Category: Contest

Identifying and Protecting Yourself and Your Family Against Hazardous Chemical Materials Incidents, by a Marine in Missouri – Part 2

There are many different levels of protection out there. Military gear is specifically designed for CWAs. There are three general levels of protective equipment– level A, level B, and level C. Military gear is somewhere in between level B and C because it is designed for specific chemicals. Level A gear is fully encapsulated, typically a chemical-resistant plastic suit with a Self Contained Breathing Apparatus (SCBA) or provided air through a pressurized air system and a hose. This provides both splash and total vapor protection. However, the downfalls to this nearly complete protection are: It is cumbersome to wear, Depending …


Identifying and Protecting Yourself and Your Family Against Hazardous Chemical Material Incidents, by a Marine in Missouri – Part 1

We live in a society that depends on hazardous materials to create the technological wonders and comforts we expect for everyday life. Whether you take your kids to a swimming pool or drink any sort of city water, you knowingly or unknowingly depend on large amounts of chlorine to ensure the water is safe. Anywhere there is a mechanic shop there are chemicals required to lubricate, clean, and repair materials; some of those chemicals are potentially dangerous or deadly. As you drive down the highway you see thousands of semi-trucks carting loads of materials that could be more deadly than …


Survival is Attractive, by L.M.

As a young, single female, I guess I’m probably the furthest in most eyes from the typical profile of a self-sustaining person who prepares for anything. I am a 26 year old regular girl with no military family or background. I never really liked camping or the outdoors, and I don’t even live in an overly remote or homestead-type community. I grew up just like most every other girl– cheering, having sleep-overs, and generally being as naïve as most girls are, unfortunately. I’m not unusually strong or unique; I’m just a girly girl. I’ve always shopped and been focused on …


Five Things You Need To Do To Be Prepared To Defend Yourself, Family, and Home, by E.W.

Buy weapons, not just guns. You’ve heard the expression “don’t put all your eggs in one basket”. This applies to the realm of tools for defending yourself, your family, home, and neighborhood. Put simply, you need to buy weapons and not just guns. Then, you need to know how to use them. Simply purchasing a battle carbine or several different firearms and a bunch of ammunition is not a complete approach to the solution of personal defense. It may be a good start, but there’s more to this whole thing. One way to think of this is geographically. Battle conditions …


Emergency Prepping, Sustainability, and the Idea of Adapting in Advance, by F.J. – Part 2

Prepping is a great cultural example of the observations that led bio-cultural anthropologists to a hypothesis that suggests human brains are hardwired to use past experience and present observations to make projections of hypothetical future scenarios following a basic “if–then” logical model. Those practices, which are inherent in all of us, form the basis of storytelling— an art form that humans alone have the capacity to practice. They say it’s an evolutionary trait we adapted to guide our decision making, since the days of our primitive ancestors, through all those stages of change that hadn’t happened yet, or were only …


Emergency Prepping, Sustainability, and the Idea of Adapting in Advance, by F.J. – Part 1

“We are an exceptional model of the human race. We no longer know how to produce food. We no longer can heal ourselves. We no longer raise our young. We have forgotten the names of the stars, fail to notice the phases of the moon. We do not know the plants and they no longer protect us. We tell ourselves we are the most powerful specimens of our kind who have ever lived, but when the lights are off we are helpless. We cannot move without traffic signals. We must attend classes in order to learn by rote, numbered steps …


Preserving Western Culture After TEOTWAWKI, by Professor P

Walter Miller’s sci-fi masterpiece, A Canticle for Leibowitz, envisions a nuclear apocalypse that wipes out the 20th century world, leaving the few survivors in a pretty hard core TEOTWAWKI situation. Many of the survivors blame the technological horror on human learning, rather than on human sinfulness, and band together to destroy all remnants of western culture. They burn books, and they burn the people who try to preserve them, including Isaac Leibowitz– a major “booklegger”. Leibowitz had organized a group of men into a new monastic order that smuggled books to the relative safety of their monastery, where they copied …


