Scenario : 'homeless ' inside your home

I was thinking about starting a thread about "bugging in" where you are forced to stay bugged in by civil unrest or whatever. Let's say you become 'homeless' but with a home sheltering you. No power, very little drinking water, and half empty pantry.

What to do and how to survive for a month or two or three ?

I have a week alone in the house when DW and kids were visting grandparents. Meanwhile I have been thinking about several scenarios including this one I just mentioned.


Weather ? Geography ?
Something like Texas.

Furniture will make lots of firewood. Pigeons all over the house will provide some food ( if someone/something fixes my twisted psychology). Small garden will add few veggies. Solar oven is a possibility. Water quantity and quality can be a problem. Maybe a solar still can help (multiple units - running full time ).

Any ideas for being 'homeless' in your home ?


BTW, it not that inpossible to happen. I know a guy who lost his job and couldnt afford to pay the bills and lost power ..etc.

The first thing to do is rip off the lower part of the roof gutter downspouts and put containers under them.

Most furniture is treated with something: varnish, paint, plastic coating, etc, so you might not want to cook over it directly, or burn it indoors where you would be exposed to the fumes. I have a small wood stove, and it can go through a LOT of wood. Just to keep a campfire burning all night (to keep bears and zombies away) takes a lot more wood than most people think.

For the pigeons and crows, put out some cornmeal or oatmeal to attract them, then put up a net that you can trip with a long string. If you've got a gun, you could eat the neighbors' pitbulls that are always running the streets. When you run out of dogs, there are always the neighbors. Eat the nasty ones first and tidy up the gene pool just in case things get better.

If you don't have much food, you'd better have seeds. In addition to planting them, you could probably trade some for food you could eat immediately, like moldy Twinkies.

Sue

Water, as Sue has pointed out, is going to be a major problem. As Sue pointed out, rainwater collection will be a must!

Food should already be squirreled away.

Heat for cooking & warmth is going to be both required and create a fuel problem. Extreme tree trimming will help a wee bit but wood burns faster than most people realize, perhaps because most people tend to build bigger fires than what they actually require.

We've got lots of geese around here during two parts of the year (the north-south and then south-north migrations). You walk out of your house and you almost trip over the dang things. If you get too close, they're just as likely to charge you as run away. Let 'em charge and whack their heads off with a knife. Sounds brutal, but it's an instant dinner. If you don't want to put up with a charging goose, make one of those bolo things - three rocks tied with string in a three pointed star fashion. You can easily walk up within ten feet of a goose and get it with that. Squirrels are pretty big around here too. An airgun would bag those guys. If you want "Manly Meat", go for the coyotes. They're overrunning us here (Denver metro area and surrounding towns). Jumping six foot fences in suburbia and eating pets. In my town three people have been bitten by them recently (two adults and a child). Bold critters. Shouldn't be too hard to find something to hunt them with. A stick would do it. We used to have lots of rabbits and raccoons around here. But they're gone now - I think the foxes ate them. We used to find foxes lounging around in our yard. But not anymore. I think the coyotes ate the foxes. We have the occasional mountain lion that wanders into town (I'm not sure I'd want to mess with trying to shoot one of them though). When the lions hear about the coyote population explosion, they'll probably come on down and eat those. Bears are rare, but do make it down here. I don't think they could catch the lions however. And I'm sure not planning on shooting a bear for lunch.

I have two, one million gallon city water tanks behind my house. I wonder if a battery powered hand drill would get through their walls? Drill it, tap it, and use a spare machine screw as your on/off valve.

Water is everything. Well, almost. What if it doesn't rain for awhile? Or doesn't rain enough? And setting up a rain catchment in a hostile environment may be difficult and might attract the wrong kind of attention. Or lets say you did have plenty of water stored, what about your neighbors? Sooner or later they're gonna realize you've got potable water.

Show your neighbors how to catch and purify rainwater.

I live in an area that normally gets plenty of rain, although there come dry spells everywhere.

This is a great question/scenario and one I've thought about.

Water is the key.

By definition, you have shelter. And warmth can be found with the tineist bit of fuel from furniture and trees if you make one (small) room warm and bundle up.

Food is a challenge, but you are home so hopefully have some set aside. Plus critters or gardens can provide for quite a while.

So, back to water... The rain collection from down spouts is spot on.

Also if you are fortunate to live in a home with a well you have a very good option. A generator that is only run for a few minutes each day can last for a LONG time. And in that few minutes your well pump can produce gallons and gallons and gallons of water for you.

Normal generator runtime is around 8 hours for half load? And most wells produce more than 4 gallons per minute flow. So say you run that generator for <10 minutes a day to secure fresh water only. You are talking about 8 weeks or more without a refill. And a single 5 gallon can of extra gas/diesel can get you through months. And don't forget... there is gas in your lawnmower, trimmer, and autos.

