Timelines with Bugging In vs Bugging Out

[Vespa]

The death rate has in a shtf situation has been discussed.

viewtopic.php?f=14&t=2514&p=32629#p32629

I'm not sure any one really knows or could know.

[ojiu0u4]

Hey Wulfshead,

Watched that video, thanks for the link. It provoked a mixed range of conclusions and thoughts in me. Things like pressure sterilizers and mason jars irk me, I can see that I could definitely use them and they will be invaluable in the long term, but they are useless to me in the short term before I am growing crops and untransportable due to bulk and weight in the time of transmission over however long as we return to per-industrialization and agriculture. I read all up about air drying, pickling and canning and what worked for what different types of veg, fruit and meat and what would spoil, and it frustrating to see how necessary it will be once at the farming stage to make it through the seasons, but it is totally impractical to carry around in the meantime. Carpentry tools will also be useful for many things long term but in the short again there are better items that you would choose within weight / transportation constraints.

It sort of makes the case for acquiring these items and then caching them somewhere away from BIL and BOL, so that if you make it long enough to need what will then be much more valuable items you can return to your un-looted super hidden / buried cache of rebuild items and reacquire them, assuming you can get back to wherever that is of course.

I don't quiet get why they were saying in the program that growing food is so difficult and takes a lifetime to learn, nice raised furrowed rows, poly tunnel and a fence to keep out rabbis (and a few snares as well) and the damn slugs and we thankfully can irrigate with captured & stored rainfall, I know lots of people with allotments that seem to get on fine, we can grow stuff without pesticides. Am I missing something about how problematic growing food would be and over simplifying the growing task, I was more focused on how to preserve crops year round?

[Jotnarjager]

The difference between having an allotment and relying on what you've grown for your very survival is that allotment growing is a hobby. If you have a crap year, you just say sod it and go down the shops. It takes skill to know what to grow, when and when to harvest.

You also need to know how to spread your risk. One year I tried to grow suedes and corn. Suedes likes wetter weather, and corn likes dry hot weather, I thought I was been proper clever when I planted them thinking at least one would do well. Well that year it was hot for a month or so, then it pissed down for weeks. The corn got some sort of fungal disease and died because of the wet, and the suedes got eaten alive by slugs within one day!

[Wulfshead]

Ojiu0u4,
I think in that video the main problem to crop growing would be the heat and lack of irrigation in the area where they settled.
That would not be such a problem here in the UK to that extent.
The main reason for myself posting it was that it shows a human nature to find others and restart a society.
Perhaps, and I do hope this is so, surviving humans will eventually align themselves to an ethos of 'cosmos from chaos'

Wulfshead

[Smudge]

Error 404

[jansman]

Oh, and remember to consider prepping for the 'small' things in life - the ones that are far more likely than this sort of thing - like

illness,

Get Private Health insurance

flooding,

Buy a boat or don't live somewhere likely to flood

redundancy etc!

Get adequate training to reduce the chance of redundancy and increase your chances of finding employment.

Guess we can close the forums now I've solved all your problems

That is rather a glib set of statements. Hobo was reminding us that this prepping lark should cover the small crises in life. When you have those covered you are better prepared than most. You then have a stepping stone to deal with the big stuff.

Back on topic.

The link to that film was good,thanks Wulfshead. It certainly gives food for thought about the whole bugin/ bug out issue. I am not a fan of the idea of bugging out, but if in the city I could see a need after watching that.

[Smudge]

That is rather a glib set of statements. Hobo was reminding us that this prepping lark should cover the small crises in life. When you have those covered you are better prepared than most. You then have a stepping stone to deal with the big stuff.

Glib? Not at all, I offered the common sense response to those concerns, no need to worry about growing your own food, hunting, trapping, foraging, making your own or storing food if those are your main concerns.

No not everything one should prepare for is a big dramatic event but Survivalism light doesn't work because there's no need for it imho.

Opinions vary

[jansman]

Fair enough. But please try not to come across as disrespectful. I say that, because you say that opinions vary. And they do.

