Titan the Green
WWG1WGA
Don Quixote brought this to our attention in the Main Q Woo thread, as a good starting point for newbies...
The 7 Pillars of Urban Preparedness
August 28, 2020
by Toby Cowern
The 7 Pillars of Urban Preparedness is an introductory course that Selco and I teach. This is a foundational module that we refer to often because so much is built from these seven pillars. Selco and I created this framework to hang things in a logical sequence.
When Selco and I first met we shared our teaching material. After sifting through it all we found we had a massive volume of material with very little structure. People were having to process the information and somehow compartmentalize it in their own minds. They could not keep up with what we were teaching in the moment because they were still trying to sort out the previous information. We realized we needed to build structures for people to hang information on.
The preppersphere desperately needs that structure. As the sphere expands, without these structures, the information becomes more and more fragmented and people do not quite know what to do with the information they are given. The 7 Pillars are strong foundational pillars designed to help them with that and to help build resilience.
Please remember this crucial piece of advice:
These pillars are meant to be built together, incrementally, and consistently so the main structure stays level. You don’t want to build one pillar to its highest possible height when you haven’t yet started on the other 6.
What are the 7 Pillars?
Water is absolutely vital. Most of us probably already know that. However, what we see consistently is we struggle to contextualize the absence of something. Particularly water. Many people just can not fathom a world without freely available water. Even though academically we know it is possible there may be a time when we are without water, we viscerally don’t feel it.
We tend to avoid prioritizing water and only make a token effort. We think we can just go buy a couple of cases of bottled water, put it in the corner and “Yay me. There’s my water. Done.”
Don’t get me wrong, that’s a good start. But that is woefully insufficient. Not only in terms of actual resource, but in strategic mindset or proper planning for this preparation. We must take into consideration reasonably foreseeable problems. Is it reasonably foreseeable that there can be an interruption to our water supply? Yes, and it happens daily somewhere in the world. It doesn’t just mean the tap doesn’t work. It could also be the water is contaminated.
If we fail to keep up our intake of water, we can experience significant problems very fast. A lot of people in survival training talk about the rule of threes: Three minutes without oxygen, three days without water, three weeks without food. Some even add in 3 hours without shelter, which is environmentally related.
I want to challenge this because it gives a total false sense of security.
Yes, you can go three days without water before long term internal organ damage occurs. But, in just a few hours without water you will begin feeling the detrimental effects of dehydration. Your mental processes will become compromised. You may not be deadly dehydrated, but you will start to make stumbling-bumbling bad decisions. So, you may just die by making a stupid decision because of your compromised mental state.
Please do NOT treat this with token effort. We must understand how important water actually is.
Pillar One-Water: Actionable Point
The first block of this pillar is to have a water supply stored and ready to go. You will need to calculate your household water requirement. Ideally, you want to aim for a robust two-week supply of water. This is something that’s way better to overestimate than underestimate.
The second block of this pillar addresses hygiene, whether that be in terms of flushing toilets, washing clothes or washing bodies. You want to have that buffer zone.
If you have collected water in a container that has not been treated, the container will become contaminated. You do not want to put your safe, treated water back into an untreated container. Make sure you have another container or system.
Pillar Two: Shelter
Thinking in terms of wilderness survival shelter, it would be: what resources can be discovered or pulled from the landscape to build a suitable structure to shelter against the elements here? Urban preparedness is going to be different.
Fundamentally, your shelter needs to protect you from environmental hazards. For me living here in Northern Scandinavia, we go deep into extreme winter – double-digit negative temperatures, consistently with heavy snowfall, heavy winds. Heating and insulation of houses and whether cladding and weatherproofing is a huge priority of constructions here.
All of you are all over the globe and I don’t know what region you live in or what weather you live through. But the common thought here should be: is your shelter resilient to your weather in general. Hopefully, your house deals with the climate that you’re used to living in. (That would be unfortunate if it weren’t.) And, also to the extremes of that climate and any extreme weather events that could happen.
Environmental threat is not just about the weather, it is also about the demographic you live in. Do you live in a densely populated region or a sparsely populated region? More densely populated areas have more people. More people means there will be more competition for resources. It can also mean the area can become more prone to violence.
Density does not just refer to people. You have to consider animals.
It’s been interesting to look at areas that have gone into lockdown due to the pandemic. The ecosystem has been interrupted because many animals were used to feeding off human garbage. (Dumpsters at the back of restaurants type stuff.) Animals are becoming increasingly out of control and problematic because those normal food resources aren’t there. Animals associate people with food and will take risks to get closer to people to access that resource. Your shelter needs to protect you from animals as well.
Pillar Two-Shelter: Actionable Point
Think about layout in terms of actual use vs intended use vs potential use. A shelter needs to function normally and it needs to function in extremes. Not only during environmental threat, but also the additional burden of more people.
