The Ability to Pry

In what situations/locales is the ability to pry things an essential for a survival kit?

A lot of folks place importance on the ability to use their survival knife as a pry bar, or include an actual pry bar in their gear, but I can't think of too many situations that would call for heavy duty prying. Figured I'd see what the consensus is here.

I keep a pry bar in the bedroom since here in earthquake country, a major shaker can often shift the house enough to jam the doors in the house.

For more heavy duty prying, I do have a couple long wrecking bars and wood blocks. Most rescues from damaged buildings after earthquakes are self-rescues or rescues by neighbors, not professional first responders.

When I lived in places with mass transit, I would occasionally think about carrying some smaller pry tool for subways and elevators and such, but never got paranoid enough to actually do it.

Your question reminded me of those guys trapped in an elevator in the WTC during 9/11. They pried open the elevator door, and used the metal squeegee tool to carve out an opening in the drywall shaft of the elevator, and busted through to a restroom to escape the elevator. Something like a "cop tool" would've been handy for prying, cutting, and punching through materials in a case like this.

This is earthquake country, and it allows me to get to the emergency/evacuation kit without having to kick my way through an interior wall and door if the house shifts.

For the $10 I paid for the crowbar, it's not a major investment

Some people died in Katrina because they made the mistake of retreating from the rising water to the attic with no way to get through the roof.
The Sock

Living in earthquake country, I have several pry bars stored in various locations around the house. I also keep one in the car for the occasional automobile accident.

Obvious next question: What kind of prying tool?

I rather like classic fire axe/Halligan bar combo:

I chose the gooseneck prybar because it has the closest geometry to a halligan without forking out ~$140 for one. It's similiar to this:


The axe would be nice, but given what this thing did a couple of interior doors I was getting rid of, somewhat redundant.

I keep gooseneck prybars in my bedroom, office, car and one in a car trauma FAK - buy them cheap, and spread them around. I'm not shy about breaking out glass or wrecking a doorframe getting myself or someone out of a jammed door.

Then a couple 4-5 foot halligan type prybars in the outside storeroom, along with a garbage can full of sacrifical 2x4 and 4x4 blocks, for cribbing and lifting after a collapse. I put the garbage can on wheels, or it can be toted by two people. Ace Hardware stocks a really nice inexpensive model long prybar for ~$25, I buy one, they order another one, I buy another...

I put a 16 inch prybar in every 72 hour kit I build and give away - daughter #1 got one when she went to college, handy as a defense against unruly boys...

Thanks for the replies. Jammed car or home doors was about all I could think of. I've been thinking of getting a Fubar for our apartment, in the event of fire or (less likely) earthquake.

Has anyone found a use for a prybar (or a knife overbuilt so as to be usable as one) in a back woods / outdoor scenario? I'm kind of stumped there. I don't think there's much to pry, except maybe breaking into a building for emergency shelter, which is probably a pretty low likelihood situation.

In an emergency doors jam, locks seize up, or you cant find the key, things get in the way, sometime things just richly deserve a good beating. A well made pry bar will see you through these sorts of situations.

A top-of-the-line Halligan would be ideal but the really good ones are pretty large, are difficult to store with the spike sticking out, and they run in excess of $200 each.

My preference for emergency kits is a flat bar. For equal size and capacity they are usually a bit lighter and often cheaper than a bar made from hexagonal steel section. Also the wider blades opens up options for prying laterally, scraping, using it as a hoe to shift mixed gravel and debris. The thinner blades, which I usually grind down to a fine edge, work better on tight joints without having to resort to hammering them in.

For $13 you get a nice brand name unit that is sure to be reliable:
http://www.northerntool.com/shop/tools/p...la=&cm_ite=

For $6 you get one with less peddigree:
http://www.northerntool.com/shop/tools/p...la=&cm_ite=

For $3 you get a generic:
http://www.northerntool.com/shop/tools/p...la=&cm_ite=

Note that all three tools may indeed be made in the same factory from the same steel as the Vaughan Super Bar. The Vaughan just getting a little more finishing, a paint job, and a label. No guarantee that that is true but the general trend is that good quality tool steel and the cost of heat treatment has dropped in price so much it really doesn't make sense for anyone to make a bar that can't meet minimal standards for quality and usability.

Just to be sure if I was going to buy a quantity of the cheapest unit, perhaps for an organization, I would get a sample and put it through its paces to make sure I was getting something functional.

Those bars are quite useful at moving and prying objects. I have some scattered around the house, but I use the same models in excavating fossils. The field conditions I encounter often find the desired specimen locked in a large conglomerate/gravel deposit, where one is often prying largish rocks out to "unlock" the desired bone. They work quite well, better than any knife, and can take quite a beating.

I also have some long (five feet or so) hexagonal bars, pointed at one end, with a chisel at the other. One can shift amazingly heavy items with one or two of those.

A few guys on here have the EOD breacher bar from Countrycomm. I keep putting it off but will get one soon for EDC. It's pretty neat for less than $20.

Looks pretty interesting.. Of course, I would never buy one just because it is a cool looking gadget, but since I might use it for science, perhaps I'll get three or four!

The EOD breacher bar is okay, certainly better than nothing, but it is mighty short for serious prying where length translates to leverage. That and the prying edge is pretty thick so your going to need a substantial crack to get it started. You might be able to grind a more finer edge but no amount of grinding will make the unit longer.

that's a puzzler there. like this piece of aluminum i was working on recently. i musta cut that thing five times, and it was STILL too short.

We've got a Paratech Biel tool in our bedroom - another quake country resident.

