Having made a comment to Blast about being windbound for 3 days has got me thinking about McGyvering and resources that are useful and right under my nose, like the following:

Legal to pick-up:
A 5gal plastic bucket,
A 24" plastic fan screen,
A large piece of styrofoam,
cane growing on the canal bank (good for fishing poles, shelter building, etc)
Several boards (2x4's, 2x6's, 4x4's),
An orange lifejacket,
A plethora of driftwood for shelter making & firewood,

Illegal to take/make use of:
4 signboards that are approx 4'x5' ea,
2 heavily damaged camps (temp shelter)(perhaps some overlooked useful items inside of ea),
A sand & gravel yard w/a dragline & a dumptruck (temp shelters and perhaps some useful items inside of ea),
A petroleum production dock with solar panel arrays (and other useful items),
A bridge with accessible Navigation Lights,


When you have time to stop & smell the roses, take a look around and notice what useful items you see laying around,,,let me know.

Ignoring the three floors of fully stocked chemical laboratories ( ), I spend a lot of time prowling around the facility where I work. Two particularly useful finds were the refreshments stockroom and the equipment "graveyard". The refreshment stockroom is where they keep all the soft drinks, bottled water, and snacks for the executive meeting rooms. It's filled with two pallets of bottled water, and a pallet each of Coke, Diet Coke, Dr. Pepper, Diet Dr. Pepper, and Sprite along with several tubs of hard candies.

The equipment graveyard is where people can dump equipment they no longer want. It's a scavenger's dream, but I have to fight three other people over the contents. Wednesday I scored a complete, high-quality microscope with all sorts of accesories. The thing has to be thirty years old or more. It's in perfect shape, the owner just dumped it because she can't easily hook it to her computer!

Oh, the other useful find was the location of the fuel tanks for the emergency generator, but that's pretty much off limits. Completely open and unprotected, but off limits.

And if things really get bad, there's a herd of cattle across the street from me. I love Texas!

-Blast

Additional observations while cruising the GICW (Gulf Intracostal Waterways) and the Western Rivers:

1) Rope: 1/4", 3/8", & 1/2"
2) Line: 1 1/2", 2", & 3"
3) Milk Crates
4) Life jackets
5) 55gal Drums (mostly new ones)
6) Steel & plastic buoys
7) Destroyed Light structures & associated equipment (woden platforms, solar panels, batteries & boxes, lights, steel light stands, plywood dayboards)
8) Old tires
9) Fishing gear (yo-yo's, fishing line/quipment in tree limbs)

This is what comes off the top of my RAM.

I already take advantage of my neighbors littering up their place. My apartment building and our surrounding yard is kept nice and tidy, but the crazy neighbors in the next apartment building over have totally trashed their area. It's mostly single moms that don't watch their kids and let them run wild, and they left the following and more just lying around in the yard and in the street. Forgive me as I like to be descriptive...

Several tires, some in pretty good condition, which I take to either the scrap yards or the tire places down the road and sell for some pocket money. I know that the neighbors don't want them anymore because they leave them lying by the side of the road next to the garbage cans, for weeks at a time, assuming the trashmen will come pick them up. They never do.

A large dry-erase board, I dunno, about 4x5 feet, classroom sized? - tossed out because the kids had drawn on it over and over so much it was stained. Obviously they didn't know about the simple household item used to get rid of that, Windex, and now I put it to my personal use. I have all my phone numbers on there, with tons of room to spare and it works better than a Rolodex.

A broken pellet gun, and a half-full canister of pellets, tossed to the side of the road and left for naught. My multitool, and the trigger, release spring, and sight stick from an old BB gun I have fixed all that. I bought another small box of pellets to supplement my target practice on pop cans. If worse comes to worst, I like to think, at least, that Mr. Squirrel or Mr. Bunny wouldn't stand a chance.

Several VCR's, stereos, flashlights, and electronics - all broken to some degree, but some have been repairable. The things I can't fix I scrap out for parts and put those in my junk drawer. I once fixed a VCR that looked like new and gave it to my aunt, and she couldn't tell the difference (just don't tell her that!)

A good Nalgene bottle! This made me very sad to no end, as I knew those rotten kids probably didn't take care of it. A few good deep cleanings later, one of them in a bleach mix (God knows where it had been before), and it has a happy home with me.

Glass jars, which held I think small amounts of instant coffee. They were left there when the kids couldn't smash them in the street. I use them to hold spare change, a different kind of coin in each one. I've also got one that holds penny nails, and another for matches for my candle motifs.

I've told the landlord about my neighbors (which he appreciates) but he says there's not much he can do, besides defer from their security deposits. And he also told me whatever they throw out I can have, so whatever I take is gravy. Nobody's said anything to me about it for over a year.

Hmm... I'll play along.

Problem with being rural, not as many dumps as there used to be, but I won't complain.

Other than the obvious bits of grass and tree based debris, a bunch of beverage containers. If I haven't been cleaning up, there should also be about a half dozen plastic bags, the random CD. There is a 20' length of 12" culvert pipe that the town took out as part of the last drainage modification, it's rusty but it might be useful.

Yeah, I don't have much in the way of scrounging without annoying people.

Where do you take tires and get money back? Around here, you need to pay them to take tires away. Nobody wants them.

Nobody buys tires anymore. They're a liability. I used to work at a tire recycling plant which paid for tires. In 3 months they had so many tires sitting around (the machine can only chew them up so fast) the fire department shut them down because the tires were a fire hazard.

That was going to be my question.

Re the "...good Nalgene bottle!...", I would be very carefuly using that, bleach or no bleach. There are some really nasty chemicals being used by drug manufacturers, I would hate to injest some of that from a free bottle I found on the street. Same reason I passed on a jillion ice chests I found on the side of I-5 over the years...

"from the parings of man's fingernails, devils make little caps for themselves."

I'd guess they're about like a log home. Hard to start but once its started difficult to put out.