If the shit hit the fan, what would be in your bug out bag?

[CJay]

Sorry, couldn't resist it, the two on the same line gave me the fleeting impression of a gentleman who likes to do things in comfort! 

I've got to the sort of age where comfort is greatly valued

[rdl]

We had a power failure a few days ago that lasted nearly 16 hours. Power is pretty reliable here. There are occasional random dips, but I only recall two extended outages in the last 10 years and both lasted less than an hour. It never hurts to be prepared.

[bitslice]

There are only a few countries where this is relevant,
if something happened in the UK I've got nowhere to go, and the local rabbit population is not going to keep 150,000 people fed for very long.

So say this was the USA, and you needed to get from a city to a safer location 50 miles away, why carry a bag full of equipment?
The first day is going to be simply walking out into the countryside, so just pre-bury anything you might need for the next day in a barrel 10 miles away.

Repeat every 10 miles

[Someone]

Locally to me the one disaster that has reasonable probability of happening is a Richter scale 9 subduction zone earthquake. There will be thousands who wished they had  water, food, and way to keep there flashlights and phones charged.

Do the Canadians like Americans have non-tivial power blackouts on a regular basis? Its humorous to see the reports (including new media) of people sitting in their cars with the engine idling so they have somewhere warm and power for the mobile devices.

[jh15]

I would want medical iodine in my go bag for the occasional dirty bomb to saturate my thyroid.

[CatalinaWOW]

If you are worried about EMP and gamma pulses your bugout bag better be a deep cave with a Faraday cage.  Then you can keep whatever floats your boat.  Probably condoms and a high end oscilloscope will be equally valuable/worthless.

For the much more real natural disasters a simple multimeter and some solar power sounds like the main electronic needs.  Commo gear for those so inclined and trained also makes sense.

One more thing to think about.  For forest fires, earthquakes, floods and other natural disasters that leave society intact, but which may not leave your home intact, a hard drive with photos, documents, account numbers, contact information, policy numbers and the like makes a whole lot of sense.  Portable and a big help in restarting life elsewhere.

[chickenHeadKnob]

Locally to me the one disaster that has reasonable probability of happening is a Richter scale 9 subduction zone earthquake. There will be thousands who wished they had  water, food, and way to keep there flashlights and phones charged.

Do the Canadians like Americans have non-tivial power blackouts on a regular basis? Its humorous to see the reports (including new media) of people sitting in their cars with the engine idling so they have somewhere warm and power for the mobile devices.

Well since this addressed  to me, my answer would be "it depends". There is great regional variation in geography and the type of disasters that bring down the grid. But in general we have better reliability than the US with some caveats.  For 25 years I lived in a city suburb that had underground service and a was fed by a substation designed  in part by my father. Not a single power interruption except  for 1 hour from 10:30 to 11:30 AM one summer morning as scheduled maintenance swapped  out equipment. During those same decades there was the ice storm in the Ottawa valley to Montreal area which was one of the most costly disasters in Canadian history.  In places people were without power for more than 3 weeks. After more than 24 hours without power in a Canadian winter shit gets real uncomfortable especially if you are one of those precious snowflakes that is unprepared for sudden involuntary camping.  There is an area of central Canada and includes a few north east states that is liable to get the meteorological phenomenon of super-cooled rain drops hitting the power lines and trees and freezing instantly building up a heavy coating. The prairie provinces and the north which has more severe cold typically only get those conditions on the shoulders of winter, that is early and late winter. Same thing for blizzards, in the middle of a sub-arctic winter it is usually too dry and cold to support a blizzard.

Quebec hydro has a particular susceptibility to solar flare carrington type events and one did cause a big outage once. Most provinces have grid ties to the U.S. states immediately  on their border and "wheel" power to  states deeper south. It works out well because the provinces  with excess hydro power (Manitoba, Quebec and previously BC) experience peak demand in the middle of winter around 5:00 pm on the coldest day when everyone starts cooking supper. The U.S peak demand  happens on the hottest days of summer when every yank cranks his air conditioner to max. The exception is southern Ontario I don't know what happens there but Ontario hydro has been FUBARed for decades. Worst managed of all the Canadian utilities by far. Those grid ties form a shared  vulnerability  as U.S faults can propagate north. There have been a few large scale events, one I recall is where a Con Edision transmission line sagged so much from the ambient heat plus load it contacted trees and brought down Toronto/southern Ontario. Years ago, before the internets, there was an IEEE spectrum article about the challenges of operating the grid tie points around the great lakes. The article described a poorly understood (at the time) interaction of phase angle limits and load transfer disturbance  that could propagate in a circle around the lakes like a ground loop from hell.

