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Continuity Plan, by E.M.

I guess I have always been a survivalist. As a small child during the Cuban Missile Crisis, I remember bugging out from our house near a SAC bomber base in Florida to a piece of land my dad owned about 70 miles away. I was awakened in the middle of the night by my parents, had a blanket draped over my shoulders, and was carried to my dad’s pickup. I didn’t really know what was going on, but I could tell my parents were scared. My uncle, who was in the military, called my dad in the middle of the night and told him to get the family to a safe place. His wife and son were to join us. Looking back, it’s not surprising to me that my dad had a bug-out plan. We lived near a nuclear bomber base that was certainly a target. He had 20 acres with a cabin and a couple of lakes on it. It was far enough away to escape blast effects and in the right direction to miss fallout patterns for most of the year. We spent a few days there and then went back home after things settled down.

As I got older and went to elementary school, we had weekly nuclear attack drills, where we leaned our desks over and got under them for shelter… given where we lived, I’m not sure it would have helped much, but it made an additional impression on me.

I think this profoundly affected me. Although my parents really never taught me much about preparedness specifically and my Dad didn’t talk about any preparations he had made, the attitude of being prepared and self-sufficient was pretty prevalent. In Scouts, I had a great interest in wilderness survival and spent a lot of my time as a teen reading and practicing those skills. A friend and I even dug an expedient fallout shelter in the woods near our home. All this is to say that I have been learning and practicing survival and preparedness skills ever since I can remember.

Today, my prepper group is my family. I have lots of kids– seven of my own, three step-kids, plus kids’ spouses and also grandkids. There is a very broad range of sentiment among them concerning preparedness. We get everything from “You guys are crazy, the Government will take care of us…” to those who are fully on board and can’t wait to take the next tactical rifle class. However, if the SHTF, I expect pretty much all of them will come live at the “The Homestead”. Some have preps, some don’t, but that won’t matter then.

I’m currently the security, medical, agriculture, power system, water system, and communications guy. I am “Dad”, so I felt that I needed to learn everything I could to help my family through anything that might come. I’ve tried to teach my kids as much as possible, but most are grown now and have jobs and families, and they just won’t make cross training in these critical areas a priority. It’s great for a group member to have a lot of valuable skills, but if one person is the only one with some of the critical skills, everyone could be at risk if that person is no longer around.

I have people to fill roles of mechanic, builder, IT guy, child care, and cook. I have a lot of books on almost every topic concerning preparedness and homesteading, however, as we all know trying to learn skills after the fact is not a good plan. Gaining most skills requires study and most of all practice and more practice.

So, what’s the plan for filling these roles, if something happens to me? Let’s face it, if we are in a collapse situation, WROL, PAW, TEOTWAWKI, or whatever you want to call it, the world will be a much more dangerous place than today, and all of our life spans may be shortened. How do you make sure everyone in your family or group has the best possible chance of making it? It’s easy to just say, “Have a backup or alternate for every critical skill”, but the reality is that you can’t pick your family, only your friends. You also can’t force people to prioritize what’s important to you and maybe not to them.

So, here are some ideas that I have used:

I do have some duplication of skill sets in agriculture, and security, and hope to encourage development of communications and medical skills in a couple of others, but in the end it is up to them, and I have to work with what I have in order to give them all a fighting chance.

So, do these things create a solid continuity plan? No, not really. But, given the realities of everyone’s schedule and priorities, it’s the best I can do right now. It exposes them to the areas that I feel are important skills for the family to have, even if I’m no longer around. If and when things go bad, I’m sure that there will be more motivation for everyone to learn skills and cross train, but it’s certainly risky to wait until then.