Joke aside, an interesting issue to be addressed when it comes to prepping is which places are to be avoided after SHTF. The short story goes something like this, I mean this is the preamble: it is very possible for a catastrophic event to take place at some point in one’s life, whether you like it or not; it may be a large scale disaster of sorts, like a nuke strike, or an EMP strike, solar-made or man-made, courtesy of your local-crazy-nuke-armed dictator, or whatever natural extinction-level event, or terrorist attack.
The possibilities are endless.
Now, provided you’ve survived the initial “shock-wave”, you should concentrate your efforts on staying alive for a little bit longer, because, after all, there’s no fun in prepping and stockpiling gear and food and what not, if you’re not going to benefit from your efforts, right? It’s not about “he who dies with the biggest stockpile wins”, the trick is to stay alive, or at least to die last.
Hence, today’s article, which is aimed at trying to help you with the noble endeavor of saving one’s skin in the aftermath of WW3 or whatever catastrophic scenario you could think of.
The Number One Lesson
First world countries, like (parts of) the US, are awesome places to live when everything works fine and dandy. I am not talking about South-Central LA, or diverse neighborhoods in Chicago or Memphis, where crime rates are through the roof, if you know what I mean. The point is that our modern day uber-high tech society comes with obvious benefits. The caveat to living in a first-world country is that when everything is starting to fall apart, people are generally clueless with regard to surviving in third world conditions, i.e. without running water, electricity and things of that nature.
And yes, in a large-scale disaster, it’s very probable that electricity will go first, which means nothing would work anymore, since everything today runs on electricity, including your computer used for reading this article.
Also, since most of the US population is concentrated in a relatively small number of densely populated urban areas, it goes without saying that big cities are to be avoided like the plague in the eventuality of a SHTF event. Incidentally, almost every big city only has enough supplies to last for three days tops, and I am especially talking about food. The concept is that the food-delivery chain is never going to stop, the trucks will keep on hauling, hence nobody bothers to stockpile food anymore.
Obviously, in a serious crisis, life in a big city will become hellish rather quickly, as essential supplies are going to disappear fast (think about what happened this Black Friday, then amplify that by a factor of, I don’t know, 10,000 and you’ll start to get what I am talking about), people will get desperate for food and water (yes, your water utility company uses electrically powered pumps to deliver water to your faucet), and rioting and looting will become the new normal.
Naturally, it makes little sense to prepare (as in stockpile) large amounts of gear, including food, in a densely populated urban area. Since you’ll be the only one in “the hood” having emergency supplies of water and food and what not, you’d basically have a big-red TARGET sign painted all over your property. And soon enough, you’ll have to share your goodies with your local and not so friendly mob of looters. And that will get you nowhere, in terms of survival. Most probably, you’ll end up shot anyway.
So, if you’re all about “doom and gloom”, considering relocating from the big-bad city would make for a great idea. . And do it now, while you still can, until it’s too late.
The general rule of thumb is that big cities are to be avoided like the plague in SHTF scenarios. The good news is that the US has over 3000 counties, but half of the population lives in 146 counties, which means there’s a lot of “people-free” real-estate available for your bug-out retreat, where you can safely store food, water, guns, gold, bitcoin or whatever.
