One of the things that gives us the most troubled sleep of all is the risk of, and outcomes from, an EMP attack on the US. In case you’re not fully up to speed on this draconian danger, we discuss EMP attacks – what they are, how fearsome their impacts would be, and how easy they are to stage – in several articles here. Our sense is that the danger of an EMP event is […]
Are you building up a library of prepper resource materials? You definitely should be. If you’re like us, you probably already have somewhere between hundreds of thousands and literally millions of pages of resource material, spanning tens or even hundreds of gigabytes of data on your hard drives. It is very easy to download and save material from many different sites and sources. If you’re like us, you’ve maybe also bought some CDs or DVDs […]
So you’re about to buy yourself a rural retreat? Congratulations. We hope you’ll never need it, but how wonderful it is to know it is there and available if things should go severely wrong. In among all the other things you need to consider when choosing a retreat is its lot size. There are a number of different factors affecting how large a lot you need, including the soil type, what sorts of crops you […]
Many of us rely on wells for our water supply, and in such cases, we have an electric pump that lifts the water up and into a supply tank. These pumps are usually long-lived and reliable, and draw little power (at least by present day standards where we have access to virtually unlimited electrical power at comparatively low cost). But what happens in a future adverse scenario where first our power fails and then secondly […]
Today marked a watershed moment in our privacy. A new commercial satellite was launched with four times better than before imaging capabilities, further reducing our privacy. There was a time when getting privacy in our retreat was an easy and simple concept. Choose a location away from the main roads, and you knew that as long as the parts of your retreat that you wished to keep private were not visible from any other property […]
Many people add a root cellar to their retreat. This is good, but if you are not careful with what you store in your root cellar, the gases (notably ethylene) given off by some stored fruit and vegetables may interfere with the longevity of other stored fruit and vegetable items. In addition, some items give off strong odors which could contaminate other stored produce. And some produce prefers warmer or cooler temperatures, and greater or […]
We sometimes amuse ourselves reading properties for sale advertisements that describe themselves as being prepper properties. We particularly like looking at the dwelling structures – what they proudly term the prepper retreat – on such properties. Nine times out of ten (maybe even 99 times out of 100), the ‘retreat’ is nothing more than a generic house with nothing at all that would enhance its role as a sturdy building, reliably protecting the people inside […]
We’ve seen very little written about adding an escape tunnel to your retreat, and what has been written has not necessarily been practical or prudent. First, of course, do you need an escape tunnel for your retreat? That’s something you have to decide for yourself, and probably also something you have to do a cost/benefit calculation on. Most of us have our retreat designs limited first and foremost by our budget, and we have to […]
Many of the preferred locations for prepper retreats are in areas that have substantial swings in temperatures between hot summers (daytime temperatures often in the 90s and sometimes exceeding 100) and cold winters (where temperatures seldom rise above freezing, even in the middle of the day). That’s no big deal when you have unlimited utility power for heating and cooling, limited only by your ability to pay the electricity or gas bill each month. But […]