It is not a bad thing to think about bugging in and what you need to do to be prepared for it. I think that is the whole point of emergency preparedness for homeowners.

Well, furniture won't provide a lot of firewood.
Not only is it usually made out of other stuff instead of wood, but even wooden furniture does not make much of a pile of wood once it is broken down.
Then you need to deal with having a fireplace or stove to burn it in. You would be better scavenging from dumpsters and construction sites for wood it you were going to do that.
Cooking will likely be outside with a barbecue pit or can stove simply because you likely don't have a fireplace in your house, but if you do have a fireplace or wood stove it suddenly becomes a useful feature instead of just an architectural ornament.
Straw (dead grass) can be a useful cooking fuel. Chinese peasants have relied on it for thousands of years.

Consider oil lamps, slush lamps, or candles for heat and light.
If it is cold you will be wearing more than just one sweater too.
Most houses can be managed to stay fairly warm, opening drapes in the daytime and closing them at night to trap heat from the sun, that sort of thing. Anything that adds insulation is good.
If you are forced to gather water and need to filter it cheaply you might want to try slow sand filters (bio-sand filters) because they are cheap to make and 5 gallon pail version should deliver about a liter an hour.

Food will likely be scavenged in your scenario. You won't have time to grow a garden if it is not already being grown. You better understand urban/suburban trapping and the raising of domestic meat sources too. (rabbits, pigeons, squirrels, possibly ducks and geese, maybe even rats if it gets to the starvation point.)



Your basic proposal pretty much suggests Paris under German occupation in WWII or Berlin when they were isolated from the west right by the Russians at the end of WWII. ( Berlin airlift,not East Berlin after the wall so much)

Make sure you get all the pigeon poop--from the roof--out of your water.

You need to start thinking ahead now. Get the garden started now, don't want until you have to bug in to try planting seeds. Same with catching water, get a tank and put it under your porch/deck and get the gutters plumbed in to it now. Look into grey water recycling inside the house, a tank in the basement/crawlspace that the shower and washer feeds into to use for flushing the toilet.
if the family is going to be gone you can test, shut off the power, water, gas, etc and see how long you last.

And keep it for black powder!

I've got nothing really. If I'm kept that closed in, then I guess midnight break-ins at the local grocer are out of the question, unless it's bad enough to risk their wrath. BTW, I'm absolutely SHOCKED at how much food comes in dry/packaged form. I kind of thought pasta only. There's couscous, pasta, milk, oatmeal, grits, cream of wheat, flax, flour, kool-aid and their kin, rice, various spices (tomato sauce/powder, etc)... you could really, really store a lot of food in a single 5-gal bucket or a under-the-bed tupperware container.

But, alas, water is key to most of those foods too!

I'll second that on water, a water cistern or making one from the gutters can be a great asset and I would also use tarps, trash bags or what have you to make water collection points for rain. Another thing I would get is a good quality sleeping bag rated for very cold weather, the two biggest killers that will get you the quickest is cold (shelter) and water. Shelter will kill you faster than not having water but both are critical. Living in Fla for us buys us time for shelter and water is a lot plentiful here but a lot of pesticides and virus, but these past years we haven't got much rain where we are at than along time ago. We're good for shelter here from rain and cold down to 40 below zero if needed with good down winter sleeping bags from Western Mountaineering. The only need for a fire would be for cooking and to keep warm when not in the sleeping bags, we would limit fire activity to the minimum to conserve fire wood. As for food after depleting all the reserves and eating all the oranges and figs off the trees, then it's fishing, hunting squirls, cat's, dogs etc.. with a BB gun. The BB gun is quite and low profile, will not attract attention as much as the other weapons and keeping a low profile is a must or it's off to the big house. The big guns are for big game if needed and thief's and zombies . Unfortunately we don't have very big game where I'm at. I guess if you look at it and you are caught by a LEO, you'll get free meals and shelter anyway so it's a win win I guess. The bottom line is you live.

Since winter tends to be pretty cold where I live my main concern would be heating. As has been said before, furniture makes lousy firewood and giving off all those toxic fumes I don't think it would work indoors.

In an emergency we'd probably move to the smallest room in our apartment. I would attempt to insulate the windows as best as I could and make a makeshift shelter so that we could stay warm even without heating if absolutely necessary. In a pinch, we could move to the basement. A lot warmer down there if the heating is gone but much less comfortable.

Otherwise, making a small wood stove from a large paintcan is not difficult if you have access to firewood. Even an alcohol stove could be improvised easily but fuel is again a consideration. I think we could make it for a week or two at most. Of course, that's all theoretical because I've never had to do it for real (hope it stays that way)... Maybe I'm less prepared for that kind of contingency than I thought!

