suit.
Level C consists of a filter-type respirator and chemical protective clothing, gloves and boots (same as type B).
Level D includes standard work clothes – uniforms, surgical scrubs, turnout gear – which give some skin/splash protection, and no respiratory protection.

Triage
Once proper PPE is in place, the response has been organized, and the scene has been rendered safe, care for victims can begin. After safety, preventing or minimizing the loss of life is the highest priority. A CBRNE event is likely to produce a large number of victims, and could easily exceed response capabilities. When this happens, the goal must be to do the greatest good for the greatest number.
Haphazardly rendering aid to random victims will result in chaos and poor treatment priorities, which will in turn lead to unnecessary loss of life or poor outcomes for victims. It is important to apply triage procedures. “Triage” simply means “to sort,” and refers to sorting victims into groups based on severity. The first competent care-giver to arrive at the scene of a mass casualty event should begin triaging – sorting – victims. The following categories are pretty much universally recognized:

Red or Immediate – These persons have severe injuries, but are likely to be able to be saved. The are “salvageable.” Given the seriousness of their condition, they receive treatment (and transport to the hospital, if available) first.
Yellow or Delayed – These are the people with serious but not life-threatening injuries. They are the second group to receive treatment, after the Reds/Immediates.
Green or Minimal – These are folks with only minor injuries. After all the reds and yellows are taken care of, they can be taken care of.
Black or Expectant – These victims are dead or expected to die. Any victim who cannot breathe on their own should be triaged into this category. If manpower or resources are limited, they should not be expended on these victims, who will probably not survive anyway.

Once triage is completed, treatment can begin.

Treatment
Some comments specific to incident type will be included later. For now, consider the following general assessment and treatment priorities (note that this is a mere overview; detailed first aid skills should be sought elsewhere):
Mental Status – Assess whether the patient is awake, unresponsive, confused or lethargic, etc. An unresponsive patient should be considered Red/Immediate. A confused patient will probably be Yellow/Delayed, assuming no additional problems are found. Next check the ABCs:
Airway and Breathing – Check to see whether the victim is breathing. If not, open their airway by tilting the head or (if injury is suspected) by lifting the jaw forward. If the patient does not breath on their own at this point, consider them Black/Expectant. If they do, ask whether they are having difficulty breathing and listen to their breath. Difficulty breathing, rapid breathing or strange breathing sounds indicate at least a Yellow/Delayed patient. Severe or progressive difficulty breathing indicates a Red/Immediate patient.
Circulation – First, if a patient has no pulse, they are dead, and are Black/Expectant. Second, check for bleeding. If bleeding is found, it should be controlled. Place direct pressure on the site; this should control the bleeding. You may have to maintain pressure for several minutes, then place a dressing and bandage. If the bleeding does not stop, and is from an arm or leg, apply a tourniquet. In the past tourniquets were viewed with great caution, but it has been found that they can be safely used for up to several hours without long-term negative effects. At any rate, one cannot worry too much about an arm or leg when a victim – possibly a loved one – is bleeding to death. Finally, keep a bleeding patient warm (cover them with a blanket) and elevate their feet; this will help combat shock.

Those of you with CPR training will notice that I’ve omitted rescue breaths and chest compressions from this discussion. That’s because (1) in a mass casualty situation victims needing these interventions will be Black/Expectant, and will not be treated; and (2) unless high-level follow-on care – paramedic, ER and/or ICU – is available, CPR alone is unlikely to save a cardiac arrest victim. And I simply don’t have space to include such details here. I do, however, recommend that everyone seek out first aid and CPR training, at a minimum.

Finally, remember that scene safety comes before treatment. If necessary, move the victim. In general it is good to leave trauma victims in place, in case there is some spinal damage. However, when the scene is unsafe, you have to move.

Specific Incident Types

Explosives Events
Remember that explosive devices can also include some biological, chemical or radiological (“dirty bomb”) contaminant; and that there could be secondary devices waiting for responders. (Note that explosives will usually destroy any included biological or chemical material, making explosive dispersal of such agents unlikely to succeed.)
Explosives create blast-type injuries, which are classified as follows:
Primary Blast Injuries: pressure-related injuries from the blast wave, these can affect internal organs such as the intestines, lungs or inner ear without visible external injuries
Secondary Blast Injuries: these are injuries from objects (shrapnel, debris, etc.) striking the victim
Tertiary Blast Injuries: if a blast is powerful enough to throw a victim into the air, they will sustain injuries from striking the ground or other objects
Quaternary Blast Injuries: all other injuries, including burns and the like

Here are some basic treatment ideas:
Bleeding should be controlled by direct pressure and, if necessary, tourniquet.
Broken bones, sprains, etc., can be splinted
Burns should be covered with clean – preferably sterile – sheets or dressings; do not put any salves or chemicals on any but minor burns, as they will have to be washed out later – very painful for the victim
Victims with neck or back pain or tenderness, or loss of sensation or movement, should not be moved unless absolutely necessary, as they may have suffered spinal injury, which may be worsened by movement. However, this is much less likely than television and first aid instructors would have you believe.

Chemical Events
Chemical events require proper PPE; otherwise, follow the “Rule of Thumb.” Remember that wind and water run-off can spread contaminants. Also remember that chemical events may not be immediately apparent. Multiple victims with quickly-developing symptoms, as well as dead flora or fauna in the area, are the most likely signs.

A special note should be made for organophosphates. These produce a condition commonly called SLUDGE (salivation, lacrimation, urination,
diarrhea, gastrointestinal distress, and emesis), which in layman's terms is the sudden onset of soiling yourself, peeing on yourself, crying and vomiting everywhere. They merit special mention because these are the type of exposures for which Mark I kits and other atropine/2-PAM kits are indicated, as well as valium for possible seizures.