For example: you may live on your own, or you may live with a partner and have a small family. What if, out of necessity, additional family members must be included. How will your shelter now cope with that? Do you have enough beds and bedding? Do you have enough cutlery and crockery if you need to house and feed more people? Or, you may have a categorical red line of no one’s ever going to come into my property, let alone stay on, or to stay here for a longer period of time.
Many of us are used to simply walking in through the front door or the back door. But let’s just put it in pandemic context. If an airlock is needed to create a decontamination route into the premise, how will you re-roll to do that? How am I changing? Are you going into a garage, stripping down, cleaning and putting on fresh clothes? What are you options for entering the residence then?
That is viral or pandemic specific, but there can be other issues.
For example, you are out dealing with extreme weather events getting really wet, muddy, dirty and stinky. That same sort of decontamination process needs to be factored in. How do we transition from outside to inside safely and securely? How do we transition from inside to outside in the reverse manner?
The big one is: what if the infrastructure gets compromised? What if the water stops running? What if the electricity stops working? If there is a gas supply, what if it runs out or it’s switched off? What are the alternatives now to keep the shelter functioning? And what’s the longevity of those? If you’ve got a small, backup gas cylinder, how long does that work in your heating system?
Remember this: one to two weeks minimum is a healthy caution. You should be thinking about if the need to heat, cool, ventilate and light your shelter for one to two weeks MINIMUM. This is not to say don’t plan for longer, if you want to plan for one month, three months or six months, that’s perfectly fine.
Pillar Three: Fire
This pillar includes alternative heating and cooking means as well as fire protection and fire suppression.
If electricity is off, if the stove doesn’t work, if the heating is shut off, what do you have as an off grid alternative for that? Do you have a camping stove, a little gas cooker or the ability to improvise and adapt for what is suitable for your environment?
As the system starts to get squeezed and the pressure begins to show, emergency services are potentially re-prioritized. You will then need to be your own fire department, your own nursery, your own school, your own pharmacy, your own hospital. All of that infrastructure and resource you’re used to accessing may not be available to you for some time. As the situation gets more serious you must increasingly become risk aware and prepared to manage risk.
Pillar Three-Fire: Actionable Point
Possible scenario: The electricity has gone out. You are now using candles for lighting, a camp stove or gas cooker to cook on. This is increasing the fire hazards in the home. At the same time there is going to be significantly delayed response, or no response, from emergency services.
Make sure you have smoke alarms in place, fire blankets and accessible fire extinguishers. Aside from very small children, everyone needs to know where these things are and how to use them. This is very important. If you are not there in that moment, whoever is there must know how to adequately suppress a fire before it gets out of control.
Another thing to take into consideration is what your residence is made of. If you are living in a brick apartment, great. However, if you live in a wood house insulated with sawdust it will they go up in flames like a tinderbox.
Pillar Four: Food
We are terrible creatures of habit.
We buy the food we are used to buying with no regard to practicality. Especially if we eat fresh every day. Two weeks of fresh produce in your fridge is all going to by mushy and rotting within three days. When we break out of our habits because of panicked herd mentality we find that we have stocked up on all the wrong things.
To those of you who may have already gone out and bought 200 kilos, 450 pounds of pasta: what are you gonna do with it? After eating that for four meals straight, you are going to be done. Cooking and cleanup are fine if everything is running perfectly. But what if the grid is compromised?
Shelf Stable and long-term food do not require any sort of special storage considerations, refrigeration, freezing or particular temperature. You need to ask yourself: do I have the means for preparation? Is this something I can tolerate? Let me let you in on a little secret: No One Likes MRE’s. They are a necessary evil with a few rations that are okay. But that is as good as you’re going to get.
You have to try and keep familiar routines as much as you possibly can. Mealtime cannot be a war-zone. Throwing away a weeks’ worth of food is not survivable.
Pillar Four-Food: Actionable Point
While the stores are still open and online ordering is available, get what you can. Try to maintain a well-rounded diet. Buying a million of one thing is not going to work. To the best of your ability add variety. In my family we are fortunate to be able to create Indian food. With four base ingredients and 10 different spices we can have 30 different meals.
Don’t forget the snacks, it’s going to be a stressful time. Comfort snacking can bring a profound sense of relief. Just don’t buy 400 bags of chips and nothing with any substance.
The big thing to factor in is ease of preparation. Whatever you buy, just imagine if you’re limited on water or the gas or electricity is off. How easy is it to prepare? Things that require little or no preparation should be very, very high on your list.
The 7 Pillars of Urban Preparedness
August 28, 2020
by Toby Cowern
The 7 Pillars of Urban Preparedness is an introductory course that Selco and I teach. This is a foundational module that we refer to often because so much is built from these seven pillars. Selco and I created this framework to hang things in a logical sequence.
