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Survival Tips For When The Power Goes Out |
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Written by Zami
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When it comes to survival techniques, in our modern age of cell phones and continuous communication, very few people consider the possibility of being trapped somewhere in their car for an extended period of time. Most of us, when encountering car trouble, simply call up the nearest tow truck or roadside assistance organization. While it is true that many highways have adequate cellular coverage, there are still parts of the country that are too mountainous or remote for a guaranteed cellular signal. Unfortunately, these remote areas are often the same ones that are hit by the kind of inclement weather that can leave you stranded. In the case of a regional weather catastrophe, such as a heavy snowstorm or flooding, even if you can get in contact with rescue services, it could be hours or days before they can get to you with any help. For these reasons, it is important to make sure that your car is outfitted with a survival kit that can help keep you comfortable and safe during these situations. Let’s start with some good points. Your car will most likely provide you with excellent shelter against snow, wind and rain. It is water tight and provides a decent amount of insulation against the cold. Even still, over the course of a night or even a couple of nights, you will need a way to stay warm without running the car. Your vehicle will only have a limited amount of fuel, and you can’t leave it idling continuously. A good survival technique is to run the car for a few minutes every half hour or hour, depending on the temperature – enough to keep the cabin warm and not have the engine ice up. In addition, you should keep a couple of blankets in your trunk – one for each person you normally have as a passenger. Some people bring a can of Sterno as an emergency heat source. This is an effective solution for camping, but in a car it can be dangerous, as there is often no place for the noxious fumes to escape. If you do burn Sterno in your car, make sure to leave the windows down enough for ventilation. Many people find that this requirement is enough to negate the heating factor of the fuel, and so they opt for chemical heat packs. These heat packs can be placed in your boots, gloves and pockets to help keep your body warm. They are a vital part of your car’s survival kit. Once you have taken care of keeping warm, there are a few other basic needs you should attend to. The first is food. Keep a small supply of energy bars, trail mix and nuts in the car with you. Since you won’t be able to cook in your car, you will want enough calories to keep you warm and alert. Storing water in your car in the winter is a bit tricky – you may very well have to defrost it with your car heater, or break off chunks of ice and suck on them. Remember that ice contains more water than snow, pound for pound, so if you have to venture out to seek water, prioritize ice. In addition to food and water, your kit should ideally contain a small LED flashlight, an extra pack of batteries, and road flares so your car can remain visible even if it gets buried in a ditch or a snow bank. You will also want to keep a small folding shovel, a first aid kit to deal with any scratches or headaches, road salt for getting unstuck and a pocket knife. Survival equipment doesn’t have to be elaborate to be useful. All of these items will fit in the trunk of your car, and can go a long way towards helping you deal with an emergency situation while out on the road. |
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Survival Techniques Building A Fire |
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Written by Zami
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Knowing how to make a fire is one of the fundamental skills of survival. Regardless of whether you are lost in the woods, camping with friends or trying to keep warm after a storm has destroyed your home, knowing how to start and maintain a fire is an important part of the survival equation. You will need three things to get a fire going and keeping it at a healthy burn level. The first of these is an ignition source. The most portable fire starters are waterproof matches and butane lighters. Both of these items should be present in each and every survival kit you put together. If for some reason you find yourself separated from your kit, or have reached the end of your butane or match supply, then you can use alternative fire starters made from common materials such as batteries and steel wool. By taping together the positive and negative terminals of two double A batteries, and then connecting the exposed terminals together with fine grade steel wool, you can superheat the steel to the point where it will readily ignite dry tinder. It is an important survival technique to have more than one method of fire ignition available to you in your kit, in case something happens to your primary fire starter. The next step is to provide tinder and kindling to help your fire catch. Tinder is the term for small, dry flammable objects that will readily catch fire. Some good examples of tinder are lint or fluff from clothing, dry pine needles, paper or dry grass