I may be a wild eyed, foaming at the mouth FAK fanatic because I think that having some sort of FAK in almost any environment is a good idea. I totally agree with you that the majority of situations can be handled with no more than a bandaid. In fact, when I was safety officer for my office, I made sure there was a box of bandaids and a bottle of aspirin adjacent to each FAK, so that the more serious components in the kit would not be messed up by people foraging for the means to take care of their hangovers and minor owwies.

Still, there are those other occasions. The plumber next door falling off the roof, lying prostrate in a pool of blood; the fellow office worker in a grand mal seizure on an otherwise normal Saturday afternoon; the poorly supervised worker who got tangled up with a Bobcat(small loader type vehicle) and broke his leg. These all happened in an urban environment and competent aid was just a 911 away, but even in these situations, good first aid principles needed to be applied promptly (isn't that why they call it first aid?). A point that has been made many times is that training is the most important element in the "kit." Good training generally keeps from doing unwise and damaging procedures, like improper and unnecessary moving, proper assessing of the ABCs, etc.

A former girl friend was halfway through a CPR course and shopping for groceries, when a fellow shopper collapsed unconscious right next to her. You just just never know.....

Getting into the woods, it really does become a little dicier, even if you are only "five miles from town," although here again, most of the situations can be handled with a bandaid. Not all however. There was the climber we encountered who had taken a fist sized rock right in the middle of his forehead (fortunately he was wearing a helmet). This encounter seriously altered our schedule for that day, since we were about fifty miles from town.

I, personally, have frequently bandaged up a "tweaked" knee or ankle on both myself or a companion in order to hobble back to the car which is one reason I am a particular fan of elastic bandages. I recall one trip to Rainbow Bridge years ago when all six Ace bandages in the party were holding a joint together. We were a good hundred miles from a town on that occasion.

I am sure my attitude toward emergency preparedness has been colored by my SAR experiences, but I have seen too many situations where something like a lousy match and a handful of tinder would have made all the difference in the world and lives would have definitely been saved.

Too many of these episodes start out with "I had no intention of walking so far," "getting onto that high cliff," "fording that stream - it seemed so shallow" sort of statements. I have been particularly impressed with the number of times that building a fire and even minimal first aid knowledge would have made a difference in survival.

Distance from town really isn't that incredibly significant. Of course, the further out you are, the more likely it is that assistance will be lacking, or at least delayed for an unknown period. The question is, when a emergency arrives, are you going to start dealing with it right now, or are you going to be dependent on the actions and abilities of others to get out of the scrape? Are you relatively self reliant or just another bird sitting on the wire?

By the way, I don't want to make too much of self reliance. There are limits. In both of the cases of the plumber and fellow worker cited above, I was very impressed with the speedy and competent response by the local emergency medical system (FD). It is great to have those folks around, but what do you do when they are delayed or unavailable?

Just to take a far out hypothetical example, presume we had a magnitude 7.0 earthquake here in SoCal, and perhaps, just perhaps, the paramedic might need more than five minutes to respond to my broken arm? What then?