What is the best way to make G-d laugh? Tell him your plans.
That was my experience in bugging out from South Florida ahead of Hurricane Irma. If you are a regular reader here, I’m sure you would think that I was well prepared for a short term natural disaster. And overall I would say that was true. But though I was much, much more prepared than most people, nothing went quite the way I had envisioned. I didn’t have to stand in line for food that doesn’t need refrigeration. I was able to drive past thousands of people stuck at gas stations because I had enough fuel in Gerry cans to travel out of the state with two cars. And when I landed at my destination, Tallahassee, Florida, I was able to shop very quickly for all the stuff I couldn’t carry, which I’ll get to. Here are some lessons so far that I have learned from the experience. Oh, and I should note that my wife was 38 weeks pregnant Monday, so that.
#10 – Short term emergencies are not (necessarily) the collapse. – I have been trying to explain for years that prepping isn’t about short term natural disasters, but after bugging out from Irma, I think I have a much better perspective of how to explain it.
Don’t by any stretch think that we are done with the damage of Hurricane Irma. Most of my neighborhood still has no power, though ours was back on rather quickly. Our friend Dwayne from Kissimee River Hunt and Fish, who many of you know from hunting articles here, has up to two feet of standing water, and my father, though safe, is stuck in the Florida Keys with no water or fuel at all.
But still, Irma is what I would consider a very short term emergency, and as I said, I think I figured out the key difference. In a short term emergency, there will be people who can help other people, and who are willing to help other people. In the collapse, the only “safe” place will be where you personally have food, water, security, and a roof over your head, and that isn’t flooded with water, radiation or refugees.
I knew that there was no way I could stay home for Irma, because if my wife went into labor, trees in the road would prevent us from getting to the midwife, or from her coming to us. But I knew that if I went out of the storm track, there would be no pandemonium, no lack of supplies, and nothing preventing us from having the baby without any drama. So I was able to go to my cousins, who were friends with a midwife up in Tallahassee. The storm ended up pointing there, and there was some pandemonium, but by then we knew that the storm had weakened, so leaving to the midwife would not be a problem.
With Harvey, over in Houston a few weeks ago, within a day or so we had trucks going out from South Florida with food, toilet paper, diapers, fresh water, etc., all donated by private people. Nobody knew that within a week they would be shopping for that stuff for themselves. That is now happening with the Florida Keys, while another hurricane if spinning up in the Caribbean.
People who don’t perceive a threat to themselves will help other people. With the collapse, for a time people will help each other, but as it becomes more and more clear that there will be no return to normal, that will end, and it will end ugly.
#9 – You can’t always take it with you. – Most of the long term readers here will tell you that I am no advocate of bugging out. But even so, I have a whole trailer of supplies that I can tow on the road. Now, had this been “the collapse,” and I had to leave (we have a fairly close nuke plant), I would have at least attempted to take it. But since we knew where we were going to friendly ground, and that the stores were well stocked, I left the trailer behind and only took a large cooler and some road food. Left behind were buckets, bags, and #10 cans of flour, beans, rice, dried milk, etc., as I’ve showed you in my food articles. In the cars we really had no room because…
#8 – Gas takes a ton of space. – We ended up having to take two SUVs out of SoFlo, because we bugged out my mother in law and a total of 6 pets. I had 60 gallons of gasoline on hand in cans, and after topping off both tanks, we traveled with 8 steel Gerry cans, which took up about half the storage space in one car. There was no gas on the road at all, and thousands of families were stuck waiting, many of them fuming that they had gas coming to them, yet none arrived. About 100 miles out I pulled into a rest area North of Orlando and parked amidst the standing big rigs so I could hide and fill my tanks. By then people were already really angry, and desperate, and I think that breaking out that much gas would have caused a stir, if not a gunfight.
