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

--- Quote from: Someone on July 19, 2016, 11:36:40 pm ---
--- Quote from: chickenHeadKnob on July 19, 2016, 06:54:36 am ---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.
--- End quote ---
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.

--- End quote ---

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:

--- Quote from: nbritton on July 19, 2016, 12:46:20 am ---Also it should be water resistant, and also be able to survive EMI from a gamma ray burst, EMP, or solar flare.

--- End quote ---

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:

--- Quote from: chickenHeadKnob on July 20, 2016, 06:56:56 am ---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.
--- End quote ---
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. :-DD

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.
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