Survival Skills

LifeHacker.com has published some excellent web pages on "The Survival Skills Everyone Should Know".

 

"Be a Grown up Boy Scout" includes Wilderness skills for

• Know your priorities
• Learn Basic First Aid
• Build a Shelter and Fire
• How to Find Water and Feed Yourself
• Basic Hygiene
• What to do when Lost

"MacGyver, Survivalist, or Stockpiler" covers Urban survival skills

 

And "Survival books to keep on your bookshelf in case of the apocalypse"

 

Bottom Line

Under Urban Skills three kinds of Preppers are recognized:

• The Stockpiler: someone with a wide assortment of supplies but very little knowledge of how to actually do anything.
• The MacGyver: someone who can jury rig anything with duct tape, a pencil, and a pack of chewing gum.
• The Survivalist: someone who can find dinner in an old stump and keep warm using a roll of toilet paper and a rusty coffee can.

Which type are you?

Why Me Make Mistakes

I'm listening to Why We Make Mistakes - By Joseph T. Hallinan during my daily commute and cannot shake the feeling that I've heard it already. Perhaps the déjà vu comes from hearing the same stories in other books like Blink and Freakonomics. Perhaps not.

The author cites many reasons that people make mistakes:

1. Memory bias - we color the past to favor ourselves
- we remember successes and good grades over failures and F's. We take credit for the successes and find blame to excuse the failures.
- we forget that we've changed our mind and think we've always been in favor of our current beliefs

2. Vision bias
- we are quick to classify. If we see a "construction worker" or person of another race our brain is happy and we look no further for additional details. When we see someone "like us" we look deeper for more identifying details.
- we see less than we think. When remembering a person it may be their hair or facial expression or mannerism that we recall. Rarely details of eyes, nose, mouth, ears, etc.
- we quickly tire when looking for rare events - when looking for something that is infrequent, like cancer in a mammogram, after hundreds of images of nothing, we miss the one case it does occur because we've become trained NOT to see it.

3. Hindsight bias
- After an accident, the correct action to have taken is "obvious". How could the person have missed the obvious?  It's only obvious after the fact.

4. Multi-tasking
- we multi-task poorly, despite what we think. Modern cars with too many displays and sensors become overwhelming.

5. The Danger of Snap judgements
- Our first answer to a test question is not always right. If you have a nagging feeling to change it, do so. The subconscious is more likely to be right than the gut instinct.
- People find the "perfect hiding place" with a snap judgement and then forget where it was.
- People quickly create a password and then forget it

Bottom Line

The author's main point is that we cannot avoid being "human". Rather than blaming mistakes on "human error" find the reason why humans are prone to this error and do something about it.

For example, anesthesiologists used to use machines from two manufacturers. In one the dosage was increased by turning a dial clockwise, in the other, counter-clockwise. Naturally mistakes were made when an anesthesiologist forget which machine type they were using. Patients died until a standard was set so all machines worked the same way.

Free Preparedness Training

If you don't know where you are going, how can you expect to get there?
-Basil S. Walsh

Where there is no vision, the people perish.
-Proverbs 29:18

I recently got an e-mail from a person asking about Preparedness training.

Where to begin? There are so many different things to consider and it all depends on what you are Preparing for.

The FEMA site covering preparation for natural disasters is at http://www.ready.gov/
See also http://allreadystl.com/types-of-emergencies/ for a list of emergency prep documents by disaster type.

The LDS church has an excellent introduction to the basics at http://www.providentliving.org/

If you're worried about TEOTWAWKI (The end of the world as we know it) see http://www.survivalblog.com/ which covers surviving on your own - raising your own food, caring for medical needs, protecting yourself, etc.

You can receive free training by volunteering for the American Red Cross or a local CERT team:
http://www.redcross.org/  (drill down to Preparing & Training, then Preparedness Fast Facts).
http://www.citizencorps.gov/cert/

FEMA offers free online training which are required for emergency workers, in particular IS100 and IS700:
http://training.fema.gov/IS/NIMS.asp

To learn more about 72-hour kits see my blog, 72-hour Kits, with links to resources.

Bottom Line

There is no shortage of information online. The hard part is knowing where to begin. Both the Red Cross and FEMA endorse:

Get a Kit, Make a Plan, Be Informed.