and plants. Tinder doesn’t burn very long, which is why you need to combine it with kindling. Kindling is the term for the small, thin pieces of wood that you can use to get your main fire fuel to catch. Kindling has a large surface area and a low internal volume, making it burn hot enough to set the main fuel on fire. The fire’s fuel is the final component of the fire pyramid. The most frequent fuels used are wood or coal, but thick books and upholstery such as seat cushions will also serve the purpose. Make sure that you have gathered enough fuel to keep the fire burning as long as you need it to – it will be difficult to venture out into the dark to search for more fuel by the dying light of your fire if you run out. It is better to gather and stockpile too much wood than to not have enough. You will need to protect your fire from water and wind, both of which can put an early end to combustion, especially if it is just beginning to catch. Wind can also blow embers out of the fire and onto other flammable materials such as tents, clothes and dried grass, so be wary of the weather and your choice of fire location. Once a fire has died down to just glowing coals, it can still provide a good source of warmth over the course of the night. |
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Survival Cooking Techniques |
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Written by Zami
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When someone brings up the words ‘survivalism’ and ‘cooking’ in the same sentence, for many the image that springs to mind is of a group of people eating out of cold cans by candlelight. I’ve always chuckled a little at the thought of survivalists living completely off of MRE’s and cans of tuna and peas. The reality is, there are many different methods of cooking food, both canned and fresh. It is easy to forget that our ancestors managed to make hearty, healthy meals without electricity or half of the advantages that a well-prepared survivalist will have in an emergency. Let’s take a look at some of the options that are available to would-be survival gourmets. Of course, the simplest method to use for cooking is an open flame. Cooking over the campfire is a tradition that goes back a lot farther than the Boy Scouts – the early settlers and Native Americans both roasted meat and vegetables over a burning pit of wood. There are quite a few ways to harness the heat of a cooking fire. The most basic is to suspend the meat you are cooking over the flame with a stake or a spit. A more controlled option is to use a metal skillet, which will give you better control over the amount of heat you are exposing your food too, and will also allow to boil and cook vegetalbes in water. If you have access to a steel drum, you can use it to create a makeshift oven. By cutting a ‘door’ in the side of the drum, as well as air holes at the bottom and a few more at the top, you can cook on the top of the stove and benefit from the warmth that radiates from the sides. Fires are not always practical, but if you live in a sunny climate, you have another option for cooking without electricity or gas. Using a simple box oven, you can harness the power of the sun to cook even a large amount of food. Solar ovens can be built out of materials as simple as cardboard boxes, aluminum foil, an oven bag or piece of glass and glue. The way the oven works is by concentrating the heat of the sun so as to focus it on the food you are attempting to cook with. The greenhouse effect helps to trap the heat inside the boxes under the glass or plastic, and the double layer of box walls helps insulate the oven. Using a basic solar oven you can cook at temperatures of around 300 degrees Fahrenheit, which is more than enough to cook almost anything thoroughly over a period of 5 hours or so. There are many different plans for solar oven designs available on the internet, and they are inexpensive to experiment with until you find the one that works best for you. Whether you choose to use fire or the sun to cook your food, make sure to first verify that your preferred method is practical given the climate you expect to find yourself in. It is almost impossible to cook with a fire in the rain unless you have a steel covering to protect the flames – so if you find yourself in a wet environment, fire might not be the best answer. Likewise, if it is wintertime, or if you are in an area with constant heavy cloud cover, a solar oven is probably not going to work for you. Be ready to adapt to the situations that present themselves to you and be willing to consider more than one cooking option. |
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Stockpiling Water Home Survival Techniques |
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Written by Zami