#7 – Sheep is a kind word for most people, and an insult to sheep. – It took us 13 hours to make a normally 7 hour trip, and it was not because there was too much overall volume on the roads. The delays were only before the rest areas, and created purely out of stupidity. After we passed a rest area we would go from stop and go traffic to instantly 70mph, then as the next rest area approached traffic would get slower, then there were red brake lights. Going North, this delay started as 5 miles before the rest area, then turned into 20 miles before as people decided that they needed to stop and top off, because they thought the rest areas had gas.
The problem was, none of the rest areas had any gas, and each rest area had hundreds of vehicles backed up and turned off before the pumps. A ton of people left last minute, with nothing, and very little gas.
In the back of the line nobody knew this, so as people came up to the long line on the left, many decided that they didn’t want to wait so they figured they would go to the front and cut the line. But the line wasn’t moving, so there was nobody to jump in front of. They would then stop and wait, until the second line backed up, then the third line would start, and that was when the Florida Turnpike turned into a parking lot.
#6 – Battery powered optics are for soldiers. – My “ready rifle” is a Tavor SAR, and it has an EOTech on it from back when I reviewed the Timney replacement trigger for the gun. Of course the battery was dead, and in my brain fog of trying to get out, I forgot that I had relocated all of my oddball batteries to a single box so “I wouldn’t lose track of them.” Thankfully if I really got stuck, the SAR has flip up irons, but the experience told me that battery powered optics are for soldiers who use them every day, and who carry backup batteries. When I landed in Tallahassee, the Walmart didn’t even have any CR123 batteries, but fortunately there was a Bass Pro right next door with a display of them in the front of the store. Good old Bass Pro.
#5 – Stock up when you land. – I think I came out of the womb with a #10 can of freeze dried carrots in my hands, because I am just a natural prepper. When we first landed in Tallahassee, some of the hurricane tracks were already suggesting a move up the West coast. But for the most part everything but gas was readily available, and the stores had electric. I filled up two carts with food, got two bottles of propane and a double propane stove from Bass Pro. My cousins, like most Americans, only have a few days worth of food in the house, but after one inexpensive trip to Walmart, we all could have survived a month. It ended up that we only lost power for a day, and everything was fine, but it’s easy to Monday quarterback when things go well. When it eventually doesn’t go well, all of the Monday quarterbacks will be dead.
#4 – Knowledge is survival. – I’m sure many of you reading this are long time readers, and you have learned with me all about calories per dollar, how to cook off grid, how to get water, etc. Don’t discount how important that knowledge will be if you get displaced with a bunch of people and you have to stock up from scratch.
When I went to Walmart, everyone was clamoring for the canned food, and I was able to get hundreds of pounds of flour, sugar, beans, rice, and pasta for a fraction of the price that similar calories would cost in cans. Generally canned food runs at about 100 to 500 calories per dollar, as does Velveeta cheese and nonfat dried milk. Walmart flour in 25 pound bags is over 5,000 calories per dollar. Beans and Rice are over 1,000 calories per dollar, as is sugar and pasta. I’m not saying don’t indulge in some Dinty Moore. But if you only have a “30 Day Supply” that you paid 100 calories per dollar for, you might want to take a look at some of my prior work here. Because…
#3 – The mouths will most likely stack up. – You may think “hey it’s just my wife and I,” but whether you stay in or bug out, most likely you are going to get wound up with other people who help you, or who you help, and your contribution to the relationship may be food. I personally ended up with a total of 14 humans to feed, and I had a strong possibility of more if we had brought in a midwife (my wife has not popped yet). Survival is not going to be a bubble where you come out after the crisis ends and wow you survived. More likely survival will be a story of how you survived, and that story will more likely involve other people who you don’t currently know. The more you plan for unexpected mouths, the more likely it will be that the other people are a help, and not a hindrance.