Which translates to

• make or buy 72-hour kits for your home, office and car. (see 72-hour Kits and Pet Go-Kits )
• make family plans for how you will respond to house fire and other emergencies. Where to evacuate to, whom to call, etc. (see Family Communication Plan)
• follow blogs like mine and check out the resources above. (see also FEMA tip of the week) 

Where to get Free Stuff

“The truth shall make you free, but first it shall make you angry”
-unknown

Is money tight? Are you living on a limited budget? Then I suggest Where to Get Free Stuff: Mega Guide to freebies at
http://www.wealthinformatics.com/2011/08/19/where-to-get-free-stuff-freebie-guide/

It includes

• Free travel resources like free bike rentals, free tour guides, free lodging and free showers.
• Free entertainment: movies, TV, music, and museums
• Free samples of health and beauty supplies
• Free items on your birthday
• Free information: books, magazines, online courses, etc.
• Free technology
• Free financial advice
• and more

Bottom Line

As a teen I loved buying books (soft cover - I'm not crazy enough to pay hard cover prices). My dad said, why not use the public library, it's free. But I liked the idea of owning books I wanted to read and reread. This changed mid-way through college when my book collection was stolen from the dorm's summer storage area. I was not going to buy the books a second time and now use the library instead.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel?

Brunel

“The hardest thing in life is to know which bridge to cross and which to burn”

- David Russell

I just finished a book called The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack which included several famous persons from an alternate-history of Victorian England. Many I recognized like Richard Francis Burton, Charles Darwin and Florence Nightingale. But I had never head of the title character, Spring Heeled Jack, an urban-legend (?) from the Victorian era of a ne'er-do-well gentleman who could leap amazingly high.

Another character I had never heard of is Isambard Kingdom Brunel. (And with a name like that you'd think I'd remember it.) So I looked him up on Wikipedia and learned that Brunel placed second in a BBC 2002 public poll to determine the "100 Greatest Britons". Say what? Second only to Winston Churchill? Of course this was a "public" poll which becomes more obvious in that Princess Diane placed third, above Darwin (4th), and Shakespeare (5th).

Thames tunnel

So who is Brunel and what makes him so famous (at least to your average Briton)? Isambard Kingdom Brunel (9 April 1806 – 15 September 1859) was a genius of civil engineering who designed and built dockyards, railways, transatlantic steamships, and numerous important bridges and tunnels. His designs revolutionised public transport and modern engineering with innovative solutions to long-standing engineering problems. He assisted in the building of the first tunnel under a navigable river, the first propeller-driven ocean-going iron ship (SS Great Britain, which in 1843 was also the largest ship ever built), and first major British railway (The Great Western). Many of Brunel's bridges are still in use, having stood the test of time.


Clifton Bridge

Brunel is perhaps best remembered for the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol. Spanning over 700 ft (210 m), and nominally 200 ft (61 m) above the River Avon, it had the longest span of any bridge in the world at the time of construction.

Bottom Line

I'm pleased that an engineer is recognized in his own country. There are many famous scientists but who remembers the engineers? In America the only engineer that I recall is, John Augustus Roebling, who built the Brooklyn Bridge and many others. Perhaps only bridge builders are remembered? And some architects like Frank Lloyd Wright or I.M. Pei. But what of the others? Who built the Empire State Building? Who built the Trans-Continental Railroad? I don't recall being taught that.

My Bread

“The first time I tried organic wheat bread, I thought I was chewing on roofing material”- actor Robin Williams

Unless your food storage is a mountain of tin cans or a closet full of freeze-dried meals, odds are that you will have a few buckets of wheat for emergency use. Now what will you do with that wheat? Back during the Y2K scare we got a good price on a wheat grinder so we were able to make decent flour but had little luck making bread from scratch. Most of our baking efforts came out like bricks with very little yeast rising. We checked our yeast - it was alive but not working for us.

A few months back my wife found a bread recipe that has worked perfectly every time. We now have a new loaf every few days. The recipe was first published in the New York Times back in 2006 by baker Jim Lahey. It was an immediate success with the public and Lahey used his moment of fame to publish a baking book called, My Bread. We've tried a few recipes - we really enjoyed the no-knead olive bread with green olives, no so much a loaf containing peanuts.

The full bread recipe is a bit big for just two; the loaf sometimes goes bad before we can finish it. This won't be a problem if you have kids.

Some things about the recipe that work for us.

1. The long rise time lets the yeast do its job.

2. Use a dutch oven or cast iron pot with lid. The bread rises very little in the oven so it takes the shape of the pot. We had a lot of round low loafs before my wife switched to 2/3 recipe and a cast iron tea pot to give the loaf some height.

3. Definitely preheat the pot (without the lid). We tired once with a cold pot and the bread stuck to the pot and did not want to come out. But with a hot pot and a little corn meal tossed in before the bread, we have no sticking.

4. My wife now mostly skips mini-knead and second rise step. She lets it rise for as long as 24 hours in winter when our house is cold. Then while the pot is preheating in the oven she'll punch the bread or move it around a little inside the rising bowl if it looks too gassy.