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What would you do tomorrow if it was suddenly announced that the water from your tap was no longer safe to drink? Worse yet, what if the same announcement also made it clear that there was no definite time table as to when your water would once again become potable? Most people do not have a reserve of water inside their own homes to use in case of an emergency situation such as this one. You might be saying to yourself, ‘It’s not that big of a deal – I’ll just head down to the local supermarket and pickup a case of bottled water’. Unfortunately, chances are that everyone in your town who was affected by this problem has had the same thought. By the time you get to the store, water supplies could be completely gone, along with the bottled juices. Water has suddenly become a precious commodity in your town, and you are on the outside looking in. It doesn’t have to be this way. In fact, stockpiling water with your survival gear is one of the easiest and best disaster preparations you can possibly make. Think of all the things you do on a daily basis that involve water. Cleaning and cooking food, washing your clothes, taking a shower, flushing the toilet – all of these things are over and above the water that you take into your body through drinking. If you no longer had a safe supply of water to use, it would have a significant impact on your life. Fortunately, water is one of the least expensive items to add to your shopping list, and one of the easiest to store. A good survival tip is to have 2 liters of bottled water stored per person in your family per day you expect to be without safe drinking water. Therefore a family of four would need to store 80 liters of water in order to have a 10 day supply of potable water. That sounds like a big investment, but considering that water is available in cheap, 4 liter bottles at any supermarket, it wouldn’t take long to stock up. In fact, you could buy 2 bottles of water every time you picked up groceries and within a month you would have built up a reasonable supply. If you are in an isolated area, it might be worth it to double your stocks to ensure you don’t run out in case of a lengthy emergency. What if you are caught in a bad situation, such as after an earthquake or flood, when you know that the water in your tap might soon no longer be safe – or even there at all? There are a few survival techniques that you can use to maximize your water storage over the short term. You can immediately fill up your bath tub and use that water for cooking and cleaning. You can also drain your hot water tank or the toilet refill tank. By following these simple steps and suggestions, you can make sure that you and your family won’t be left high and dry in the event that your regular water supply is interrupted. |
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Rally Points Survival Tips |
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Written by Zami
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When it comes to cooking, you can make things as complicated or as simple as you want them to be. In a survival situation, it is almost always better to focus on simple meals which can be made quickly with a minimum of preparation time and clean up. It also helps to have the fewest amount of utensils or cooking implements involved as you can. This minimalist cooking is a solid philosophy for keeping your survival kit light and your environmental impact low. A campfire provides many opportunities for minimalist cooking. Of course, everyone is familiar with roasting things like hotdogs and marshmallows on a stick. You can also do this with mushrooms, bell peppers, strips of beef and chicken breasts. However, there are also other ways to cook using a campfire. Instead of roasting over the open flame, you can use the campfire’s red hot coals to cook food wrapped in aluminum foil. You can cook certain items that don’t roast well in this manner, such as potatoes, as well as other different kinds of vegetables. If you have an iron pan, you can take advantage of the coils to make pancakes. I know that pancakes might seem like a counterintuitive menu item given that we are talking about survival foods that require minimal preparation, but if you use dried pancake mix that requires you to add only water, the process is rather simple. Simply mix the water and pancake mix in a plastic bag and then poor it onto the griddle, flipping the pancakes until both sides are done. Cooking with boiling water is also quite practical. By boiling water in a pan, you can cook many different types of roots and vegetables, softening them up and making them easier to chew and digest. You can also use boiling water to cook eggs without the messy cleanup, giving you a good source of protein. Break each egg into a Ziploc bag. After sealing the bag, use your fingers to scramble the eggs. At this point, you can add any bits of meat, cheese or vegetables that you would normally put in an omelet. Seal the bag again and drive a stick through it so that you can suspend the bag in the boiling pot of water. In about 5 minutes, you will have a scrambled egg omelet, without any pans to wash, and a pot of sterilized water to do with as you see fit. You can of course also use either of these survival techniques to cook with, or heat up canned food. A simple corned beef hash can be made from canned beef, canned corn and flecks of potato fired together in a skillet over a campfire. You can also use the skillet to heat up canned soups – although be mindful of the sodium content in those soups and what that can do to your water consumption. With matches, an iron skillet, a good knife and a can opener as your survival equipment, you can make the most of your minimal supplies and create a varied diet that will keep you going on the trail. |
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