by Anon-6, Survival Blog:
I’ve been a prepper since 2012 and was born in the early 60s. I started prepping when Obama was reelected and realized we’re on our own to protect our families from the hazards of a dangerous world. One of my first purchases was a 1-ounce silver Eagle that stays in my pocket to this day as part of my EDC kit – a small metal cigar case that works nicely (maybe a future article on that). From there, research and then purchasing food, water storage, comms, medical supplies, guns, and getting trained.
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Fast forward to late 2022 and early 2023. Based on the politics of today (and the Ukraine war) the most obvious way I see the US coming out of the divisive environment we find ourselves in is a major war (standard). I concluded there was a greatly elevated risk that a war will come and serve as a way to unify us against some problem/boogyman – worked before (the Civil war “to end slavery”, German and Japanese “defeating fascism” in WWII and to end the Depression, Iraq invasion of Kuwait, etc.)
Part of my research was to read – a lot. SurvivalBlog has helped enormously – many thanks to the smarter-than-me contributors for your ideas, motivation, and plans. One of the most thought provoking things I read was a book published in 1997 titled “The Fourth Turning.” You can search it where you buy your books (in cash – wink, wink). That book describes how our country goes through four 20 year cycles every 80-ish years and every major fourth cycle, or “fourth turning,” has ended in a war: the War for Independence, the Civil War, WWII, and now with the To-Be-Named-Later War. I can’t come up with a cool acronym for this so I’ll just think of it as the next war. The authors point out that each subsequent war was more deadly than the one before it. If the trend continues, and I think it probably will, we’re looking at an ugly mid- to late 2020s timeframe nuclear exchange for this Fourth Turning’s culmination.
In the last year I have taken a good look at my stock of nuclear attack preps and found I had a good deal of the right gear but it was spread all over my prep storage shelves and overheard racks in my garage. Much of it was inaccessible in a timely manner. By timely I mean about the time fallout from a nuclear attack might be a factor to my family’s survival. I live about 20 miles from a potential major target in the mountain west. I’m very confident we’d survive the blast from that distance, barring a major miss by the bad guys, which I know is a possibility. An EMP detonation is a possibility but it is not as immediately life-threatening as a nuke going off 20 miles away.
So over a long weekend this past winter I took on the arduous process of taking everything out of the shelves and overhead racks, cataloguing, consolidating, and replacing it all in a central location. When I was done, I had a “Nuclear Attack Quick Actions Checklist” and an inventory of nuke attack items I have, all settled into a single overhead rack in my garage. I also have a good plan to convert my basement “movie room” to a fallout shelter. Not a nuclear blast-proof bomb shelter, but a fallout shelter. Equipping either one will be roughly the same, but a bomb shelter can (not always) require pouring concrete putting up new walls and generally changing things my wife would not be willing to accept in our nicely finished basement.
First I identified the best space in my house. We live in a three story house, counting the full finished basement. The basement has windows along the main exterior wall and a walkout to the back yard through a sliding glass door. The good news is, I have underground square footage, with thick, poured concrete covered in dirt on three side. The bad news is that on that fourth side there is only a sliding glass door, some carpet and some drywall between my future shelter area and the fallout field that is also known as my backyard. The checklist below is not extremely detailed when it comes to exactly where everything is because I know where “Rack 1” is in my garage, I know where my water storage is, and I know where my food is. I’ve inserted details that I think add to this article in brackets “[X]” – you’ll see what a cleaned up checklist looks like if you remove that verbiage.
My intent is to help folks see that making a space to survive fallout is both doable and can be set up in around an hour or less if you’ve thought about it and planned for it. I’ve laid this out so my wife can do this if I’m away at work or travelling and the boom happens. It’s not a “how to” on how to survive fallout, although a lot of consideration went into the development of items to buy and place. This checklist is intended to give focus to my wife and I as we quickly move needed items into our shelter and do some quick home modifications before lethal amounts of radiation start arriving in my backyard and roof.