When Selco and I first met we shared our teaching material. After sifting through it all we found we had a massive volume of material with very little structure. People were having to process the information and somehow compartmentalize it in their own minds. They could not keep up with what we were teaching in the moment because they were still trying to sort out the previous information. We realized we needed to build structures for people to hang information on.
The preppersphere desperately needs that structure. As the sphere expands, without these structures, the information becomes more and more fragmented and people do not quite know what to do with the information they are given. The 7 Pillars are strong foundational pillars designed to help them with that and to help build resilience.
Please remember this crucial piece of advice:
These pillars are meant to be built together, incrementally, and consistently so the main structure stays level. You don’t want to build one pillar to its highest possible height when you haven’t yet started on the other 6.
What are the 7 Pillars?
- Pillar One: Water
- Pillar Two: Shelter
- Pillar Three: Fire
- Pillar Four: Food
- Pillar Five: Signaling | Communication
- Pillar Six: Medical | Hygiene
- Pillar Seven: Personal Safety
Water is absolutely vital. Most of us probably already know that. However, what we see consistently is we struggle to contextualize the absence of something. Particularly water. Many people just can not fathom a world without freely available water. Even though academically we know it is possible there may be a time when we are without water, we viscerally don’t feel it.
We tend to avoid prioritizing water and only make a token effort. We think we can just go buy a couple of cases of bottled water, put it in the corner and “Yay me. There’s my water. Done.”
Don’t get me wrong, that’s a good start. But that is woefully insufficient. Not only in terms of actual resource, but in strategic mindset or proper planning for this preparation. We must take into consideration reasonably foreseeable problems. Is it reasonably foreseeable that there can be an interruption to our water supply? Yes, and it happens daily somewhere in the world. It doesn’t just mean the tap doesn’t work. It could also be the water is contaminated.
If we fail to keep up our intake of water, we can experience significant problems very fast. A lot of people in survival training talk about the rule of threes: Three minutes without oxygen, three days without water, three weeks without food. Some even add in 3 hours without shelter, which is environmentally related.
I want to challenge this because it gives a total false sense of security.
Yes, you can go three days without water before long term internal organ damage occurs. But, in just a few hours without water you will begin feeling the detrimental effects of dehydration. Your mental processes will become compromised. You may not be deadly dehydrated, but you will start to make stumbling-bumbling bad decisions. So, you may just die by making a stupid decision because of your compromised mental state.
Please do NOT treat this with token effort. We must understand how important water actually is.
Pillar One-Water: Actionable Point
The first block of this pillar is to have a water supply stored and ready to go. You will need to calculate your household water requirement. Ideally, you want to aim for a robust two-week supply of water. This is something that’s way better to overestimate than underestimate.
- Calculate two liters per person in your household, per day of water as a minimum. This should come to a half gallon per person.
- Based on that number calculate your household requirement for one week minimum, two weeks ideally.
The second block of this pillar addresses hygiene, whether that be in terms of flushing toilets, washing clothes or washing bodies. You want to have that buffer zone.
- Calculate five liters per person in your household, per day. This should be one and a quarter gallons per person.
- Based on that number, calculate your household requirement for one week minimum, two weeks ideally.
If you have collected water in a container that has not been treated, the container will become contaminated. You do not want to put your safe, treated water back into an untreated container. Make sure you have another container or system.
Pillar Two: Shelter
Thinking in terms of wilderness survival shelter, it would be: what resources can be discovered or pulled from the landscape to build a suitable structure to shelter against the elements here? Urban preparedness is going to be different.
Fundamentally, your shelter needs to protect you from environmental hazards. For me living here in Northern Scandinavia, we go deep into extreme winter – double-digit negative temperatures, consistently with heavy snowfall, heavy winds. Heating and insulation of houses and whether cladding and weatherproofing is a huge priority of constructions here.
All of you are all over the globe and I don’t know what region you live in or what weather you live through. But the common thought here should be: is your shelter resilient to your weather in general. Hopefully, your house deals with the climate that you’re used to living in. (That would be unfortunate if it weren’t.) And, also to the extremes of that climate and any extreme weather events that could happen.
Environmental threat is not just about the weather, it is also about the demographic you live in. Do you live in a densely populated region or a sparsely populated region? More densely populated areas have more people. More people means there will be more competition for resources. It can also mean the area can become more prone to violence.
Density does not just refer to people. You have to consider animals.
It’s been interesting to look at areas that have gone into lockdown due to the pandemic. The ecosystem has been interrupted because many animals were used to feeding off human garbage. (Dumpsters at the back of restaurants type stuff.) Animals are becoming increasingly out of control and problematic because those normal food resources aren’t there. Animals associate people with food and will take risks to get closer to people to access that resource. Your shelter needs to protect you from animals as well.