Biological Events
Biological events can be difficult to detect, and to protect against, because often there is no scene. Generally, multiple victims will present with “flu-like symptoms” or other complaints to multiple health care providers. The main signs are multiple patients with similar complaints, especially when the symptoms, the demographics, or the season are unusual. For example, large numbers of healthy young people complaining of flu symptoms in the middle of summer, clustered in certain areas, is a sign of an exposure or pandemic. Isolating the source is a matter of finding “common ground” between the victims – think of lots of people suffering from nausea, vomiting and diarrhea after eating at the same restaurant.

Speaking of flu-like symptoms, I thought it might be timely to share with you the following guidance that I’ve received from my EMS agency regarding the current “Swine flu” –

1. Suspect swine flu in a person who:
- has a cough, runny nose or sore throat; and
- has a fever more than 101.4F; and
- has been to an “endemic area” in the last 7 days
Endemic areas currently include Mexico and affected areas of the USA.
2. Distance is considered adequate protection; however, if one must approach a suspected swine flu patient, a surgical mask is recommended.
3. Only if one must be in a confined space with a suspected swine flu patient is an N95 respirator recommended.
These recommendations come from our medical director based on CDC and other agencies’ information and advice.

Victims of a biological agent (i.e., an illness) can often be treated, depending on the agent; preventing further spread within a population can usually only be accomplished by isolation or – on large scales – by quarantine.

Nuclear or Radiological Event
As noted previously, deliberate nuclear attacks are relatively unlikely, due to their expense and risk when compared with conventional methods. “Accidents” are also rare, as modern-day reactors and the like are designed with multiple redundancies and dead-man’s-switches. We are many years removed from the technologies of Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, or so experts say. Smaller radiological events are more likely. Of course the first thought in most minds is the “dirty bomb,” a conventional explosive with radioactive material.

Radioactive materials are usually divided according to the following types:

Alpha particles cannot penetrate clothing or often even skin; however, they are very dangerous if somehow introduced into the body
Beta particles can be absorbed by protective clothing
Gamma rays are stopped only by several inches of lead [or several feet of earth or concrete], and easily penetrate human beings, damaging organs along their paths.

The severity of radiation exposure will depend on time, distance and shielding – a shorter exposure, over a greater distance, with more shielding in between, will be less severe than the opposite. Radiation effects various bodily systems. Inhaled radioactive material can damage the lungs. Radiation can also produce severe burns; these will present as severe itching, but over time will reveal significant damage.
In evaluating the severity of radiation exposure, the easiest reliable measure is time to onset of vomiting. If a victim starts vomiting within one hour of exposure, their exposure is severe. Beyond two hours, exposure is probably mild to moderate.
You may find it useful to stock geiger counters, personal dosimeters, or potassium iodide (KI) for your family. Information on all of these topics is already archived on SurvivalBlog, so I will not go into them here.
Otherwise, without specialized facilities, the best you can do for a victim of radiation poisoning is to decontaminate and treat symptoms as they arise. Remember that with a sufficient dose of radiation the victim can themselves become a source of radiation, and pose a contamination risk.

Summary
In the case of a CBRNE event, essential include a scrupulous eye to safety, an organized response, careful use of personal protective equipment (PPE) and decontamination to prevent spread of contamination, triage of victims, and the best treatment available. Remember that you will probably not be able to do as much as you would like. You must do the greatest good for the greatest number. Finally, remember your priorities: after safety, preventing the loss of life comes first. Then you can worry about protecting property and/or the environment, and long-term recovery. These topics, however, are beyond the scope of this essay. I hope you find the information contained here useful in your preparations, though I hope you never have to use it in a true CBRNE event.

James,
Just a follow-up to the question about bicycle power: If you do a Google search on the phrase "bicycle power generator" then several interesting options come up. One is a web site that offers free plans.

JWR Replies: Just keep in mind that every hour spent trudging away on a bike frame generator is an hour that you could also use doing something else productive. Dollar for dollar and hour for hour, photovoltaic panels are the way to go--they make power every day with minimal maintenance. I consider bike-frame mounted generators fairly specialized devices for peculiar circumstances, such as when someone is cooped up in a fallout shelter. My general advice is: Yes, go ahead and build one, but make it readily adaptable to multiple purposes, by using perforated box beam construction for the back half. This is similar to the construction method often used for hobby-built electric go-carts and similar projects. With perforated steel box beams, you will minimize the amount of welding needed to fairly quickly reconfigure the back half. For example, you could attach various pulleys and V-belts that can in turn be attached to a Country Living grain mill, a meat grinder, or a metal grinding/sharpening wheel.

Jim,
When looking for places to store sensitive electronics, consider the old-fashioned galvanized steel garbage can. For about a buck a gallon, you can store just about any and all electronics a household might have, safety protected against EPM and other damaging fields. - Jake Stafford, publisher of the "Rawles Gets You Ready" preparedness course and loyal SurvivalBlog reader

Sir:
Here is another perspective on the problems associated with a Carrington event [, from the Mostly Cajun blog]. Sol assaults Mother Gaia - for real? Regards, - Hunter in Alaska

Jim-
New Scientist magazine article recently published an important article titled "Space storm alert: 90 seconds from catastrophe." The article outlines possible scenarios for the risk of solar storms that could severely damage national grids and vital electrical and electronic systems. The effects would be catastrophic and devolve societies into a desperate survival situation for individuals.

One quote from the article:
"Over the last few decades, western civilisations have busily sown the seeds of their own destruction. Our modern way of life, with its reliance on technology, has unwittingly exposed us to an extraordinary danger: plasma balls spewed from the surface of the sun could wipe out our power grids, with catastrophic consequences."

Could off-grid standby equipment such as power generators or solar cells also be damaged? See the National Academy of Sciences report. (After registering, you can download a free PDF file of the report): Best Regards, - Gregg T

JWR Replies: I've received more than 20 letters in the past 48 hours from readers concerned about this article. In my opinion, this natural "EMP-like" effect is just another reason to get prepared. The probability in any given lifetime is quite low, but the impact if it were to happen would be devastating.

