A Watch Can Become Neighborhood Survival

A neighborhood watch can be one of the first steps to building a survival group out of your family, friends, and neighbors. In fact, your neighbors will probably make the difference between you riding out a crisis at home and you turning into a refugee.

Even the most prepared individual cannot defend his or her home 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Your home is your fortress in a crisis. And you'll make it as strong and survivable as you can. But you may not even need a fortress if your entire street or neighborhood is working together. You are going to need your neighbors, and they are going to need you.

Use the neighborhood watch as an opportunity to put together a list of all residents with their home and e-mail addresses, phone numbers, and list of skills. Be sure to note skills that would be useful in a real crisis or even a collapse (doctor, carpenter, plumber, etc.).

You can also do this with an informal meet and greet. I work a lot, so I was terrible about meeting the neighbors, beyond the usual friendly h.e.l.los. So, my wife and I organized a couple of barbecues-first for our Latino neighbors to the south of our house, and then for the neighbors on the north side of the street. In the first batch, we wound up with a bunch of people from Uruguay and Argentina, their amazing cooking, a pool guy who later saved us hundreds of dollars on fixing our swimming pool, a couple of accountants, and-special bonus-a Homeland Security agent.

In the second batch, we got a sheriff's deputy, a pharmacist, some Haitian immigrants (now there are some people with survival skills), a car salesman, his insurance-agent wife, and a programmer for Cisco systems.

These are friendships that will help us find out what's going on in an emergency on the local (sheriff) and national (Homeland Security) levels, advice on medicine in a post-crash situation, and how to survive if things get really bad (Haitians).

You can do the same thing in your neighborhood. Be the leader. Take the initiative to educate your friends on the kind of rough times that we will probably face, and how they can prepare for them. The more your neighbors are prepared, the easier it is for your lifeboat to float.

Along with the neighborhood watch, potluck, and barbecue dinners, here are some other activities you can do to educate, prep, and organize your neighbors:* Start a garden club and get your neighbors going on their gardens. A couple of our neighbors have been inspired by our gardens.

* Learn as much as you can about their skills, backgrounds, and interests.

* Buy useful tools that you can share.

* Organize a neighborhood fishing contest at a local lake or stream.

* If you have a firearm, and some of your neighbors do, too, go to the shooting range together.

* Build a survival library of books and lend them to your neighbors. See what books they have that they would be willing to lend to others in the neighborhood.

* Get them started on food storage. If you have a coupon-obsessed wife who stuns store clerks with her shopping savvy, have her educate the neighbors on how to save money. Everyone wants to save money.

The Volunteer Center of Marin County, California, has a Guide to Organizing Neighborhoods for Preparedness, Response, and Recovery, which you can get FREE on their web site at http://www.preparenow.org/marin-g.html.

And supposing there is no disaster or crisis. Let's say nothing bad happens ever and you all live incredibly mundane lives. At the very least, you'll form lasting friendships with your neighbors and rebuild the sense of community that so often seems missing from modern American life.

Want to Know How Intruders Will Break Into Your Home? Ask a Fireman!

Firemen are the real experts at breaking and entering-they do it all the time to rescue people who are trapped in burning buildings. Here's an excerpt from Fire Nuggets by Eric Guida:Forcible entry is an art. On an engine company the art is in accomplishing the job with the tools that are ordinarily carried on an engine. Anybody can grab a circular saw and cut their way into a structure. The true art comes in doing it with just a Halligan and 8-pound flat-head axe.9 A Halligan bar is like a pry bar on steroids. It's a multipurpose tool for prying, twisting, punching, or striking a way into a door or wall.

Mr. Guida's article is an eye-popping introduction to the forcible breaking and entering that fire departments do all the time when they rescue people from burning homes. You can find his article by pointing your Web browser here: http://tinyurl.com/a2v6ym. You should go see it just for the photos.

So if you're not reinforcing your home because you worry that the fire department won't be able to get you out in an emergency, stop worrying-these guys could bust open Al Capone's vault in a New-York minute.

The Next Step-A Water Supply

So far, if you followed the advice in this chapter, you've decided to secure your home and your valuables, and make friendly relations with your neighbors your first line of defense. But turning your home into a fortress won't do you any good if you are forced to leave it.

One of your biggest vulnerabilities will probably be water. Let 's say you've already done the smart thing and stored potable water for your family, as well as purchased a water purification system as a backup. You may also want to consider a rainwater catchment system for your roof. Runoff water is saved in barrels, and can be used for irrigation in dry periods (for that spiffy garden you're growing).

My wife got a nifty rain barrel for the cost of a cla.s.s at the local horticulture society. A hacksaw was all we needed to shorten one of the house gutters to feed into the barrel, and it has a strainer to keep out the large debris and/or lizards. It's just a form of extra protection in case TSHTF.

Now, on to Sanitation

You're drinking all that water, right? And you 're eating your stockpile of food? Now, what are you going to do if the plumbing stops working, which is a real possibility in a power-down situation?