[beholda palehorse]

Hi,

From everything I have read so far:

1. Bug In, keep a low profile and defend
2. Don't build a bunker because it can always be over run by enough people / acetylene torches / burned out, so you have to be ready to...
3. Bug Out as a last resort unless
4. You had the foresight to move your life to "safe place" way in advance

I get the above it kind of makes sense, it has some holes... Like if a bunker can be overrun by the starving hordes, why do I think I can defend my house. Lets say I had an automatic rifle, 2000 rounds and the skill and will to use it, that only takes care of 10% of the small town I live in, let alone all the people migrating North! My point being, no matter how well armed, with enough people, or just them waiting you out for three days till you have to sleep, it is very difficult to defend a fixed position. It is even more difficult to bug out of that location when it is surrounded by the starving hordes with your Bug Out Supplies. And yes Bug out to where, the road system is likely toasted....

Maybe we should be asking the question from a different perspective. The way I see it, Bug Out is to get away from other people, before you need to get away from them, because there are way too many to defend against, not a preferred strategic choice, but a tactical retreat of necessity, until the people problem changes.

Presumably, the game plan (for those that didn't do 4 above - which is Buging In somewhere remote already) - is to be able to disappear for long enough "somewhere" that it is then feasible to return to your primary location once the threat of too many other people to defend against has reduced through death to a manageable level and whoever is left is in reasonable shape.

I tend to agree that Bug Out to the woods is a very big ask on a >12 months timescale (and probably very crowded - largest Forrest in UK is only 297 square miles and there are a million people in Glasgow and another 100K in Carlisle both less than 50 miles - so if just 0.027% of those two cities head to the closest and biggest woods that is one person per square mile which sounds equally scary as beep) let alone permanent game plan. So we presumably need to select somewhere "dumb" (idk roof of an industrial building??) that other people wont think is a "good" location such as a national park.

And so I finally get to the point of this seeming insoluble tactical contradiction...

So should we in fact inform our decision making by asking ourselves the question how many and how quickly will the population die and secondly how depopulated does it have to get for us to individually feel within their individual / group / community that they can handle the looters and ultimately defend veggie patches. I know the different SHTF scenarios in total breakdown will effect how quickly the population decreases, so lets park nuclear and pandemic for a second and just consider social infrastructure collapse for whatever reason (EMP, blackout, flood, economic, etc) something which trashes the infrastructure but doesn't actually kill lots of people on day 1.

Has anyone done any work to estimate or predict how rapidly the wheels will fall off, dehydration, starvation, victim to looters and how quickly the unprepared masses will not make it.

Once we have this time frame in mind if we think about Bug Out, location, kit, timeline, when to jump and why in the context of needing to disappear/hide from people for X months before it is "safer" to move back from the tent in the woods to a conventional building in a town and start building a group community with whoever is left.

Does anyone have any links to any predicted research / graphs. I am guessing, but the first two months are going to be total carnage in a complete global SHTF.

Thanks for your thoughts.

if we analyse and consider what happened in hurricane Katrina, then we are never more than three days from anarchy.

[ojiu0u4]

nail on the head there. I do believe the break down will happen very quickly. The question is how long does it stay in that unmanageable state WROL until enough people have fallen by the way side either through privation or predation of others that there are few enough left that it becomes practical to defend a BI location with small / community group. 3 days without water, is it 90 days without food? There will be a lot of unpleasantness even in the safe areas such as the stadium during Katrina let alone on the lawless streets. If this scenario is a medium term event say 6 moths to year and every other country has their handful as well, there is no help coming. With Katrina with one city effected in a global super power the response was a mess. So no help is coming. The trick is to survive long enough from day 3 to day ??? that the rest of the population has decreased to a level where the threat is more manageable and standing your ground / BI and defend actually becomes realistic...

If you share my view that you can not defend against a crowd in a BI scenario, the question becomes if you have access to supplies to sustain you, wherever they maybe / cached / forged. So what does the population density have to drop by and how long would that take.. We have about 65M people and about 94k square miles in the UK. How many people per square mile for BI / "homesteaders" to be able to cultivate and defend long term. A population drop of 95% sounds horrific!!! It still leaves a UK wide average of 34.5 people per square mile and that still sounds awful crowded to me in a WROL situation. Put another way, there would be on average another four people within 274 meters and another four within 387 meters. So within less then the running distance of a 400 meter track there are another eight people (on average) and that is at 95% drop! Now obviously the Cairngorms will have a lot less and city centers will have more.