Most home non-grid-tied photovoltaic, micro-hydro, and wind power systems will probably be safe from a Carrington Event. (The field strength and coupling effects will be roughly analogous to that of nuclear EMP.) If you have a microprocessor-controlled battery charge controller, then one fairly inexpensive measure is to buy a spare. But for most of us, buying a spare large inverter is cost-prohibitive. In the event that your large (whole-house) inverter get fried, then perhaps your could plan to revert to DC-only system, and store a couple of spare small inverters for crucial AC loads.

As with any other "EMP redundant" radios and other electronics, you should store your spares in ammo cans, all-metal cookie tins, or similarFaraday cage structures.

Hello Mr. Rawles;
I'm a long time reader of your blog. I would like to recommend a new novel called, "One Second After" by William R. Forstchen. It deals with an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) event which occurs in the United States. The author apparently consulted with military experts, and it has an afterword by Captain Bill Sanders, U.S.N., and the Foreword is by Newt Gingrich.

Though the book is lacking in survival details, it does realistically convey the frightening impact on American civilization. The need for obtaining food is prevalent, and it does show the benefits of having a good food storage system. There are some weaknesses, for instance, I've wondered how they seemed to have an endless supply of gasoline, and how the military ultimately brings back civilization, much like "Alas Babylon". The author does a good job with characterization, and the plot moves along quickly. I would say it would be a good addition to a "survivalist" home library.

I'm looking forward to the next release of "Patriots" , it'll go on my shelf with my other two copies [of the earlier edition]. (I always keep a loaner copy). - Harry in the Adirondack Mountains

Jim--

A note regarding my own experience with remote property ownership ...I owned a wonderfully ideal 40-acre bug-out property in northern Minnesota for many years. It was very remote. Some of the closest neighbors did not even know there was a cabin back in those deep woods. It was backed up to a large, forested DNR property that was itself bounded by swamp. My other bordering neighbors were full-time residents who were kind of ornery (very protective of their property and thus unintentionally served as guardians of my property) and so that was a plus. We were a half-hour from the nearest towns. Several dirt roads eventually took us to our driveway which crossed over the land of a curmudgeonly Vietnam vet. The driveway was a mile long through his property and then on through the DNR land where in parts it traversed swamp. We had two locked gates on that drive, near and far.

I won't go on reminiscing about the cabin, the off-grid electrical system, and all the rest of it here. (BTW, I bought this property shortly after first reading "Patriots" , so you certainly had a role in my thinking.) What I thought I could add to the current discussion is this:

1. If you are not a full-time resident of a property, even remote property--you will have uninvited visitors, "legitimate" and otherwise. We had several occasions of snowmobilers, ATV riders, and even a couple of burglary attempts. We were well fortified, so they were only attempted. (However, if they had been serious about getting some very valuable stuff on the premises, they could have done so with the proper preparation. We also discovered that we had a couple of visits while we were not there by the county tax assessor who hiked the one mile in when he could not get past the first gate with his vehicle.

2. Owning and maintaining a second comprehensive property, if you are not living there all the time, is an expensive and time-consuming proposition. In fact, it requires a demanding lifestyle commitment that, if you have other things going in your life, can get quite burdensome. Eventually, I made the decision to put all my time and preparedness money into my primary homestead (and in my preparedness business). I sold the property and all that went with it to a very lucky and appreciative buyer and used the proceeds to install an NBC shelter under a new addition on our home. We're on the outskirts of suburbia and come hell or high water, we'll make our stand here. It was really quite a relief to go this route, as I always worried about how and when we would be able to make the decision to head for the hills and whether it would be when everyone else was doing the same thing--making ourselves very vulnerable on the roads until we got to the property.
Furthermore, I had to admit that I'm not the young lion I once was, which had allowed me to think about dragging my family anywhere in a chaotic environment, unless there is simply NO option to stay put.

Bottom line--when someone asks me about bugging out vs. hunkering down--I advise that if at all possible, you live where your refuge is. There is an awful lot you can do to make your home your castle--wherever it is located. And you can do that for less money than buying, equipping, and stocking a second property. It also eliminates having to put you and yours at risk on the road between Points A and B (assuming you do have a secure Point B) at a time when there are going to be a lot of panicked and desperate people out there.
Blessings, - Vic at Safecastle

Hi James,
Regarding the article "Some Thoughts on the Survival Vehicle" - I couldn't agree more with the choice of an older Ford truck. I love mine. The only part I take exception to is converting permanently from electronic ignition to a mechanical point type distributor. I understand the EMP and other concerns, but there is a caveat readers need to be informed of.

Some/most Fords with 302 or 5.0 liter engines in the mid- to late-1980s and on were equipped from the factory with a hydraulic roller lifter camshaft. The roller cams are made of very hard steel, harder than older hydraulic "flat tappet" camshafts. On these "Roller Cam" engines the roller camshafts must be mated to a special hardened distributor drive gear (a hardened gear is on the factory electronic distributor) or the roller camshaft drive gear will destroy the softer standard (ductile iron IIRC) point type distributor drive gear in short order. I found out the hard (expensive)way!

I know that there are some aftermarket hardened distributor gears that might be retrofitted to a point type distributor. Some racers use bronze distributor gears with roller camshafts, but these softer bronze gears are only intended for racing and would have a limited life when used on the street.

One might be able to retrofit a standard "non-roller" camshaft to a new engine, but that’s likely beyond the skill sets of the average Joe.