If you lose the water supply to your toilet, you can use your wastewater (from cooking or bathing) to flush the toilet once or twice a day (only as needed). Keeping the lid closed between each flush will help avoid odors and germs.

Alternately, in a short-term situation, you can p.o.o.p and pee into plastic bags. You'd better double-bag to make sure there's no leakage. But that's short-term and it's not comfortable.

A better solution is to designate a five-gallon bucket as a toilet-even better, get a toilet seat that snaps on to a five-gallon bucket. You can buy those for under $20 on the Web (for examples, go to www.survivormall.com, www.cabelas.com, and www.quakekare.com). Acquiring one of these will make your life so much easier in the event of a crisis.

If you don't want to spend money for a specially designed toilet seat, happen to have a spare toilet seat hanging around, and are handy with simple tools, you can build your own composting toilet. You can find an example with excellent instructions at the Appropedia web site.10 Point your Web browser to http://tinyurl.com/mty3gd.

However you get one, just do it! You 'll also need a second five-gallon bucket. This will hold whatever you're going to sprinkle over the waste in the toilet after you use it; sawdust is a good choice. Lime or powdered bleach are other alternatives. If you don't mind spending a little money and you care about the planet, you can use RV-Trine Bacterial Formula (look for it at www.campingworld.com), which eliminates odor and digests waste and paper with good bacteria, and is all natural and biodegradable to boot!

When the sawdust bucket is empty, it's time to empty the waste bucket. You can bury its contents (at least four inches underground) as long as you keep it far enough away from your water source. Or, you can compost it. If sewers aren't working throughout the neighborhood, you'll have to organize the neighbors to compost it (hopefully, you've already talked them into buying bucket toilets). There's a good book that explains how to compost human waste called The Humanure Handbook, by John Jenkins. You can find out more about that at www.weblife.org/humanure/default.html or www.jenkinspublishing.com/humanure.html.

Meanwhile, snap the seat onto your second bucket, start using that, and after you have the first one cleaned out, it becomes the sawdust bucket.

If you're a gardening type, you can also collect urine in a separate bottle to use on your plants. I'd recommend using a funnel unless you have dead-shot accuracy. Dilute the urine with 5 to 10 parts water, depending on how concentrated it is, and put it directly on the plants; it's a good source of nitrogen. If you're paranoid or think peeing on your garden is icky, you can put off harvesting from the plants for a week (or until after a rainstorm), but that's probably paranoia. Some darned cat is probably peeing in your garden anyway.

Make sure you have hand-washing facilities in an emergency. Hand sanitizer is okay if water is restricted, but what you want is water and soap. Store soap (if you learn how to make soap, that 's a possible post-crash occupation), and teach your family to wash their hands properly every single time.

I think the early chaos waves won't last long enough for you to run out of toilet paper, at least if you store as much of it as we do at our house. If you run out, you can decide which of your books you'll sacrifice to wipe your b.u.t.t-yet another good reason to have a library. An alternative is reusable (washable) cloth, which may gross you out if you haven't already done the same thing with cloth diapers.

Washing your body is easy enough with water heated over a fire, and you can buy a solar shower at any camping store if you're so inclined. You might want to consider how you would wash laundry by hand. You'll probably wash clothes less if the washing machine isn't working. Consider buying a drying rack for laundry now, because they may be unavailable post-crash.

Electricity: The Real Refuge

So now your home should be secure, and livable because you've taken care of sanitation. You should already have plenty of water and food stored, and you might even have a backup water supply in the works. The next thing you might want to work on is electricity. Electricity is what can turn your home into a real refuge.

And I have news for you: You are probably going to see extended failures of the national grid system.

Since 1990, demand on the nation's electric system has increased by about 25%, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. The nation operates about 10,000 power plants. However, construction of the transmission infrastructure that distributes this electricity has decreased about 30% since 1990.11 "Unless substantial amounts of capital are invested over the next several decades . . . service quality will degrade and costs will go up," the Department of Energy says on its web site.

I live in the South; I like solar power. If you live on the wind-swept plains of Oklahoma, you might want to look into wind power. As with most other things in this book, there is no perfect answer. You need to find the answer that works best for you.

Just remember that both solar and wind are intermittent power sources; you might want to consider a backup battery system.

A typical U.S. home uses approximately 13,000 kilowatt hours per year. That can be handled by a five-kilowatt peak (kWp) solar system. This kind of system can run a homeowner $20,000 to $40,000.12 There are federal tax credits that can help alleviate some of the expense, and check for state solar credits in your area. Solar power systems have a large upfront cost, but they last 30 years or more and pay for themselves in about eight years.

Because it is structured to wean the solar sector off subsidies, rebates are highest in the early years of the plan-in other words, now.

When you install solar panels on your home, you're not taking your own home off the electrical grid. On cloudy or overcast days, when your panels aren't generating optimum electricity, you don 't have to worry about your lights going dark. Instead, you're converting your home into a hybrid-powered home-one that uses solar energy and then supplements the excess with traditional electricity.

