Survival and Prepping – Threat Analysis

Though I’ve followed these subjects from a distance for several years, it’s only been recent that I started taking them seriously. One catalyst is my wife somehow got into prepping. She started out watching shopping videos on YouTube and somehow ended up watching preppers. She got me Michael Snyder’s “Get Prepared Now!” for Christmas. She’s also been buying as much dollar store paracord as she can find (although I keep telling her to get the 550 or MILSPEC.)

With my wife’s sudden interest in the subject, I started digging back into it. I even started watching the show “Doomsday Preppers” on Hulu. Some of those people have some off-the-wall fears and plans, but some of them are really smart.

I figured before I come up with a strategy, I should probably know what kind of threats I’m likely to face. There is no sense in prepping for a “zombie apocalypse” that is never likely to happen, although who doesn’t need an excuse to stock up on shotguns? But if you’re going to prep, you should probably give some thought to what you’re up against realistically.

On episode of Doomsday Preppers had me shaking my head and muttering. One guy was prepping for a supposed cyber attack that would entirely take down America. I obviously know more about cybersecurity than he does, and I kept muttering “That’s not how a cyber attack works.” The other guy was prepping for a “Red Dawn” style Russian invasion and somehow he and his two buddies were going to sneak behind enemy lines and stop it.

Some of these preppers live in a cabin on a mountain 2 hours from the nearest (small) town, and are prepping for terrorism and dirty bombs. I’m not sure they understand how terrorism works, but small towns are unlikely targets.

I have some experience in Risk Management, so I applied it to likely threats I could face in my area and the possible responses. This was a brainstorming exercise I did over the course of an afternoon, and very informal. I created a table in OneNote. I was unable to import my table to WordPress with any kind of formatting that made it readable, so I screen-shotted it. Again, this was very informal and while I did anonymize it somewhat, I figured cleaning it up and removing the profanity was probably too much work for a blog I haven’t posted to in over 6 months and probably don’t have readers for.

Green is obviously good. Red is severe. Black is off the charts, yet highly unlikely.

All of these are for my area. I judged the severity of a hurricane as yellow. While hurricanes are serious threats, by the time they get to me they’re just bad tropical storms. I got hit by two of them last year. I had to drive home from work in what was left of Florence. I also forgot to add under tsunami that I’m far enough inland that I don’t think it would affect me.

Now in the event I had to leave, the traffic in my area could be at a standstill for days with everybody else evacuating, so my most likely scenario is to shelter in place.

Having done that analysis, I can conduct some realistic preparations for the more likely scenarios, which are weather related. If I had to bug out, about the only way I could expect to pull it off is to be the first one to know so I can get on the road and out of the area.