There is another distributor related issue to consider - assuming you already have or will have a points type distributor. There is an aftermarket electronic ignition kit made by a company called Pertronix. The Pertronix Ignitor made for Ford V8 point type distributors installs in place of the original points. (Pertronix make models for many types of vehicles, not just Fords). All the Pertronix components install under the distributor cap. I've equipped 10 vehicles with these ignitions over the years with no ignition failures of any kind. My truck has had a Pertronix Ignitor since 1999 making it almost maintenance free for day-to-day operation, as opposed to points. If, God forbid, an EMP or other factor rendered the Pertronix inoperable I keep a set of points/condenser in the vehicle to reinstall in the original point type distributor. I also keep a spare Ignitor in a sealed metal cookie can (EMP proof). Assuming you know how to change a set of Ford ignition points, reinstalling the points will take about 20 minutes or less. (Maybe longer if the engine is hot ;) ). I don’t work for Pertronix, I’m just a very satisfied customer. Food for thought.

Kind regards, - M. Artixerxes (a 10 Cent Challenge subscriber)

JR
Some of the March 12 comments in SurvivalBlog discussed belts, hoses and tires. Here is an additional consideration, and has served me well for 30+ years. I buy spare belts, hoses, vacuum lines and tires - before I use any of them, I coat the outside of each of them thoroughly and liberally with mink oil, all over the outsides and let "set up" for a few days before installing, or for longer term storage.

These items deteriorate from dry rot over time when exposed to harsh temperatures, and extremely small "cracking" appears, from which failure is born . Even yet-to-be-used spares deteriorate when stored in most instances. Mink oil coated/treated rubber extends the useful service life of these items far beyond expected shelf ( or use ) life, in my experience. I even work it down inside the treads on tires.For true spare use, I then wrap tires in plastic trash bags, or sealed bags for smaller items such as belt and hoses and assorted lines.

FWIW, the same idea applies to storing leather coats and boots. - KT in Texas

Dear Mr. Rawles:
First and foremost thank you for your novel "Patriots" which I am currently reading.

I live in the Dallas-Ft. Worth metroplex. As of late there seems to be a rise in the number of "home invasion" type of crimes in this area. Every morning that I go to work I hear about a new incident in the metroplex. This has led me to put inside locks on my bedroom doors and purchase my first gun. I consider myself one of those "know enough to be dangerous" people, but am planning on taking a handgun safety course . I'd like to know your thought on preparedness for these "home invasion" crimes which are on the rise. Once again thank you for your novel which has opened my eyes to just how unprepared I am. Sincerely, - Geoffrey T.

JWR Replies: You've surely heard the phrase "caught off guard." In my opinion, almost the entire American citizenry has been systemically "off guard" since the end of the US Civil War. There are two fundamental weaknesses that make American homes vulnerable to home invasions: a condition white mindset, and appalling architectural weakness. I'll discuss each.

Condition White Mindset

First and foremost is an almost universal Condition White mindset. This refers to the Cooper situational awareness color code for "unaware and unprepared". The vast majority of the urban and suburban population spends 90% of their daytime hours in Condition White. They do a lot of idiotic things, like failing to keep their doors locked at all times, and failing to keep loaded guns handy. Most folks lock their doors only just before retiring each evening. So most daytime and early evening home invasion robbers simply stroll in to unlocked houses and catch the occupants flat-footed. By adopting condition yellow as your norm, and by taking the appropriate security measures, you will tremendously lessen you vulnerability to violent crime, including home invasions.

Architectural Weakness

Secondly, 150 years of relative peace, stability, low crime rates, and cheap energy have worked together to push American residential architecture toward very vulnerable designs. Modern American homes are essentially defensive disasters. They have huge expanses of glass, they lack barred windows or european-style security/storm shutters, they lack defensible space, and they often have no barriers for the approach of vehicles. Another ill-conceived innovation is the prevalence of floor plans that situate the master bedroom at the opposite end of the house from the children's bedrooms.

For the past 25 years, one of the hallmarks of "bad neighborhoods" in the US has been the prevalence of barred windows and beefed-up doors. These are neighborhoods where the prevailing crime rates have pushed the majority of the population into Condition Yellow as a full time baseline mindset. Given the upswing in crime rates that will undoubtedly accompany the coming depression, I wish that everyone in the ostensibly "good neighborhoods" had this same outlook. I don't find it all surprising that criminal gangs now specifically target wealthy suburbs for home invasions, for two reasons: A.) That is where the good stuff is, and B.) These residents are sheep for the slaughter (given the prevailing condition white mindset.)

One of the most chronic defensive lapses is American suburban architecture is exterior door design. Typically, entrance doors either have widows immediately adjacent, or set into the doors themselves. Even worse is the ubiquitous sliding glass door. Nothing more than a brick or a paving stone tossed through the glass and bingo, instant access for home invaders, with the fringe benefit of instant fright and surprise for the occupants just inside, who will likely be startled by the crashing noise and flying glass. SWAT and MOUT trainers call this a form of "dynamic entry". There are umpteen variations. You may recall the use of a piece of patio furniture in Robert DeNiro's dynamic entry of Van Zant's house in in the movie Heat. Another is the vigorous application of a 5- or 6-foot length of steel pipe or a more specialized tool, in (the proven "break and rake" technique preferred by the British SAS and SFOD-D (commonly called "Delta Team") to quickly clear any protruding shards of glass).

America in the Near Future = Welcome to South Africa

In South Africa, the crime rate has been so high for so long that it has changed the way that people live in a day-to-day basis. Every stranger is viewed with extreme suspicion. Automobile drivers regularly refuse to pull over if they are involved in a minor traffic collision, for fear that it is a pretext for a car jacking.

Threat Escalation and Proactive Countermeasures

Modern military planners often talk in terms of threat spirals. In essence, a given threat escalates and it inspires a defensive countermeasure. The ideal situation is "getting inside your opponents threat spiral"--meaning that your anticipate your opponent's next escalation, and proactively take countermeasures, insulating yourself from the future threat.With that in mind, here are some thoughts on potential home invasion threat escalation and countermeasures (perhaps some SurvivalBlog readers would care to add to this list):

1.) More frequent home invasions. The worse the economy gets, the more crime we can expect. Home invasions and kidnappings are likely "growth" areas.