On days you actually overproduce solar electricity, your home becomes a mini power plant, putting electricity back into the grid. That generates a credit on your utility bill. This is why it's important to cut your energy use as much as possible. For more ideas, see the section in this chapter ent.i.tled Cut Home Energy Costs Before Crisis Strikes.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) put out a good introductory guide to solar power for consumers in 2003. It 's calledTable 11.1 Wattages of Typical Household Electronics DeviceTypical WattageSurge Wattage Standard light bulb 60 60 Fan 75 150 Small TV 300 400 Washing machine 375 400 Freezer 500 1,000 Electric blanket 400 400 Microwave oven 800 800 Furnace fan 750 1,500 Refrigerator 1,200 2,400 Home computer/monitor/printer 1,500 1,500 Well pump 2,400 3,600 Electric water heater 4,000 4,000 Heat pump 4,700 12,000 Central A/C 6,000 24,000

A Consumer's Guide: Get Your Power from the Sun. It's on the DOE web site at http://tinyurl.com/dfcnd7.

You can also find the DOE's guide to solar hot-water systems, A Consumer's Guide: Heat Your Water with the Sun, at http://tinyurl.com/yrjql3.

But you may not want to invest in a five-kWp system if all you plan to do is keep your refrigerator and water heater running and a few lights on, especially if you think your crisis will be short term.

In order to choose the right emergency power source and to size it properly, you need to understand something about the power requirements of the devices you plan to operate.

A normal 60-watt incandescent light bulb is required both for running it and turning it on. But a furnace requires twice its normal wattage to turn on-that's what is called its surge wattage.

If you plan to operate sensitive equipment like TVs and computers from an emergency power supply, you will want to have surge protection equipment in place, or you may blow out the circuits of whatever you're running. For computers, use an uninterruptible power supply (UPS). When a large device like a refrigerator turns on, an ordinary generator will not be able to keep power stable during the surge.

Portable Generators

Generators tend to get very expensive as you move above 5,000 watts.13 A simple gasoline-powered generator will consume about a gallon of gas every two hours or so at 1,000 -watt output. All generator manufacturers rate their generators' fuel consumption based on running with a load that is half the rated capacity. It's a bit misleading, but they all do it. So remember when you're generator shopping that the fuel usage numbers shown below are for half the rated continuous load! You can also purchase generators that run off of diesel fuel or propane.

But there are disadvantages to generators:1. Maintenance. Generators need to be maintained throughout the year, and if you don't maintain them, they will not work when you need them.

2. Fuel storage. You'll have to keep enough gasoline to see you through (figure 85 to 90 gallons for two weeks).

3. Noise. The cheaper models can be noisy. Flashlight Tip Don't just have a flashlight-have multiple flashlights, including one in your bedroom and one in each car. At least one of your flashlights should be waterproof.

More importantly, get rechargeable batteries and a solar battery charger. They cost extra, but they'll be worth their weight in gold if a crisis drags on for a while.

Consider getting a hand-cranked radio that is also a flashlight. Also, if you can get a hand-cranked radio that can recharge a cell phone, even better.

4. Carbon- monoxide danger. Every hurricane season, there are stories of families that ran generators without proper ventilation and the entire family was killed.

5. Storage. Along with storing the fuel, you'll have to store the generator itself.

Another Solution-An Inverter and Deep-Cycle Batteries

An inverter converts 12-volt power (like that found in a car battery) into 120-volt power. Typically, you run an inverter off of your car's battery, and it can produce 200 watts. You can also buy what is called a deep-cycle battery.

An inverter is a very easy and inexpensive solution if you can keep your power demands in the 200-watt range. That's enough to run several light bulbs, a radio, and a small TV.

But what about running your refrigerator? Or a s.p.a.ce heater? Inverters can run up to 2,500 watts, but the higher you go, the more expensive they get.

Of course, inverters are limited by your car's battery, too. Each battery has a reserve capacity rating. A typical rating is 80 minutes, which means the battery can supply 25 amps at 12 volts for 80 minutes. If you consume 120 watts continuously, that means you are draining about 10 amps from your car 's battery continuously. A typical car battery can supply power at that level for perhaps three hours. That's not going to get you very far. You can keep running the car to recharge the battery, though. And you can do that with stored gasoline, just like you would a generator, as long as your gasoline supply lasts.

On the other hand, a deep-cycle battery can supply power at that level for six to eight hours. Then you will need to recharge the battery.

Inverters can be a good option up to about 2,500 watts, although again, they tend to get expensive at that point (a 2,500-watt inverter might cost $600 to $1,000; and then you still need to buy a number of deep-cycle batteries and a charging system).

The Pros of Inverters * They are silent.

* They are maintenance-free (when you operate them from your car's battery).

The Cons of Inverters * If you build your own deep-cycle battery bank, then you will have to maintain the batteries.