#2 – We all can be blindsided. – I think most preppers have a scenario in our heads of what we will do when “it all collapses.” The government will cease to exist. Money won’t work. Yadda yadda yadda. But if this past month has taught me anything, it is that nobody knows the future. I had never even considered that weaponized weather would be sent at us, as opposed to government storm troopers. I wasn’t prepared for anything to do with a flood. Where would I even keep a boat, assuming that a boat would even help? My prepping stuff is good for all 99% of all situations, but what if lost in that 1% is the key ingredient to survival?
The sticky widget is when you start in with the “I’m not going to bother because I won’t have what I need anyway.” A lot of you reading this will feel that way. But I always tell people, you feel that way today. When you are starving to death, or worse, your kids are starving to death, and you didn’t encounter any of the challenges that might have happened, will you feel that way then. If you follow my research and storage guidelines, it really isn’t expensive to put away food and the ability to cook the food for a year’s worth of calories for 2 or 3 people (remember Walmart flour is 5,000 calories, or 5 man/days, per dollar). Don’t do nothing. You’ll regret it when the time comes, and it’s coming.
#1 – This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper. – From a famous poem by T.S. Eliot. And I wonder. Maybe there won’t be an event that we associate as the day the collapse happened. Maybe we will just slip into a period where things will get worse and worse, and they never get better. Is this the beginning of a wave of compounding crisis that eventually leaves humanity grabbing for what once was?
When I saw South Florida plummet into crisis literally days after our trucks left for Houston, it made me start to think about things that are going on in the world. I have considered the whole North Korea thing a weapon of mass distraction until now, but think about it. Kim sent another missile over Japan the other day. When that missile took off, nobody knew the trajectory or payload. It could have Leveled Tokyo, or Los Angeles, and nobody would have ever tried to shoot it down. Why didn’t anyone even try to shoot it down? What would the world look like today had that been an active bomb, or even a nuke? Are the media stories about North Korean missiles prepping us for accepting that Tokyo was just blown off the map and nobody even bothered to try to shoot down the missle?
If crisis are stacked on top of each other, each of us will help the next guy, and then we will get hit ourselves. There will be no mass realization that the game of musical chairs is over. Eventually there will be nobody who can help anyone, and everyone who was somewhat prepared will have already given up their resources to help others. There was a news story trending yesterday on Facebook that South Florida preppers were sending their caches to the Keys. Seems funny right? Preppers don’t usually tell people what they have.
But why? Why would there be a plan to devolve humanity into survival mode? Because we are already in survival mode, and that fact is being hidden from Western populations. Most Western countries have surpassed food exports with food imports already, and even though here in the US we are better than most, sharp exports declines have even brought our present status into questions.
Off the chart UV radiation, corruption of the soil PH, unprecedented droughts and record temperatures have decimated food crops for almost a decade, and very few people know it because the media does not report on it. Right now in California the vineyard grapes are turning to raisins on the vine due to daytime temps over 100 and nighttime temps over 90. India regularly is experiences temps over 120, and over 40,000 farmers in India killed themselves last year due to failing crops. In the oceans, UV has killed the plankton and excessive carbon has acidified the water. Fisheries the world over have been dying, including the salmon population destined for US markets. Sardine fishing in the pacific is now either banned or highly regulated, because there are no sardines left.
Climate science has been scammed, but not the way you think. The planet is overheating at several times the pace that public climate figures like Al Gore have been selling, and there is a massive worldwide coverup being waged to keep you, me, and all of the other tax cattle in the dark.
Go outside and put your face in the sun. Can you stand it for more than 5 minutes? Probably not, because whether you live in South Florida or Downeast Maine, there is virtually no ozone layer left to protect you from the most dangerous rays of the sun.
You can’t blame cow farts for this, or leaky air conditioners, hair spray bottles or even gas guzzling SUVs (well not all of it). The primary and most dangerous factor is what is called geoengineering. The military industrial complex has been trying to play G-d for decades with top secret programs that are meant to cool the planet, but that have failed and are now making the situation worse.
