“Home is a shelter from storms–all sorts of storms.”
― William J. Bennett.
When disaster strikes, staying inside your home is almost always your best option. You already have a home shelter, so you aren’t exposed to the elements. You have the majority of your preps and other things on hand to assist you in your survival. You may already have the advantages of a community or neighborhood. Even if you don’t know the neighbor across the street by name, but you exchange a smile and a wave, you have an advantage over bugging out across hostile terrain filled with unknowns and strangers. When it is safe to leave your area, you will have a better idea of where to go and stay safe.
You need to do things immediately before or in the minutes after conditions necessitate an extended period of needing to shelter in place. You won’t be able to run out to the store to pick up what you need, so your supplies and ingenuity will have to get you through as long as necessary. If you know the disaster is coming, you must stage and ready your home environment like you might your basecamp in the wilderness. So let’s jump in…
At the same time, touch base with any trusted neighbors. If you share a fence line with a neighbor, commiserate about the disaster you both face and let them know you’ll be keeping an eye out for them, too, though you are locking down. Neighbors who share a fence line insulate your home from disasters and the aftermath. They may also want to swap out something with you. They may have something for you, and you may have something for them. How well you want to know and how close you want to be with your neighbor is up to you. Every situation is different. I have had neighbors I trust and an occasional neighbor who I felt that I had to keep an eye on them. Every neighbor is different, and I have always believed good fences make good neighbors. It’s true here too.
If your home runs a high risk of being attacked or the conditions worsen outside that make this a possibility, identify an interior room that is safer from gunfire. Any standard round can typically penetrate the outside walls of most modern construction houses. The walls only offer concealment. Make sure light is not escaping out your windows. Make sure that one person is on watch at any given time. A security system that can work online and has minimal power requirements can aid you in keeping watch if you live alone. If there is a knock at your door, make sure someone in your group is watching the other entrances to your home. A knock on the front door could be a tactic to divert your attention from another entry into your house. Discuss your plan and run a few scenarios with whomever you share your home space with. Will the children hide? What would you do if someone was at one of your windows? What would the other people in the house do once that threat is identified? Even running through a few possible scenarios can equip you with a plan for home defense and keep you safe inside. As part of your preps, you should have already rendered as much of the exterior as possible fire safe. You should already have as part of your prepping a fire plan for the interior that includes fire extinguishers, alarms, fire blankets, maybe even gas masks. Someone with bad intentions won’t think twice about burning you out to grab what they can of your supplies. Also, you should have a solid lock on any electrical box on the exterior of the home. Even though power may go off and on, opening wide your locked doors to check on your breaker box makes you a vulnerable target. As part of your preps, take a look at some of my other blogs about securing your home. Do a 360-degree assessment of the exterior of the house from the perspective of a desperate criminal.
Establish one room or a few connected rooms of your home as the central command of your house. This is particularly important if weather conditions will require you to keep cold or warm in one area of your house. If that is the case, consider closing vents in other rooms and sealing off the rooms you will be in. Even without power, you don’t want your warm room or cold room seeping out to other parts of your home. If the disaster involves radiological or chemical contaminants in the air, you will need to seal off the room completely. This will include vents and fireplaces. If you live in a two-story home, consider taking shifts or making rounds around the top floor, looking out each window. Make sure that there is calm and quiet in every direction of your home. Weather permitting, your better defensible location is on the upper floor. If flooding is a possibility, it is your safest area. Otherwise, a living or dining room that is off the kitchen may be your safest area. If the disaster will have a longer duration or be accompanied by civil unrest, consider using extreme hold duct tape on your windows on the lower floor in X patterns and anchored to the frames. While this will not stop an intruder, it will slow one. A window that is smashed but still hanging in its frame is less likely to be entered than a window that’s not there at all. It also provides you just a little bit more time to implement your home defenses.
Also, make sure you have the means to cook and heat water to a temperature sufficient enough to kill bacteria. In the aftermath of a disaster or during a disaster, you don’t want to be dragging your barbeque indoors. That can be deadly, just as an open fire attracting unwanted attention can be equally dangerous. On that point, understand that operating a generator or even small fires may attract unwanted attention. Cooking fragrant foods may attract desperately hungry people. Keep your needs as simple as possible. Live, even in the safety of your own home, as primitively as possible.
You need to be able to get rid of human waste to maintain your health. Garbage bags and 5-gallon buckets with lids are suitable for this purpose. The waste material can be sealed in a bag with the air lightly pressed out and stored in a larger container for later disposal. The 5-gallon bucket with a trash bag and a pool noodle fitted to the rim is a pretty familiar item for campers, beachgoers, and traveling families, so you may already be familiar with this method of safe and sanitary waste elimination. In more suburban or rural settings, you may want to plan and dig a latrine of at least 2-feet deep after the second week of bugging in. But, again, safety and space are the determinants of whether you go this route. If you do, make sure it is 200 feet from any of your natural water sources.
Finally, if you have pets, have a bug-in plan and a bug-out plan. Will a puppy pad be possible? Do you need to move small barking dogs to better sound-insulated rooms? Large barking dogs are a great deterrent even when the house might be empty of people. Should the animal’s food and water be relocated to a safer area? When letting your pet out in the yard isn’t an option for a week or more, you will need to have a plan in place to safely discard their waste, as well.
There are definite advantages to staying put and battening down the hatches. The biggest is that your home has the bulk of your prepping supplies; however, you can’t just assume that since you have all the pieces of the puzzle secured and contained within your walls that you’ll be fine. Just as you have a well-constructed bugout plan, have a well-thought-out bug in plan as well. Then, when you have calculated out a plan, test it before you need it. Put yourself on lockdown for a day and night and part of the next day. Identify any gaps in your plan and work to eliminate them.
As always, please stay safe out there.