5. As some versions of the recipe state, the hardest part is waiting for the bread to cool for one hour after de-potting. The author says this is essential and we haven't broken the rule yet.

Bottom Line

Try it - you'll like it! We liked it so much we bought the book after first borrowing it from the library.

Five unusual items for your emergency supplies

“The easiest period in a crisis situation is actually the battle itself. The most difficult is the period of indecision -- whether to fight or run away. And the most dangerous period is the aftermath. It is then, with all his resources spent and his guard down, that an individual must watch out for dulled reactions and faulty judgment.”- Richard M. Nixon

Here’s another fun story from the October 2009 edition of Popular Mechanics.

Beyond First Aid Kits: 5 Unexpected Survival Kit Essentials

1. Beer (or other gifts)

Remember yesterday’s blog about surviving the aftermath of Hurricane Ike? A man in Galveston found that beer was great for recruiting help: “Need your neighbor to help you clear trees out of your yard? A case of Bud is a better motivator than a $20 bill when all the stores are boarded up.”
Don’t drink beer or smoke? Then stock other items to share with helpers – bottled water, chocolate, candy, diapers, etc.

2. Handheld CB Radio

CBs will work when cell phone towers are down and may reach emergency crews and tow trucks
that you need.

3. Contractor Bags

Thick, sturdy 3-mil contractor bags are tough to store sharp debris, drag heavy objects, act as water barrier for leaky structures, and serve as a poncho in a pinch.

4. Glow Bracelets

With no electricity, houses and neighborhoods are really dark at night. One Ike survivor says, “I used them [glow bracelets] to mark the location of radios, flashlights, batteries and door handles.”

5. A Good Book

Remember Daryl Jané from yesterday who was stuck in his Jeep for two weeks? He says, “It gets so boring after a while. If I’d had a book I would have been set.” I suggest keeping THE “good book”, scriptures, in your glove compartment. It never gets boring.

Bottom Line

The items above all deal with surviving the aftermath. Barter for cleanup, means to call for help, tools for cleanup, tools for dealing with the dark, and something to overcome boredom. Don’t forget that 72 hour kits are just the beginning. It will be far longer before life returns to normal.

Scouting - fun or survival?

“Her recommendations for a campsite were totally unsuitable. There were no outlets. And there was dirt, and bugs, and ... it rains there. So anyway, we've found a place that's much more us: the Beverly Hills Hotel.” – movie Troop Beverly Hills, 1989

We are a spoiled and pampered generation. My grandparents were used to slaughtering a pig and using all the parts. The bristles become brushes. The blood became “head cheese”. They knew how to “rough it”.

For a while my wife and I enjoyed tent camping. But not backpacking into the rugged wilderness; we traveled by car and stayed at sites with running water & showers. Usually we had a great time. But the thrill of “roughing it” failed in one park when our tent was pitched next to a camper RV with A/C, TV, a kitchen and all the comforts of home.

Many survivalists have noted that Boy Scouts is suffering from the same decline into a suburban lifestyle. There is a belt loop for Computers and one option on the Art Webelos badge is computer-generated graphics. As Den leaders we are afraid to let the 8-10 year-olds handle a knife and our meeting location, a church, has a policy against fires. Hopefully they will learn survival skills as Boy Scouts.

Or maybe not. Survival experts often recommend the Boy Scout handbook as a guide, but only ones published before 1970. Modern Scouts lack the rough mountain man skills of making your own tent and foraging for your food. The edition favored by “preppers” is the 1911 edition that can be download for free at http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/29558.

Popular books for teaching survival skills include:
The Dangerous Book for Boys
The American Boy's Handybook Of Camp Lore And Woodcraft
Boy Scouts Handbook: The First Edition, 1911

Bottom Line

I recommend the movie “Troop Beverly Hills” for a fun look at scouting and what really matters (people). A Den Mother from Beverly Hills is a failure at teaching fire skills, knots, first aid, etc. But she and the girls have a great time when she invents new badges for jewelry appraisal, hair styling, fashion, shopping, and other skills suitable for Beverly Hills. But things get ugly at a Jamboree when her girls have to complete against girls who were taught to win at any cost.

Den Mother – “I may be a beginner at some things, but I've got a black belt in shopping!”

Likewise the Boy Scouts of America has adapted to the times and teaches young boys to live in the modern world, not the wilderness. Whether this is good or bad depends on your point of view – do you focus on the existing world or focus and worry about what might happen? I suggest an 80/20 spilt. Make the best of this world but spend some time and resources preparing yourself for emergencies and the future.

