jennyjj01 wrote: ↑Tue Apr 11, 2023 8:14 pm
but a tent and a hunting knife are good for...
Armed gangs are systematically looting houses, street by street. They are almost at your street. You could try to fight them. They will probably kill you. Or you can bug out for a couple of days. You want to take as much as possible, because they will take everything else.
If the government tells you to evacuate due to a major chemical, nuclear or other incident. Or if the area you live in is uninhabitable for some reason. Natural disasters are not common in the UK, but they can happen. Our climate is getting more extreme. We don't know the time scale. The ice age only took 5 degrees cooling. The earth has already heated 1.2° and another 3 is possible in just a few decades. We've already seen droughts and floods, fires etc. A tsunami could flood Manchester, let alone Liverpool. How about a meteoroid strike? Not very likely, but there is one every few weeks. A meter-wide meteoroid landed in the English Channel in February. Small fragments may have landed in France. There is a 1-2 km rock that will cross our orbit but won't hit our planet in the next 146 years, hopefully. There are 1538 near-Earth asteroids listed on the Sentry risk table with 36,718 virtual impactor dates.
If your house is uninhabitable (eg fire, flood) and there are no hotels due to pandemic, or simply everywhere is fully booked.
If you have to travel more than a few miles, and you have no vehicle, and there is no public transport. Or the roads are gridlocked, and staying that way, with cars broken down. No one to fix them.
If you are bugged-in long term, and there is no help, and you are running out of supplies, you will need to go out foraging and scavenging. These trips are not the same as popping to the supermarket on a Saturday afternoon. You need survival tools. You might be away overnight. Someone might occupy your house while you are out. THEY WILL TAKE ALL THE STUFF YOU DIDN'T TAKE WITH YOU. Hopefull you can organise rotas with neighbours, but maybe not.
Some people did actually bug out during Covid. Some countries evacuated citizens from the Wuhan area.
Some people have said the UK is too small for everyone to bug out. It might only be people from your area who are bugging out. It might only be 10% of them. Or maybe in an extreme scenario, there are a lot less people around generally. The population density of the UK is 276 people per square km. But that's an average. Half the Uk has a density of less than 50 people per sq km. Cities have over 2,000 people per sq km. In the half the UK that's under 50 per sq km, almost all the people will be concentrated in villages. Everywhere else will have very few people.
Others will say, someone owns that land, they will shoot you. Much of the land is publicly owned, or the public have rights of way. Some is owned by United Utilities, but the public can walk freely over all of it. Some is owned by farmers, but the public have right of way, or are granted permission to use paths and bridleways. OS 1:25,000 and 1:50,000 maps show Access Land, national parks, rights of way, permissive ways, recreational routes etc. Cycle maps show other routes. Farmers are often sympathetic to the rural homeless by the way. In distasters, people generally look out for each other.