You can most likely see evidence of geoengineering by looking in the sky. More than likely there is a jet up there spraying a white cloud trail behind it. We have been taught that those trails are condensation, but they are not. Condensation is water vapor and does not persist. Those trails are made up of nanoparticulates of aluminum, barium, strontium, and other heavy metals, polymers and chemicals, and they are designed to spread out in the sky and create a cloud.
This cloud, it is thought, will then block sunlight from reaching the planet, and the potential heat will be reflected out into space. If you Google “solar radiation management,” you’ll find that the science is being treated as theoretical, even on the Wikipedia page. But all you really have to do is look up to understand that it is not theoretical, and like a worldwide Death Star, has been fully operational for decades. Download on your phone the app called “FlightAware.” See if those planes spraying are officially in the sky. Generally they are not.
Reflecting the sun back into space sounds like a good plan right? That’s the problem. The weather masters originally really thought the plan would work, and I think the scientific climate community went along with them because it sounded sound to them. How they thought that spraying all of us with aluminum without any health testing is sound I’ll never figure out, but hey, they’ve been doing it, worldwide, for decades. The health effects have been widespread, including off the chart explosions in Autism and Alzheimers. Now the climate scientists are stuck. They know it isn’t working, but the power structure for the spraying is in place and won’t budge, so they just keep silent. There is also an illegal gag order on all NOAA and National Weather Service employees.
A ton of people know what is going on, including Donald Trump, Ron Paul, Alex Jones, and just about any other “alternative” voice in power. I don’t know if they have been promised something, or threatened with something, or if they just get pictures of all of them naked with little boys. But they know.
The hardest part of the scam to understand is how it could possibly be colder at times than it should be, or could be on an overheating planet.
When I was in Tallahassee and Hurricane Irma was supposedly bearing down on our location, I took the dogs out for a walk in the rain in my bare feet (I’m a total Floridian these days). The ground was so cold that I thought I was walking in snow, and I yelled into the house “Don’t worry it’s not coming here they are nucleating.” I was right.
Ice nucleation is something like one of those ice packs that you use for sports injuries. An endothermic material is dumped on the clouds, and this creates a heavy, cold rain, or more often snow. I have said before in this column that it just so happened I was in New York the week Donald Trump was elected, and I personally witnessed snow at 46 degrees outside.
It may sound like science fiction, or “conspiracy theory,” but ice nucleation is actually old science. Americans have grown so ignorant to finding out new things, and so easily manipulated into calling anything that questions the standard script a conspiracy theory that it is easy to keep the game going, when the game is all that matters. In 2009 the Chinese admitted to creating snowstorms, and in that same article you can note that it says the US experimented with controlling hurricanes with the same technology, going back to the 60s.
This summer ice nucleation was used to keep the Arctic from having a blue water event, (note that you will have to add a security exception to your browser to view that Navy website) despite the fact that the ice kept melting after it was 24 hours dark this winter. And even though Antarctica experienced a massive ice shelf break off, the planes have been dumping chemicals there all summer as well.
For over 13 years Dane Wigington at Geoengineeringwatch.org has been blowing the whistle that the climate game is over, and that it is only a matter of time before we can no longer sustain life on this planet. I turn off comments on these articles because I have never had one show up that made any sense, in light of over a decade of research, full of verifiable data, patents dating back to the 1930s, and whistle blowers from the highest levels of government.
Below is Dane’s take on how NEXRAD radar stations were used to steer Harvey and Irma. To see these radar machines in operation, just take a look at the clouds on any day that they are spraying even the short trails. You’ll see the clouds chopped up on a uniform wave pattern, then turned into a flat layer of puff balls. That can’t happen in nature. I could go on and on.
I hope my lessons from Irma helped a bit, and I hope you will take actions to give yourself a better chance of surviving once this whole thing uncaps. It could be that we are already on the road, as I explained. That white sun sure was hot today. Remember when the sun was yellow?