Why We Forget

"Memories, pressed between the pages of my mind
Memories, sweetened thru the ages just like wine,
Memories, memories, sweet memories" - Elvis song

As much as we want to remember things, it appears that the brain is really designed for being forgetful and unobservant. The opposite condition, perfect recall, can in fact be overwhelming and a detriment to survival. Many Idiot Savants have amazing gifts of memory but at the cost of being autistic. And so evolution favors forgetting.

The flaws in our memories and observations are detailed in a book I’m enjoying called, “Why We Make Mistakes: How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average” by Joseph T. Hallinan. Here are some of the anecdotes from just the first CD:

• A researcher made a film where a man walked into an empty classroom and sat down. The scene cut to a close-up of him, seated, looking around. What most viewers failed to notice was that a different actor was used for the close-up shot.
• The human eye has a very small zone on the retina for detailed vision. The vast majority of what we see is peripheral. We are fooled into thinking we have great vision because the eye is rapidly moving about taking three shots a second that get stitched together in the brain as one image.
• This means that a lot of detail about us is not observed – the brains fills in the gaps with what we expect to see.
• This trait works against us when it’s our job to find the rare occurrence: a radiologist looking for tumors on an X-ray or an Airport Security guard looking for gun as the luggage is scanned. They miss on average 25-30% of the items they are trained to look for. The brain has a built-in quitting threshold that makes the snap judgment all is normal and there is nothing interesting to see.

It turns out there is a lot we don’t know about memory and recall. My brother-in-law is working with lab mice in an attempt to locate where memories are formed in the brain and to physically detect the brain change where a memory is stored.

Bottom Line

While the facts above may be interesting (and clutter the brain) of what use are they?

It turns out that most of the time, what we do and what we see are subconscious. We walk, drive, eat, etc. on autopilot as we focus on a conversation or a phone call. Those tasks we do under autopilot make a very fleeting imprint on the brain and are soon forgotten.

A common example of this is forgetting where you left your keys. You walk in the house (autopilot) while thinking about the kids or the bathroom and set down your keys on the first empty space you pass. Then you forget about the keys because there are other more important things to think about.

The solution to this is to make your key dropping habit a conscious act.

1. Try to pick one location you always use.
2. When you don’t use that location, then pause one second as you set down the keys to visualize yourself where you are standing in the house, look attentively at the surface where you are placing the keys, and make up a story like “I’m putting my keys on the dining table because I need to run to the bathroom.” This should be a deeper impression on the brain and aid in recall.

Recommended Books

"The worth of a book is to be measured by what you can carry away from it." ~James Bryce

The SurvivalBlog has posted a list of reader recommended survival & preparedness books at ...

www.survivalblog.com/2009/07/survey_results_your_favorite_b.html

The readers' favorite book is The Encyclopedia of Country Living by Carla Emery. It sells for $18-20 on Amazon and is described as, "invaluable practical advice on all aspects of growing and preparing food. ... how to cultivate a garden, buy land, bake bread, raise farm animals, make sausage, milk a goat, grow herbs, churn butter, catch a pig, make soap, work with bees and more."

Many of the books in the list cover gardening and farming. The rest are a mix of general principals, health (dentistry, first aid), guns, religion (bible), food storage, and cooking.

Bottom Line

While I love the internet and all the information that is available, I would not count on it to be working after a major emergency. First - many disasters knock out the electricity. Second, that might be a break in your phone line or cable. Third, if you do have power and a working line, the servers may be overwhelmed or just incredibly slow.

Do yourself a favor and buy a few good books:

• first aid
• old fashioned cooking skills (e.g. Joy of Cooking, 1965 edition)
• general survival guide
• farming/gardening (if you have the land)

Nuclear War

"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room." - from the movie Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

I've recently read two books about life after a nuclear war. The first was a classic called Alas, Babylon, written in 1959 by Pat Frank. The second was One Second After written by William R. Forstchen this year. Both follow the efforts of a former soldier to rally his town and pull people together to survive the coming hard times after America is hit by nukes. In both cases the town is outside the fallout zone so radiation is not a primary concern. Instead the enemy is roving bands of bandits and the harshness of nature when people are deprived of electricity and modern devices like cars, refrigeration, and medicine.

But beyond the common background, these books are as different as the island adventure/survival stories of Robinson Crusoe vs Lord of the Flies. In Alas, Babylon (like Crusoe), American ingenuity and virtue wins the day as people work together and rebuild civilization. In "One Second After" like "Lord of the Flies" the baser side of man is seen when push comes to shove. It's dog eat dog (or literally man eat man).