2.) Use of dynamic entry tools by home invaders. We can expect them to use commercial or improvised door entry battering rams and Hallagan tools--like those use by police. This means that just standard solid core doors by themselves will be insufficient. Switching to steel doors and.or adding sturdy cross bars will become common practice.

3.) Possible use of vehicle-mounted battering rams.

4.) More frequent and elaborate police impersonation by home invasion gangs.

5.) Larger, better equipped, and better organized home invasion gangs. Larger gangs will be able to invade a home--conceivably even when there is a party in progress.

6.) The potential use of cell phone jammers.

7.) More elaborate ruses as pretexts to get homeowners to open their doors. For example, not only will the "point man" be dressed as UPS driver, but there will be a very convincing looking UPS truck parked at the curb.)

8.) More home invasions at any time of the day or night.

9.) More use of pepper spray and other irritants by home invaders.

10.) Use of large diversion such as explosives to draw law enforcement to "the other side of town."

11.) More elaborate intelligence gathering by home invasion gangs--researching exactly who has cash, fine art, gemstones, precious metals, or jewelry in their homes. (BTW, this is just another reason to practice good OPSEC.)

Given these possible threat spiral escalations, you might consider building a dedicated "safe room". I can think of no better way to get inside the bad guys' threat spiral. Such a room could serve multiple purposes, including "panic room", gun and valuables vault, storm shelter, and fallout shelter. (And hence, provide you family with solutions for multiple scenarios. The folks at Safecastle (and other specialty contractors) can build these both aboveground or underground, with special order inward-opening vault doors.

You mentioned putting a lock on your bedroom door. This is usually insufficient, since most interior doors are hollow core, they typically use lightweight hinges, and they have insubstantial strike plates. Most of these doors can either be knocked down or knocked though, in very short order. I recommend replacing your bedroom doors with heavy duty exterior type doors (preferably steel) with heavy duty hinges and one or more deadbolt locks. If your house has all the bedrooms isolated on one hallway, then I recommend adding a heavy duty door at the end of that hall, and keeping it locked at night. (Basically a "safe wing" for your house) Then, inside of that safe wing, you should have a far more secure dedicated safe room that your entire family can retreat to, before the outer layers of defense succumb to physical attack.

Redundant communications are important, so you can solicit outside help. Both the master bedroom and the safe room should have hard wire ("POTS") telephones that are serviced by underground lines with no visible junction boxes. Be sure to test using a cell phone, as a backup, from every room. Having a CB radio in your safe room also makes sense. OBTW, one of my consulting clients in New Mexico intentionally installed a vertical 3"-diameter air exhaust vent from the ceiling of his safe room/fallout shelter to his roof. Using a broomstick, he can pop the slip-fit flapper valve loose, and then use the pipe as a conduit for flares from his HK P2A1 flare 26.5mm flare pistol! He reported that he has tested shooting meteor flares "up the spout", and it worked fine. Very clever.

The Ultimate Solution: Designing for Security from the Ground Up

I most strongly recommend that the next time that you move, that you buy a brick or other masonry house and upgrade its security, or better yet, start with a bare lot, and custom build a stout house with and integral safe room, from scratch. As previously discussed in SurvivalBlog, two good starting points for house designs are Mexican walled courtyards and building with square bastions (also known as Cooper Corners). These projecting corners eliminate the "blind spots" that are common to typical square or rectangular houses.

For greater detail on this subject, I recommend Joel Skousen's book "The Secure Home." My novel "Patriots: Surviving the Coming Collapse" also has some detailed design description for ballistically armored window shutters and doors, as well details on constructing neo-medieval door bars.

If you are serious about custom building or retrofitting an existing house for increased security and/or adding a safe room, then I recommend the architectural consulting services of both Safecastle and Hardened Structures.

Compsec is a subset of OPSEC that is concerned with computer security. It can not be ignored if you plan to use computers now and after a SHTF situation.
The personal computer is a powerful tool to help cope with any disaster or survival situation. The capacity for enormous data storage in a very small footprint makes it a valuable resource when the grid and net go down. You will have all the information you need at your finger tips; first aid and medical info, maps and topography, equipment and firearms manuals, personal records and pictures, and the list goes on and on. Just be sure you have back ups of your data on hard drives and DVDs and a spare system or two stowed away in an EMP-shielded cabinet. Laptops make sense as spares due to their transportability and lower power consumption.[JWR Adds: Like all of you other spare small electronics, any spare laptops should be stored in 40mm ammo cans, for EMP protection.] Make sure you have spare batteries and chargers, hard drives, etc. Consider having the rugged laptops that are shock, water and dust resistant. Here are some examples:

Dell Ruggedized Laptop
Panasonic Toughbook Laptop

See the recent article on how to power your PC with solar energy in Computer Power User magazine's November, 2008 issue. The article is titled: “Get Off The Grid”.
Solar Laptop chargers are available from:
Basegear
Ready Depot
[JWR Adds: Compact photovoltaic power systems are also available from Ready Made Resources, a loyal SurvivalBlog advertiser.]

Here are some sites with useful information that you might want to stow away before TSHTF:
USGS Topography Resources
KI4U Library
First Aid References
EquippedToSurvive (PDF)
NIH Medline
eBooks
There are many other treasure troves of information on the Internet. Look around and gather those free files now[, and make backups on CD-ROM].

You don't have to spend a fortune on software; if you leave Microsoft behind and enter the world of Open Source software where you will find a plethora of great software ranging from the LINUX operating system to office automation, databases, and hundreds of useful programs. Consider that most viruses and malware are written for Microsoft products, so open source is generally more secure for that reason alone. Check out these web sites for some alternative ways to go:
Ubuntu
Red Hat
SourceForge
Tucows
If you prefer to stick with the tried and true Microsoft, do indeed follow their security recommendations and make sure you get all the updates installed as soon as they come out. I recommend using the automatic updates for the operating system and software packages as well as virus and spyware scanners.