I didn't think Twinkies ever got moldy...;^)

John E

A good down or winter sleeping bag can be a real life saver in a pinch. It's a good investment that will last you for a long time. Weather you are into down or synthetic (each with it's ups and downs) if the power is cut a good quality bag will save your life. I'd rather have a hot bag than a cold bag, on an investment side I would opt with a good quality bag from Western Mountaineering,Feathered Friends, Wiggy or a know good quality manufacture that people use routinely for expeditions and have good field track records. Eventually you will run out of wood and fuel unless you live in an area that has miles and miles of forest. Then your concern would be to keep that fire going which will go through a lot of wood taking time away from searching for food and water. Just a thought, I know with the emergency bags we have we can stay warm and dry for quite a long time. Also a fire is a life essential as well but will require a lot of wood over time. I try to conserve the fire as much as possible and use it when I need it the most.

One of the basic scenarios I think worth planning for is a nuclear strike that requires you to remain indoors for a couple of weeks while the fallout decays away. I have enough food and water stockpiled for that, and there's plenty of bedding to conserve warmth.

For economic problems, I have made a point of keeping my gas and electric suppliers different in the hope they won't both fail at once. I also have an open coal fireplace and I keep a reserve of coal, albeit not in the main house. I live on the edge of a village, so there is potential to forage for wood outside.

In the longer term, I have dependencies on civilisation I find hard to break. I'd need to learn a new trade, for example.

Don't forget that most homes have a built-in 40 gallon (or larger) water reservior - the water heater. There's also several gallons that can be harvested from the pipes. Just open a faucet at the high end of the system and collect water from a faucet at the bottom end.

In cases where the municipal water is still flowing, but becomes contaminated, it's important to remember to turn off the water main to your house first so you don't get contaminated water in your system.

Granted, it may not last all that long, but it could bridge the gap during a dry spell or something like that.

Rainwater is said to be twenty times cleaner than the cleanest groundwater of any kind.

If you know you'll have to harvest rainwater, the next very first thing you need to do is get up on the roof and clean it off. Sweep off the leaves and conifer needles. Take careful note of where the bird poop is -- there's actually very little on most of the roof, isn't there?. Birds mostly poop where they perch: on trees overhanging the roof (cut them off for firewood), on your TV antenna (take it down), on wires stretching across your roof (see what you can do to remove them), and on the ridgeline of your house. Remove the perches and you'll remove the major source of rainwater contamination.

Since you carried two eye-bolts and a hundred feet of thin wire with you when you went up on the roof, once it is cleaned off, screw an eye-bolt into each end of the ridge of your roof (if you've got one of those fancy, multi-sectioned roofs, it gets more complicated). Fasten one end of the wire securely to one eye-bolt and then stretch it tightly down the length of the roof to the other eyebolt. It has to be very thin (too thin for even a sparrow to perch on) and tight. This will prevent birds from perching on your roofline.

If you do this, you've just eliminated probably 98% of your rooftop contamination sources. And, if things got bad, I wouldn't really hesitate to drink the water that comes from the roof without purification. I know that everyone says, "Oh, no, you can't drink THAT! It's got asphalt in it!" Well, how much residue really comes off the roof as the water quickly runs over it? Do you think you would be ingesting as much of the petroleum product as you're already eating in your food now, or less? I know what I think!

Grocery stores will be stripped before you even think of breaking into one.

Those plastic underbed storage containers are great for storing more food where it isn't in the way, or obvious.

Sue

> Let's say you become 'homeless' but with a home sheltering you. No power,
> very little drinking water, and half empty pantry.

I suspect that's the most common result of disasters in the US. Katrina rendered most of the residents of New Orleans stranded in a town without power. Many midwesterners are left without power after major blizzards or tornadoes. Nor'easters in New England, blizzards and hurricanes on the East Coast.

It's less likely that your home will be destroyed than that you'll lose power. On the West Coast, earthquakes will cause power losses, but the likelihood of damage to the home is greater either from the quake or from the fires that start afterwards at the broken gas mains.

My assumption in my location in the San Francisco Bay Area is that we'll be stranded after a quake for some period of time, maybe weeks. If we're lucky, we'll have the house. If not, we'll have to go somewhere and shelter in place. We have food, water. and fuel for a month for the two of us, and some changes of clothes. Luckily, the weather here is temperate year-round (never below freezing, rainy in the so-called winter, generally in the 70s or 80s in the summer.

If the problem is one which cannot be forecast and evacuated in time (tornado, earthquake), sheltering in place may be the best option.