Pillar Two-Shelter: Actionable Point
Think about layout in terms of actual use vs intended use vs potential use. A shelter needs to function normally and it needs to function in extremes. Not only during environmental threat, but also the additional burden of more people.
For example: you may live on your own, or you may live with a partner and have a small family. What if, out of necessity, additional family members must be included. How will your shelter now cope with that? Do you have enough beds and bedding? Do you have enough cutlery and crockery if you need to house and feed more people? Or, you may have a categorical red line of no one’s ever going to come into my property, let alone stay on, or to stay here for a longer period of time.
Many of us are used to simply walking in through the front door or the back door. But let’s just put it in pandemic context. If an airlock is needed to create a decontamination route into the premise, how will you re-roll to do that? How am I changing? Are you going into a garage, stripping down, cleaning and putting on fresh clothes? What are you options for entering the residence then?
That is viral or pandemic specific, but there can be other issues.
For example, you are out dealing with extreme weather events getting really wet, muddy, dirty and stinky. That same sort of decontamination process needs to be factored in. How do we transition from outside to inside safely and securely? How do we transition from inside to outside in the reverse manner?
The big one is: what if the infrastructure gets compromised? What if the water stops running? What if the electricity stops working? If there is a gas supply, what if it runs out or it’s switched off? What are the alternatives now to keep the shelter functioning? And what’s the longevity of those? If you’ve got a small, backup gas cylinder, how long does that work in your heating system?
Remember this: one to two weeks minimum is a healthy caution. You should be thinking about if the need to heat, cool, ventilate and light your shelter for one to two weeks MINIMUM. This is not to say don’t plan for longer, if you want to plan for one month, three months or six months, that’s perfectly fine.
Pillar Three: Fire
This pillar includes alternative heating and cooking means as well as fire protection and fire suppression.
If electricity is off, if the stove doesn’t work, if the heating is shut off, what do you have as an off grid alternative for that? Do you have a camping stove, a little gas cooker or the ability to improvise and adapt for what is suitable for your environment?
As the system starts to get squeezed and the pressure begins to show, emergency services are potentially re-prioritized. You will then need to be your own fire department, your own nursery, your own school, your own pharmacy, your own hospital. All of that infrastructure and resource you’re used to accessing may not be available to you for some time. As the situation gets more serious you must increasingly become risk aware and prepared to manage risk.
Pillar Three-Fire: Actionable Point
Possible scenario: The electricity has gone out. You are now using candles for lighting, a camp stove or gas cooker to cook on. This is increasing the fire hazards in the home. At the same time there is going to be significantly delayed response, or no response, from emergency services.
Make sure you have smoke alarms in place, fire blankets and accessible fire extinguishers. Aside from very small children, everyone needs to know where these things are and how to use them. This is very important. If you are not there in that moment, whoever is there must know how to adequately suppress a fire before it gets out of control.
Another thing to take into consideration is what your residence is made of. If you are living in a brick apartment, great. However, if you live in a wood house insulated with sawdust it will they go up in flames like a tinderbox.
Pillar Four: Food
We are terrible creatures of habit.
We buy the food we are used to buying with no regard to practicality. Especially if we eat fresh every day. Two weeks of fresh produce in your fridge is all going to by mushy and rotting within three days. When we break out of our habits because of panicked herd mentality we find that we have stocked up on all the wrong things.
To those of you who may have already gone out and bought 200 kilos, 450 pounds of pasta: what are you gonna do with it? After eating that for four meals straight, you are going to be done. Cooking and cleanup are fine if everything is running perfectly. But what if the grid is compromised?
Shelf Stable and long-term food do not require any sort of special storage considerations, refrigeration, freezing or particular temperature. You need to ask yourself: do I have the means for preparation? Is this something I can tolerate? Let me let you in on a little secret: No One Likes MRE’s. They are a necessary evil with a few rations that are okay. But that is as good as you’re going to get.
You have to try and keep familiar routines as much as you possibly can. Mealtime cannot be a war-zone. Throwing away a weeks’ worth of food is not survivable.
Pillar Four-Food: Actionable Point
While the stores are still open and online ordering is available, get what you can. Try to maintain a well-rounded diet. Buying a million of one thing is not going to work. To the best of your ability add variety. In my family we are fortunate to be able to create Indian food. With four base ingredients and 10 different spices we can have 30 different meals.
Don’t forget the snacks, it’s going to be a stressful time. Comfort snacking can bring a profound sense of relief. Just don’t buy 400 bags of chips and nothing with any substance.
The big thing to factor in is ease of preparation. Whatever you buy, just imagine if you’re limited on water or the gas or electricity is off. How easy is it to prepare? Things that require little or no preparation should be very, very high on your list.