I now live on Vancouver Island and the power outages here always happen in winter during wind storm events. The strong winds can come and go in an hour and bring down massive trees. If you are in a well served  urban area you may notice nothing, but if you are the last house on a remote string in the bush then you could be without power for days.

[station240]

Also it should be water resistant, and also be able to survive EMI from a gamma ray burst, EMP, or solar flare.

Yes but what are you going to test with said test equipment ?
As EMP etc will have fried or badly damaged most electronics.
In that case all that is left to test are things like car batteries and petrol generators.
Maybe you get lucky and find things like valve radios or relay based equipment that does still work.

Honestly, you can test this sort of thing with a light bulb, not much need for a multimeter when survival means not bothering with anything that doesn't work.

[Someone]

Well since this addressed  to me, my answer would be "it depends". There is great regional variation in geography and the type of disasters that bring down the grid. But in general we have better reliability than the US with some caveats.

Thanks for the details, some countries do disaster preparedness well, Australia and US dont seem to be them and it sounds like Canada is similarly poor in co-ordinating its population to be prepared.

[apis]

Preparing for the zombie apocalypse is silly of course, but there are lots of realistic scenarios that could interrupt the normal infrastructure. How well you should prepare and for what depends on where you live. For example, from what I have heard the north american power grid, like the Scandinavian is susceptible to solar flares events. It's quite possible a flare will knock out the grid and damage transformers that could take several weeks to replace or repair (and maybe longer if  much of the globe is affected). And then there are natural disasters, epidemics and of course war.

A lot of 'prepper' stuff you see on TV is just dumb though. I saw one couple who was hoarding liquor in their basement, they were God fearing people that didn't drink but for some reason they believed that ethanol would be super valuable after the apocalypse.

Having a bag with spare clothes and medicine and perhaps some food in case you need to evacuate from your home suddenly is probably a good idea though, and something many governments recommend. It's also a good idea to have food, medicine and some way to stay warm and cook at home in case of an extended blackout. I know in Sweden the government expect citizens to manage for at least 3 days without running water, electricity, medicines or food supplies. I suspect you need more than that because the government planing won't work perfectly since they've never tested their plans in real life. But exactly what you should keep and for how long depends on where you live and what your personal needs are.

Some things you can't really prepare for though. From what I've read you are lucky if you get wiped out by the initial strike during a nuclear war for example, so no need to worry about EMP's or fallout shelters! A lot of people are really naive, thinking they will be able to live of the land and so on, but you can tell they have never caught a fish in their life much less a rabbit. And they will have to compete with millions of other starving desperate people. A really bad pandemic could also be nasty but also something that is hard to prepare for. A bug out bag wouldn't help at all in those scenarios.

A bug out bag should only have the bare minimum you need to evacuate from your home quickly. If you have any tools at all I would say a pocket knife. A multimeter would be pretty low priority. Anyone who's been hiking in real life knows every gram you have to carry is 'expensive' (slow you down) so you only bring what is absolutely essential for the trip. I suspect people who have never hiked in their life will not get very far if they have to suddenly pack a bag and walk several miles during a disaster. So stay fit and go hiking is probably the first thing anyone who want to prepare for situations like that should do.

[PartialDischarge]

from what Ive seen and read online nothing beats US inhabitans (didnt want to say citizens..)
when it comes to preparing SHTF bags, bug out bags...
I personally would include medicines, money, high energy meals, and defensive/hunting weapons, plus all the things I usually carry on hiking trips...

[FuzzyOnion]

Please not here.  I just don't want to see this horseshit on an electronics forum.  Ever.

I was certainly surprised to see it.  Since I'm probably slow, I don't totally get it either.  Major meltdown - Wild West rules apply.  Bushwackin' and dry-gulchers.  Whoever has the most guns wins.
We'll be counting on the all the preppers for supplies. 

[apis]

Please not here.  I just don't want to see this horseshit on an electronics forum.  Ever.

I was certainly surprised to see it.

I've even seen Martha Stewart make a bug out bag!

Major meltdown - Wild West rules apply.  Bushwackin' and dry-gulchers.  Whoever has the most guns wins.
We'll be counting on the all the preppers for supplies. 