I think that's one of the first scenarios for which one should be prepared. How long you can survive in your own home without assistance or outside support is going to be determined by the weakest links in your chain and the hardest for which to find a substitute.

As a resident in a NY high-rise, I know water and warmth are likely to be my weak points. I have enough water for a while, but space limitations make it difficult to store a lot more. If I had to remain here for days on end with no power and heat, then I would need to make some serious adaptations. I would need to make something like tents inside our apartment, and we would need to dress warmly. Not much else we can do because we have nothing in which to burn any wood or other fuel, except maybe a candle or chafing fuel. My only other option is to move, and we are soon. I have enough food to last more than a month stashed away.

Here in the UK I have planned for just such an emergency.

In an urban area I feel that it is unwise to count on any type of hunting, foraging, gathering or purchasing.
There will be a lot of competion for any available rescources.

I keep bottled water for a few days, and have a water butt filled from the roof for the long term. I doubt that such water is safe to drink as is, but have a large supply of chlorine tablets to treat it.

I keep basic foods for about 3 months, mainly tins.

I have a small wind turbine and some PV modules, this would allow lighting and refrigeration to be used indefinatly, and would allow very limited use of other appliances.

I have a kerosene cook stove, lamps and space heater in addition, and loads of candles.

For any long term sheltering in place, dont forget plenty of good warm all wool blankets.
Although a good sleeping bag is useful if you have to evacuate, blankets on a proper bed are more comfortable for long term use.
If electricity is available, but most be used frugally, an electric blanket uses much less than heating a house!

Likewise keep a stock of very low power light bulbs, both to save money if times are hard, and to use from a generator, battery, or other limited power source.

If you are prepared, your home should be your first line of "defense" in a survival, EOTHAWKI, situation. Store what you can, where you can and know where things are. An offsite storage facility, located within walking distance, can also be used.

I don't plan on bugging out if I can hunker down. I know how much I can carry, versus how much is in my house and garage.

The key is prior planning.

One thing I've always wondered about...

Here in western WA, every so often high winds are predicted. Immediately, all the stores are stripped of bottled water. Are people just adding to their supply, or have they dumped out the water they bought the last time?

Sue

They probably just drank the bottled water after the last scare was over. So, I think it's less of a "preparing for a rainy day" thing, and more a matter of just buying their groceries a bit sooner than they otherwise would, I imagine. On the other hand, if people were rushing out and buying Aquatainers, then I imagine that there's a better than even chance that they'll just keep that stored water around for emergencies since most people won't want to drink that water under normal circumstances if they don't have to.

Gees, I remember some serious winds in Western Washington as a kid. I recall dad driving us home from Grandma's house over the Narrows Bridge in a VW Bus in very high winds. Dad made a lot of unexpected lane changes.

I also remember living in Longview back in the early 70s and they had a tornado rip through town on Columbus day one year. There were a lot of big Douglas fir behind our house that got knocked down.

Set up rain barrels now, rather than waiting. I have two under the downspouts in the back yard, totaling about 120 gallons. One good t-storm and they are full. I use the water for the veggies during the summer. I do consider these part of my emergency supply. I would not drink the water without taking normal purification precautions. Even with screens on top there is dirt/debris in the water, plus algae growth and who knows what else.

Be wary, some jurisdictions don't allow rainwater collection, and you could end up with an unwanted citation.

Ditto.

Most of my "survival" gear is camping gear.

We camp for fun. The survival aspect of the gear is bonus.

Warm sleeping bags (zero or 20-degree bags) and a tent would be priceless in sheltering-in and bug-out scenarios.

I didn't see any mention of sanitation. If you live where water pressure for flushing depends upon power, or if for some other reason the water pipes or plumbing don't work, you'll be glad you made at least rudimentary provision for the inevitable.

A 5 gallon bucket lined with two trash bags at a time is the minimum.

If at all possible one bucket for solid waste and one for liquid waste makes disposal easier.

Although the radio news, here, announced that sources of sawdust are drying up because the saw mills are idle, a bucket of sawdust or cedar litter, or even kitty litter with a scoop kept beside the solid waste bucket are a good start for a compost toilet.

Diaper wipes from the big box store and a pump bottle of hand sanitizer and plenty of rolls of TP and any other type of necessary sanitary supplies will go a long way to making your SIP healthier and more comfortable.

Philip - we're not far from you, and we pray that if the big quake shakes us all that there's no fire! (Please, God!!!)

> A 5 gallon bucket lined with two trash bags

Well, I'll offer a more comfortable alternative if the house is still useable. You'll have flushed your commode dry, so put your trash bags into the toilet as the removable liner. I've used the 5-gallon bucket, and I'll take my house toilet every time. :->

And I'll agree - wet waste should go outside to the extent possible, dry waste in the toilet.