Scott McNealy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems once said, “You have no privacy [in the Internet era]. Get over it.” That is definitely a true statement. There are gigantic databases all over the world with data on any minutiae that may have been recorded from many diverse sources which can then be correlated by high power computers to produce a pretty good picture of you as an individual should someone wish to. Some of the data is obtained legally from public records and news sources; some is obtained illicitly through hacking or purchasing outright what should be private information. The data may also come from spybots and Trojan horses right on your very own personal computer.

Anything that is stored on a computer that is connected to the internet is susceptible to data harvesting. Anything you posted to an on-line message board, or an email you sent, or a form you filled out, may well still exist somewhere on the internet even after it seemingly is gone. In the unthinkably large database of Google it may live a long, long time or on a back up tape in some obscure data center somewhere. It may even attain near immortality in the “Wayback Machine”, a database that archives web pages.

Even though using the internet can be hazardous, there are ways to make your surfing safer. By all means install anti-virus and anti-spyware software and update it frequently. Another essential is to have a firewall. Most operating systems now come with firewalls so make sure it is enabled. It can be made even more secure if you do the homework.It’s not a good idea to leave your computer running on-line 24/7 unless you have a specific reason to do so. It gives the hackers a lot of time to work on cracking your system and once cracked hackers can use your PC in their zombie army to launch more attacks and collect more data, all in the dead of night while you sleep. You won’t notice the hard drive and network activity.

Use strong passwords, it’s a pain, but weak passwords are easily cracked and once that is done, you have absolutely no security at all. Change passwords regularly because even a strong password can eventually be cracked by brute force cracking which simply tries random character patterns until it finds the one that works. If you use words that can be found in a dictionary or even words slightly modified, be aware that these are much faster to be cracked.
You can learn about strong passwords here:
Microsoft Password Checker
LINUX Password Checker
Free Ultra-Secure Password Generator from Gibson Research
Pay attention to security settings on your web browser. I use the Firefox browser because it has better security features [than others like Microsoft Internet Explorer], such as clearing of private data when exiting, the ability to manage individual cookies, and the ability to disable the “HTTP referrer” information that tells the next web site you visit where you just came from.

Whatever browser and operating system you use, make sure that it is as secure as it can be and still be functional for your needs. The basic philosophy of system hardening is to close all the open doors, install locks, and only open up those that you absolutely must in order to operate. There are many open doors and loosely guarded doors in an unsecured system which comes right from the manufacturer that way. You need to look into all the setting and options that are available with what ever hardware and software you have, and then start tightening up as much as possible.

Another problem with most PCs running a Microsoft OS is that they become laden with junk over time. As you install new software and hardware your registry grows to a huge size and you accumulate startup programs that start up when you logon and run even if you may not need them. They make the login slower and slower as they accumulate and some of them may even be spybots reporting back to home base of your activities. I’m willing to bet that most PC users are running software for programs they never even use anymore.

Here are a few sites to learn about how to clean your PC of these start-up parasites:
Info on start-up programs
This a database of good, bad and optional programs that might be running on your PC.
Microsoft registry cleaner. There are other commercial products available, be careful to select the option to make backups before you clean up the registry. The cleaners occasionally clean too much and break a program that you need.
Here is a cleaner I have used successfully.

Visit these web sites to give yourself some good security check-outs:
Tons of good compsec information.
Free Tools and Utilities.
The Junkbusters site will tell you if your browser is giving out too much information.
Gibson Research. Click on the services tab and select Shields Up! to give your system a security check up. Check out all their other good security info.
This page will tell you about your Internet "persona" and check out other good information.

Surf anonymously. This will help keep those who do not have a need to know, out of your affairs. Just remember that ‘somebody’ will know what your internet IP addresses is, and that ‘somebody’ is the anonymity provider or proxy server. It can be traced to your PC.
Here are two free anonymizers:
CEXX.org
ComputerBytesMan

One note of caution about encrypted files and web sites that your browser accesses: The browser will copy it to cache and it will be in clear text allowing anybody to read it or a Trojan to copy the page back to its home base server. The solution is to clear browser cache immediately after accessing encrypted pages.

Using a search engine link will provide the web site you visit with all the search terms you used to make the search. Instead, copy and paste the link into the browser navigation bar for a little extra anonymity. If you have a Google account and have logged in to check your Gmail then it is possible for Google to link your login to your searches thus reducing your anonymity even more. [JWR Adds: I recommend that SurvivalBlog readers go a step further and use the Scroogle Scraper intermediary portal to do any Google searches.]

I hope this information has been helpful for those preparing for those tough times ahead that lay ahead. I do believe the personal computer can be a powerful survival tool if, or should I say when, the TSHTF. Visit Set2Survive.com for more information, links and resources.

Hi Jim:
I understand about an EMP attack and it's possibilities to wreak havoc. But I can't help but wonder when I hear about a possible future EMP attack if we are trying to convince the terrorists through disinformation to detonate their nuclear weapons at a safe altitude instead of over the capitol during the state of the union speech.
I am thinking that for an EMP attack to be effective they would need at least 4 or 5 high yield nuclear weapons of at least 1 megaton each . These would have to be evenly spread over the US relative to population density. Russia could pull it off, and I am sure they would begin a nuclear attack an EMP. But I think the EMP effects of one 15 kiloton range weapon a terrorist would have would be isolated.
I could be wrong, but I can't help but wonder. - David

Jim:
That EMP report is good news.It shows that an EMP attack would cause significant but not catastrophic disruptions in our critical national infrastructure, and only scattered failures of cars, computers, and other electronic devices. These facts are even more favorable than I wrote in my e-mail to you in March of 2007. As I suspected, but couldn't prove at the time, the anti-ESD structures in modern semiconductors are very effective against EMP.