A National Guardsman’s Experiences During Hurricane Sandy, by FDO

I’ll give you a little background about me. I was born, raised, and am currently living in New England. I have a B.A. in History and have just begun work on my M.A. in the same field of study. This past June marked four years in the National Guard, and I received my commission as a Field Artillery officer (13A) in 2013. Currently, I serve as a Battery Fire Direction Officer and am a graduate of Field Artillery Basic Officer Leader’s Course at Fort Sill, Oklahoma and the U.S. Army’s Air Assault School. I have been reading the blog for …


Something’s Coming, Are You Ready?, by B.L.

[Editors Note: It is important to note that many of the claims of this article are supposition and not fact. Remember that while conspiracy theories are often intriguing and you can bet you are not getting the whole story from standard media, Occam’s Razor is more often than not the right way to go.] Have you ever felt like something was about to happen, but you couldn’t quite explain what it is? Have you just had a suspicion or maybe uneasiness that something was about to happen? I guess you can say my old Army intelligence service, from some 41 …


Surviving Kidney Dialysis in a Down-Grid Scenario, by G.C.

The power-grid goes down two hours before you are scheduled to begin your next round of hemodialysis at a clinic thirty-five miles away. Using the Ham radio, you discover through your III Percent communications network that all power is down across the southern sector. There is little hope of it being restored in the foreseeable future. The clinic should have a back-up generator in place, so (other than an inconvenience) your treatment should go ahead as planned. You lock the place down, turn on the alarms, and then you and the wife head for the clinic. As usual, when you …


Bugging Out With Children, by T.L.

The day that we found out I was pregnant was a happy and joy-filled day. Never once did it cross our minds that a few years down the road, we would fear for the lives of our children and their futures. The world in which we live in is a scary place. The economy is always in peril, the government continues to become more unstable, and it seems we are always one step away from some catastrophic worldly event or the threat of scientific experiments gone wrong, causing a man-made apocalypse. Whatever the case may be, we live in constant …


A Few Thoughts on Water Storage, by N.P.

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I’d like to discuss a few ideas about water storage and describe what I’ve decided to do in our situation. My background, since most of this is my opinion, is that I work as the chemist (meaning I manage the water treatment systems) in a large power plant, hold the highest drinking water license possible in the state where I live, and am a degreed microbiologist. I’ve dealt with various water treatment systems for awhile. I don’t claim to know everything, but I do think that I’ve learned some things, and I hope to pass along a few ideas and …


Solo Prepping, by Scott

I live alone. No, I’m not a hermit, curmudgeon, recluse, or ogre. I simply choose to live alone, and if normality as we know it dissolves, I am prepared to survive alone. As a typical working stiff, I spend the majority of the daylight hours at work. My office is 34 miles away from my home. If things suddenly take a turn for the worse while I am at work, I will have to make it back alone across those 34 miles to get home. Home is where most of my preps are stored. Home is where I am most …


Little Things WILL Become Big Things, and Food Will Be Everything!, by L.T.

When everything falls apart there are plenty of plans for “bugging out”, “bugging in”, and so forth. Whatever path you choose, things won’t return to normal soon and quite possibly never. Much has been written on beans, band aids, and bullets, but there will also be a huge demand for little things that we take for granted. Of course, there will be an even bigger demand for fresh food. Decent food is a major issue; you can’t live forever on storage foods, and most people can’t live forever in the woods. The following is information from our experiences to help …


Building Skills While Paying the Bills: Carving Time to Hone, by Scouter Dad JEB

The Greek philosopher Aristotle– teacher of Alexander the Great (a title given later in life and probably not while he was a student)– is quoted as saying, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” This statement applies in many areas in life, but perhaps it rings most true with the prepper/survivalist community. As a budding prepper/survivalist with three young children, the most valued commodity in our family is time. Hours of dedication spent skipping lunch breaks at the corporate office to stay employed, followed by the children’s after-school activities, make time for …