I was raised in the country, and nothing springs to mind about having to pry anything in a life-saving emergency situation.

In the wilds you might consider the prying ability of a blade useful when splitting wood? Not classical but if things get stuck an awful lot of the wiggling and levering has similar effect to prying.

And of course you have to get to the wilds - by car, boat or aeroplane you may need to escape from or cannibalise wreckage.

I think that for genuine survival - as opposed to camping or hiking - a stong knife that will let you chop, hack and pry, and is forgiving of poor technique (as you are tired, wet, cold etc) is more useful to quickly turn the surroundings into fuel and shelter than a finer edge which is useful for skinning and other jobs.

I have a piranha pocket tool for light urban prying. Anything heavy duty I have a 12" crowbar in the truck.

> In the wilds you might consider the prying ability of a blade useful when
> splitting wood? Not classical but if things get stuck an awful lot of the wiggling
> and levering has similar effect to prying.

You run into issues with all compromises. I can't imagine trying to pry with a blade to split wood. To each his own, but I'd move on to other tasks if all I had was a blade to split wood.

I thought I was wierd for having a wonder bar in my car kit. After watching Nutnfancy's USK series, I went out and got a bigger pry bar for that kit.

I think something to pry with is an essential tool for use during natural disasters.

Living in earthquake country, I have a variety of pry bars in various kits and other strategic places including some of the ones from County Comm that Izzy mentioned.

I'd be shocked to learn that anyone living here wouldn't have some.

I normally keep an axe, a mattock and a large pry bar in my car. Shovel is on the roof rack.

Even batoning to get at dry inner wood for kindling?

But I agree - it's all compromise

I am always puzzled by the fascination with "batoning" to create kindling. I have been kicking around the woods and fields for a very long time, and I have built numerous fires, more than a few in adverse and emergency conditions, and I have never had to resort to using a knife to produce kindling. I do not typically carry an axe or hatchet.

A well placed boot or rock, smashing dead wood, produces all the firewood necessary. Typically about ten minutes work will accumulate enough for an all night fire.

You live in dry country (I presume). Up here a lot of down wood is wet or even punky on the outside. You need to expose good dry wood to get a decent fire. You also oftentimes have to make splits for kindling, as small twigs are often wet, snow-covered, or covered with lichens or moss. Depends a lot on time of year and location. I would also add that in a survival situation in the boreal forests, stomping wood to break it is a risky manuever.

The western mountains get plenty of snow and rain and can be quite soggy. The vegetation, coniferous forest, is roughly equivalent to what I have experienced in Minnesota. Northern Arizona is basically Bemidji with mountains. Plenty of dead wood, especially pine knots, which even when wet will take a flame quite readily.

Stomping wood, at least the way I do it, is no more risky than walking off trail on uneven ground ( or exposing sharp cutting edges). A nice 25 pound rock, dropped from chest height, on a propped piece of dead wood, is a great kindling machine.

Even so, as I became more and more experienced with making wood fires, I also became aware of the benefits of alcohol and gas stoves, and carried them regularly. On at least one occasion, that habit paid off handsomely, and is the reason I am still packing around all my original toes and fingers. But I still carry matches and a lighter, along with dryer lint and petroleum jelly or hand sanitizer to get the old wood fire going.

We started referring to white gas as "boy Scout fire starter" when we used it to overcome the reluctance of wet wood to burst into flame. Now that is risky!

Batoning is hard on the knife and on the hand. Even high quality knives can snap in half from the extreme leverage that batoning puts on the top-front of the tang. It would certainly not a first choice method for firestarting, but it is one tool in the woodsmans toolbox. A person who is on a well prepared camping or backpack trip would never abuse a knife this way. In a survival situation however, a medium to large sized full tang knife could be used in the absence of an axe by batoning to cut down a tree, split some cedar to repair a canoe, make a flat splint for a companion, make some snowshoes, or fashion a paddle. The old woodsmen will tell you to never enter the woods without an axe. There is a reason that the more primitive and remote the area is, the bigger the knife the locals carry.

Living in earthquake country I keep half a dozen decent sized (some large) pry/breecher bars strategically placed around my house and barn including under my bed. I’ve put some colored or reflective tape on them to make them easy to see and attached brightly colored cordage to others that hang next to doors. There are a couple in my SUV, one that stays there and a very small one in the psk in my purse, however, I question what real good a small one would do. I live in a wood frame house but doors getting jammed would be a real possibility in a quake. Along the same lines having sturdy shoes, leather gloves and a flashlight next to the bed is a good idea as most likely there will be at least some broken glass. My town was the epicenter of the Nisqually quake and hardly any home or business escaped some broken glass. Since then I've carried leather gloves in my purse, granted not real heavy or thick, but still better than nothing in clearing a path out of a grocery store. I was at home during that quake but after seeing the news reports from grocery store aisles virtually covered in broken glass, I stopped wearing flip-flops to the stores in the summer. Sorry to take the thread off-topic but in an earthquake along with doors being jammed and things coming down trapping people, there will be lots of broken glass.

Well look at it this way, I'm work for an urban FD, I'm a LT. on a truck co. Our tools are mostly in one of two catagories
cutting or prying.....

When is only carrying one tool, it's nice to know it can take abuse - then you decide whether to abuse it or not.

When you can carry multiple tools then you can find one matched to your specific need. If I have an axe then I don't need my knife to do so much chopping - if I have a prybar then I won't need to use my knife to prise anything open.

Knives are - usually - suboptimal tools with a lot of versatility. Specialist tools (skinners, machetes, scissors, chisels, saws etc) will do a better job but add weight/bulk.

YMMV