So given there are no more container ships, no more lorries delivering food produce. What is already in the food distribution channel is effectively it and there is no help coming, certainly at any level of useful scale, for at least a year. So are we talking three months...? presumably some will go quicker than others with the more agressive violent looters being the ones we end up stuck with surviving longer, so we need to out last them, and by that I mean hide from them until they start to drop off. But as the population drops, the residual long life food resources in warehouse and peoples homes will support a population of looters for longer. Maybe at 5%, lets say... if there is at anytime enough food in the UK to feed everyone with some rationing for 1 month?? idk I have no idea what that number is... Then it could follow that by the time it had dropped to 5% the food that was then left would be enough to feed that 5% for 10 months..? again no idea, I have no figures. And that is what the question is, what is the number of days XX for the population to drop to whatever arbitrary population density that it becomes possible to defend a BI location against the thinned crowd without ending up with a scene from the Walking Dead on your doorstep. Lets say, we use 5% left and those left looting could scavenge enough to live for 10 months, and is it 90 days without food, lets say it is. That gives a figure of 10+ months.

So does that inform that a BO "hide" strategy needs to be able to have hidden caches enough to ride out 10 months somewhere very hidden, before they can expect to have a reasonable belief that it is possible to return to the BI location and hold it and start cultivating new veg crops. This would seem to indicate that you would need 3 months emergency food at BI not so hidden which you use prior to BO, another very hidden cache of 6 months at BI to return to and help through first growing season, and another 10 months of food cached at various remote BO locations "in the woods". Just having one cache of food at BI until you get pushed out by looters would not work, having that plus 72 hour bag to get to BO location where you have another single cache of food only works until you get pushed out of your single fixed structure BO location. So maybe that argues that we need say five pre identified BO that are hidden which each have say 3 months of food cached each, giving a total of 15 months to cover 10 months in the field, so you could loose two out of those five BO/caches due to them being occupied / unreachable or whatever.

So to sum up does this thought exercise lead us to?

BI 3 months plus another 6 months locally hidden caches
BO x 5 with 3 months hidden caches
Game plan
1. Stay BI
2. Abandon everything and run if forced out, travel light 72 hour pack style
3. Plan to be BO in remote & elements for 10 months (you will probably have to survive winter outdoors) and move between up to five alternate BO sites
4. After 10 months, return to original BI, recover 6 month cache and grow crops

It all comes down to my original post at the top of this thread and trying to solve this BO/BI logic contradiction that seems to suggest BO simply means moving to a different BI.

None of the current thinking as I understand it deals with the question of factoring looters into the equation and what to do if you get pushed out? do you believe you can make a last stand and survive against the crowds? and if you conclude you can't how long do we have to out last the crowds for before the numbers drop enough that you can realistically BI and defend what you have left and grow the veggies?

If we do this thought exercise about density and timelines then how does that help to inform us in advance what a sensible BI/BO strategy might need to look like - because at the moment the BI and BO single binary choice does not logically make sense to me, nor does BI till last second and then BO (fighting through the crowds?) and live in the woods for evermore, nor does BO to alternative BI or simply move life in advance - you are just back at the start of this BI loop but somewhere more remote than you started and the problem with this island is it seems a little small and crowded with even the remote bits being within range of a single tank of gas for many cars.

I am trying to come up with a mental plan for what I need to do to have a meaningful BI and BO strategy that makes clear sense to me on what I am doing and why against what contingency in a slow spiral down the plug to WROL.

So any thoughts on the above rough sketched out Plan 1 to 4...? I know I am no where near that. I can cover myself currently at BI for 3 to 6 months, I recongise I am likely to be pushed out within that time frame anyway by crowds and trying to think about sensibly what does a BO plan really need to look like taking account of the size and population in the UK and very limited national parks.