In a "major meltdown - wild west" scenario I've been wondering if it would be better to live in the US or not. On one hand, you might actually have your own arsenal, on the other hand so does every one else! I saw a computer game once about a post apocalyptic world. If you got lucky you could kill a prepper and get his supplies, but you had to be careful because they were armed to the teeth and well hidden.

[free_electron]

an umbrella and a shovel ... and my towel of course. you always should have a towel ...

[Simon]

We'll be counting on the all the preppers for supplies. 

Don't be silly, they are preppers, you will ave to get past their guns. Something really wrong with america.

[Delta]

I've never understood the ones who horde gold.

Gold has pretty much zero value (apart from some specialist electronics applications), and crucially your can't eat nor drink it!

They seem to think that after the apocalypse, all our currencies will have no value (ie people will no longer exchange them for goods and services), but gold will! 

[3db]

A pack of wipies to clean up the shit that hit the fan....

 

[apis]

I've never understood the ones who horde gold.

Gold has pretty much zero value (apart from some specialist electronics applications), and crucially your can't eat nor drink it!

They seem to think that after the apocalypse, all our currencies will have no value (ie people will no longer exchange them for goods and services), but gold will! 

It's strange though, before fiat money, gold was used as money for a very long time. Before that and in other places people have used rare but worthless things like clamshells. Money is weird in the sense that whatever is used as money becomes more valuable simply because it is used as money (since that increases demand for it). So, money is whatever people believe it is.

[PartialDischarge]

I've never understood the ones who horde gold.

Gold has pretty much zero value (apart from some specialist electronics applications), and crucially your can't eat nor drink it!

They seem to think that after the apocalypse, all our currencies will have no value (ie people will no longer exchange them for goods and services), but gold will! 

Apocalipse or not, I can assure you that in 50 years the notes you carry in your pocket, whatever the country, will have no value. Gold will.

The beauty here is that neither nature nor we cant manufacture gold, but bills and coins...

[FuzzyOnion]

We'll be counting on the all the preppers for supplies. 

Don't be silly, they are preppers, you will ave to get past their guns. Something really wrong with america.

Oh, why not?  The whole thread is silly - lighten up.  Something really wrong with America???  Just catching up?
I can't wait for the November election - either way, there will be lots more to comment on after that debacle.

[GEuser]

Rule 303

[batteksystem]

Condoms and socks.

Add a bottle of Chardonnay and the night's a good'n. 

Well, they're for gathering water, waterproofing things but yeah, they do have other uses too

Put one sock over your head and rob the bank

[German_EE]

Depends on the nature of the shit.

Give me five minutes warning of a full nuclear exchange and I'll be out there in the garden sitting in a deck chair ready to watch the mushroom clouds. Will I survive long? No, but in those circumstances I wouldn't want to. As for the other stuff, there are more important things than electronics. It's an interesting exercise to sit down and think what can be abandoned in place whilst you make your escape, do you take tools and a multimeter or an extra bottle of water and a basic first aid kit? My money would be on the water and medical gear.

Eighteen years ago I relocated  to a different continent and faced some hard choices about what I took with me to my new home. In the end everything I owned fitted on to a single freight pallet with room to spare and I used the freight costs I saved to buy new stuff at the other end.

[SkyMaster]

Well since this addressed  to me, my answer would be "it depends". There is great regional variation in geography and the type of disasters that bring down the grid. But in general we have better reliability than the US with some caveats.

Thanks for the details, some countries do disaster preparedness well, Australia and US dont seem to be them and it sounds like Canada is similarly poor in co-ordinating its population to be prepared.

In Canada, the government expect people to be able to live all by themselves for 72 hours when a natural disaster stricks.

Get Prepared
http://www.getprepared.gc.ca/index-en.aspx

Hazards and Emergencies
http://www.getprepared.gc.ca/cnt/hzd/index-en.aspx

Your Emergency Plan
http://www.getprepared.gc.ca/cnt/plns/index-en.aspx

Emergency Kits
http://www.getprepared.gc.ca/cnt/kts/index-en.aspx


Also, when a major natural disaster occurs, the military forces usually get involve, but they need an order from the Minister, and this always take time.
 

[Delta]

My bag would contain:

- One forty-five caliber automatic
- Two boxes of ammunition
- Four days' concentrated emergency rations
- One drug issue containing antibiotics, morphine,
  vitamin pills, pep pills, sleeping pills, tranquilizer pills
- One miniature combination Russian phrase book and Bible
- One hundred dollars in rubles
- One hundred dollars in gold
- Nine packs of chewing gum
- One issue of prophylactics
- Three lipsticks
- Three pair of nylon stockings.