The report shows, for example, that there is no longer any strong reason to avoid modern cars. Of 37 modern cars tested in the report, only three were temporarily stopped when exposed to EMP while running, and all could be restarted. Only one car experienced permanent damage, but that was to some unidentified electronics in the dashboard apparently not affecting drivability.
From my experience in the electronics industry, I believe that the most modern, most expensive cars-- the ones intended to last a long time-- are the most survivable because they are more likely to incorporate better-designed, better-protected and thus more-expensive electronics.

As another hard data point, modern radios are basically immune to EMP. The report states "none of the radios tested showed any damage with EMP fields up to 50 kV/m." The same circuits that protect radios from ESD to antennas and controls protect them from EMP.

The report is quite definite: EMP is a serious threat to anything with long wires, but not so much to anything small, portable, or mobile.

An EMP attack from a fission weapon would be harmful, especially to our power and telecommunications systems, but the effect would be local and temporary-- not really very different from that of a hurricane or powerful earthquake. You owe it to your readers to set the record straight on this topic - PNG

JWR Replies: Yes, that report is good news for automobiles and mobile, battery-operated electronic devices with short antennas. However, the huge, almost incalculable problem is that railroad networks, power grids, and to a lesser extent telephone systems serve as enormous antennas for EMP that can carry EMP for very long distances. In the event of a high altitude megaton-range hydrogen bomb blast, this linear coupling will carry EMP for hundreds of miles beyond line of sight (BLOS). Within that extended footprint it could potentially fry the microcircuits of any device that is plugged in to a utility power wall socket. There could be hundreds of billions of dollars worth of short term damage and a multiple of that in long term damage (loss of productivity) and along with it the risk of a societal collapse and an enormous die-off due to dislocation, exposure, and disrupted chains of supply.

Linear coupling of EMP is one of the reasons that I discourage people from installing "grid-tied" photovoltaic power systems. Sure, it is great fun watching a power meter run backwards and getting a check in the mail from your utility instead of a bill for eight months of each year. But the EMP risk outweighs the benefits. If you go solar, then make it a stand-alone system! Linear coupling is also the reason that I advocate keeping all of your spare radios and computers disconnected and stored in Faraday-shielded containers whenever they are not being used.

What I took away from the report is confirmation of what I had concluded years ago: That for next 10 to 30 years, the EMP threat posed by terrorists will be localized, since they will most likely have access to low-yield fission bombs and will be most likely to employ them in ground bursts with small "footprints". In ground bursts or in low-altitude air bursts, the line of sight is limited, minimizing the EMP effect. But in any case the linear coupling through the power grid could magnify the EMP damage.

I concur with the report's finding that there is a the possibility of a massive population loss in the event of a well-coordinated EMP attack by a major power such as Russia or China. That scenario is a "time on target" attack with multiple simultaneous high altitude air bursts of multi-megaton hydrogen bombs. Such an attack would blanket the entire continental United States with high field strength EMP. The word "devastating" doesn't begin to convey the long term effects. We'd find ourselves back to both 19th Century technology and 19th Century population levels. And, BTW, much of the most heavily populated portions of Canada and Mexico would receive extensive collateral EMP damage.

Mr Rawles,
Your readers may benefit from the following current links regarding the electromagnetic pulse (EMP) threat:

Full report of the EMP Commission to the House Armed Services Committee (July 10, 2008)

This link has a concise summary of key points from the above report:

I also recommend an interview with the Chairman of the EMP Commission.

The interview includes the following statements that are very important:

Asked just how many Americans would die if Iran were to launch the EMP attack it appears to be preparing, Graham gave a chilling reply: "You have to go back into the 1800s to look at the size of population' that could survive in a nation deprived of mechanized agriculture, transportation, power, water, and communication.
“I’d have to say that 70 to 90 percent of the population would not be sustainable after this kind of attack,” he said. [Emphasis added.]

America would be reduced to a core of around 30 million people — about the number that existed in the decades after America’s independence from Great Britain."

270 million deaths! That puts one EMP strike on a par with a full pre-emptive nuclear strike for the number of deaths inflicted. That's why I took care of securing food and water before any other preparations. - ALG

Dear SurvivalBlog Readers:

I currently live in Virginia and what Jim said about retreat locale selection is generally accurate. That's not to say "all is lost!". Hardly, there are some advantages you have in our area that I've only found in a couple other places in the US, and you can successfully find a retreat location. You just have to work harder at it. The simple fact that most people live where they do is because it's easier. The more remote locations, and the more secure, tend to be more work to live in. It's all balance and trade off.

Due to the improvements to US17 and the construction of I-66, the area you're in now will be expanding out to the west very soon. Mike knows better than anyone the amount of growth the state has experienced, and Manassas used to be in the sticks just a few years ago. Culpepper/Warrenton/et cetera. were down-right the boondocks, and they will be the next housing area for the Capitol in a decade or so. All of us see the expansion before our eyes.

The biggest problem with the Shenandoah is it's a natural corridor. I-81 and the AT just make it a massive avenue of approach. But within the mountains you can find a place that is indeed suitable. It's just going to take more work. I can't think of too many places as beautiful as that area, and even the I66 corridor is pretty, and simply put you just have to really look hard to find the right place. The farther West you go, and even into West Virginia, the terrain is more favorable, but in the end you just have to make an intelligent decision on the place that's right for you. You can name any area in the country, and with few exceptions you can probably find a decent place for a retreat, and a lot of places to avoid. That goes for West of the Mississippi as much as the East. It's just you have to look harder in the East.