Author William Forstchen wrote a darker book to show how overly dependent Americans have become upon technology. In his book three EMPs (Electromagnetic Pulse bombs) are exploded high over America by persons unknown and everything electronic is fried. Every plane in the air crashes. Every car after 1988 or so is useless (the onboard computer chip is dead). There is no refrigeration and soon no food. Near the end the hero of the book is told he did well with his town's survival ratio of 20% after one year of starvation.

Bottom Line
One thing that stood out from me in these books is how local civilization became with no cars, no radio, no TV, no phone, no computers or Internet. Your world contracts to where you can walk to. Each town becomes an island of independent survival. It reminded me of American in the 1700's. In a history of the American Revolution lecture I'm listening to, the professor constantly talks about the role towns and town legislatures played. The states held a lessor degree of authority and federal government was non-existent until about 1787. Quite a reversal of today's world.

Top Seven Preparedness Books

“Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.” - Mark Twain

Check out The Survivalist Blog for descriptions of the best Preparedness Books according to Arthur Bradley, author of “Process of Elimination"

Book 1: Crisis Preparedness by Jack A. Spigarelli
Book 2: Preparedness Now! By Aton Edwards
Book 3: Disaster Preparedness for Dummies (DVD video)
Book 4: Emergency Food Storage and Survival Handbook by Peggy Layton
Book 5: Organize for Disaster by Judith Kolberg
Book 6: Making the Best of Basics, Family Preparedness Handbook by James Talmage Stevens
Book 7: No Such Thing as Doomsday, by Philip L. Hoag, revised in 2001

Bottom Line

Arthur Bradley suggests that if you can only purchase three books, buy Book 5, Book 6, and either Book 1, 2 or 7. With those three, you should have a balanced look at common sense organizing, food storage, and emergency items to have on hand. If you can buy only one book, get Book 1.

The PM Survival Guide

"Survive Anything!" - Popular Mechanics

Popular Mechanics, the magazine, maintains an amazing survival guide on their website at www.popularmechanics.com/survival. Topics include:

• How to Survive Anything Mother Nature Throws at You
• 5 Steps to Get Ready for Disaster (Not Stuck in It)
• 22 Steps to Save Yourself When Natural Disaster Hits
• 7 Steps to Eat, Drink and Be Smart When Worse Comes to Worst
• 4 Steps to Power Your Home When the Grid Fails
• 5 Steps to Fix Your Home After a Crisis
• 107 Pieces of Survival Gear for Your Car, Home and To-Go Bag
• The 10 Worst Disasters of the Last 101 Years

Bottom Line

The PM Survival guide also contains several quizzes to test your knowledge. Try them out and see how well prepared you are.

Overconfidence

"When it comes to old-fashioned risks like weather, we often overestimate ourselves" - The Unthinkable by Amanda Ripley

In a new book called The Unthinkable, the author looks at human response to disasters and emergencies. She points out that people often make the same mistake that FEMA did, we focus on preparing for the "big" but rare events like terrorism or nuclear attack and overlook the common but deadly surprises that mother nature is prepared to send our way.

Consider lightning. The National Weather Service estimates that 100,000 thunderstorms occur in the United States each year. One hundred bolts hit the earth every second and in many years these bolts kill more people world wide than any other kind of weather including hurricanes and tornadoes. In the U.S. 1318 deaths were attributed to lightning from 1980 through 1995, an average of 82 per year. Lightning can occur anywhere and sometimes with little warning; lightning has struck 10 miles away from the rain of a thunderstorm.

Consider hurricanes. Unlike lightning, no one living near a coast should be surprised or unprepared when a hurricane hits your neighborhood. However did you know that the common cause of hurricane death is drowning; some trapped in the attic of their house but many drowned in their own cars trapped by flood waters. As a child growing up in San Antonio, Texas, I recall each rain season, seeing TV news of flood water pouring across roads like a mini river. And every year one or more cars would try to cross this shallow river and be carried off by the flood.

A few weeks ago in Ossining, NY, a torrential rain came down while my wife and I were shopping. We watched as a river of rain water began pouring down the street. The rain was too much for the storm drains and water gushed out instead of going in. Manhole covers in busy intersections were popped off by geysers. To our surprise cars tried to speed through as if everything was normal. They had no clue of the hidden gaping manholes waiting to grab a tire. We saw one manhole cover hit by a car and the cover went flying - luckily no one was hit by it.

Bottom Line
Take storms seriously - both the lightning and heavy rain. Do not drive through any water that you can not see the ground through. There could be hidden potholes or erosion that will swallow your car. Water that reaches the bottom of your car door could flood your engine or make the car buoyant enough to float away in heavy current.