Narrow down your areas to less than just a general region. Do an "IPB". That's "Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield". Figure out the most likely risks and make a list in priority. It's your priority because it's your list. Take counsel, but it's still your survival, and you're the one who really has the responsibility for deciding what's important and what isn't. Then take a map and make overlays, or just mark the map of areas that are "no-go", like the obvious ones that you can block off as not where you're going. Things like Quantico, DC, etc. aren't probably going to be high on the list of areas for a retreat. Plot the avenues of approach on the map (the refugee flow) and you'll start seeing where to look and where not to look quickly. Once you narrow down the areas, look at resources and plot those. Basically, just take the area and graphically make the process of elimination. What's left is where you should start looking.

You can also take a more "think outside of the box" approach to things. Generally speaking it's simpler to have a "one-size-fits-all" retreat. We'd all love to live at our own ranch and somehow pay bills and live off the grid, yada, yada. Sure. For many of us it's simply not going to happen. We choose, rightly or wrongly to live where we are for a variety of reasons. The choice is ours, as the responsibility is ours and ours alone (not the government's or anyone else's). So if you're stuck in a bad place to begin with, make the most of it.

Take the list of most likely threats and see if there's a way to divide them up. For example Tsunamis, hurricanes, floods, etc. can pretty much be obviated by a retreat in a relatively close position to where you live. It doesn't take much but being inland, with high ground, and a stockpile of supplies to deal with it. Having a "risk specific" retreat complicates things in that you don't have the simplicity of a single place, but you may not really need the place for World War "Z". You are much more likely to need the place that can deal with floods, civil riots in the Capitol, hurricanes, etc. You can easily find a place like that where you desire. Do the same IPB, just base it on a narrower list of risk and you should have a wider area to choose from.

Obviously there are big disadvantages in this. More than one retreat location greatly complicates things. It increases expense, It greatly increases risk because you just might be wrong too in your planning. But sometimes your bomb shelter just can't be proof against a direct hit. There's a risk trade-off in everything.

In my years in Virginia, I've run into several situations were we were either on our own, or it had the potential. Most were Hurricanes, some blizzards, a localized riot or two, a terrorist attack, and the everyday crime/fire/etc that is frankly the most likely and just as destructive to your everyday life. (You do have a fire extinguisher in the kitchen, right?). Odds are pretty high these same things are what I'll face in the future, rather than the ultimate collapse of civilization. So there is a lot to be said about starting small and improving things. A closer retreat can deal with a lot of things you're likely to face. It can also allow you a base to rebuild your residence from if you're house burns down, etc. that's easier to operate out of than one far away. Obviously it would only be a valid locale for a limited amount of scenarios, but the most likely ones.

So think about approaching it in stages. Getting a "good enough retreat" now and a "perfect retreat" later might be a viable way to go. It's far more risky than going all out and doing the "perfect retreat" from the get-go, but the actual risk can only be judged by you for your own situation. You're the only one responsible for yourself...as it should be. Regards, - Doug Carlton

James
I enjoyed your repost of the "Illusion of Isolation" article in reply to Mike's query about the Shenandoah Valley being a good retreat location. My own observation is that the Shenandoah is far too crowded and accessible to the fleeing hordes, many of whom are already there as the northern end of the Valley is already a bedroom community for the "Peoples' Republic of Stalingrad", DC. He really needs to get out farther than is a practical commuting distance from the city. As you note, the East is a challenge because getting a full-tank distance from the city is simply not possible for the most part.

I would recommend that Mike look a little further south and west; south of Harrisonburg or quite a ways west of the interstate. Once you get ten miles back from the interstate it is an entirely different world, and if you get 25 miles west of Staunton and cross over Shenandoah Mountain you will be infinitely better off as you find yourself amongst very self-sufficient folks for the most part. There also are some isolated areas near Winchester at the northern end of the valley, but it has long been an area for weekend/ski getaways for city folk. Recently there was a northern Valley realtor whose sales pitch touted the fact that Winchester, Virginia was outside the "blast zone" for DC. All the Best, - Crusher

Mr. Editor:
I live 50 miles west of Washington, DC. How do you feel about the Shenandoah mountains area as a retreat location? I was thinking about building a cabin with a Safecastle underground [blast/fallout/security] shelter. I have not yet bought the land yet but it is a good time to do so. I look forward to talking with you soon. - Mike

JWR Replies: I highly recommend Safecastle's shelters, but a shelter by itself will not ensure our safety in truly desperate times. You will also need geographic isolation. I think that anywhere that is within one tank of gasoline driving radius of the DC/Baltimore area is a dicey proposition. For anywhere inside that radius, I strongly recommend that you carefully study likely refugee lines of drift, and find a place that is very far off the beaten path--preferably a truly bypassed area that is isolated by unique geography (Steep ridges, bodies of water, et cetera.) My suggestion is that you don't want to be anywhere near a highway or even railroads! Anywhere close to a major metropolitan area, you can expect a lot of company (of the bad sort). This would require very robust (and expensive ) defense. It can be done, but why not avoid most trouble, by being much more remote? This is much more feasible on a modest budget.

It has been more than three years since I posted the following, so it worth re-posting, for the sake of the majority of SurvivalBlog readers who have all joined us in just the past 18 months: (Our readership has doubled in the past 14 months. We now have around 89,000 unique visitors per week.) This was posted under the title "The Illusion of Isolation":

A long growing season.
Geographic isolation from major population centers.
Sufficient year-round precipitation and surface water.
Rich topsoil.
A diverse economy and agriculture.
Away from interstate freeways and other channelized areas.
Low taxes.
Non-intrusive scale of government.
Favorable zoning and inexpensive building permits.
Minimal gun laws.
No major earthquake, hurricane, or tornado risks.
No flooding risk.
No tidal wave risk (at least 200 feet above sea level.)
Minimal forest fire risk.
A lifestyle geared toward self-sufficiency.
A homogeneous population
Plentiful local sources of wood or coal.
No restrictions on keeping livestock.
Defendable terrain.
Not near a prison or large mental institution.
Inexpensive insurance rates (home, auto, health).
Outside blast radius and upwind from major nuclear weapons targets.