Survival Scout Tips
Top 15 Preparedness Items That Disappear When Disasters Strike
If you live a preparedness lifestyle, you already know the basics of stocking up on food, ensuring you have batteries, and understanding the ins and outs of having a secret money supply so you can purchase goods without a bank or credit freeze. That said, it’s always important to double-check...
The Story Behind the Text from the President
On Wednesday, October 3, over 100 million Americans received a presidential emergency text alert around 2:18 PM ET on their cell phones. For most, getting this alert was nothing more than another buzz coming from the phone. Some people found it humorous, cracking jokes about how the president can now...
How to Prepare in the Event of a Volcanic Eruption
Whether you realize it or not, there are volcanoes everywhere. In fact, the American Geosciences Institute tells us that there are 169 active volcanoes in the U.S. alone. To put that in perspective, a 10th of the world's population lives within the potential footprint of volcanoes—with more than 800 million...
The Woburn Water Contamination Epidemic
How Undetected Toxic Pollutants Ailed a Community and What We Can Do to Ensure a Similar Situation Never Happens Again Water is one of the single most important elements for survival. Without it, most can’t live longer than 3-5 days. And, if you do manage to survive that long without...
5 Hurricane Preparedness Lessons from History
Carolinas Face Flooding After Hurricane Florence Lumbers Through States (Photo by U.S. Air Force via Getty Images) As Hurricane Florence made landfall on the east coast of the United States, we’ve been reminded that hurricane preparedness is a must. On average, about five hurricanes strike the United States coastline every...
The Science Behind Solar Flares and the Grid
When you hear the term “natural disaster,” phenomenon such as hurricanes, tornadoes, and earthquakes may be the first things to come to mind. However, natural disasters originating beyond our Earth’s atmosphere also have the potential to disrupt life as we know it. For example, a handful of solar flares over...
Survival Lessons We Can Glean From Castaway
Tom Hanks featured in the movie Castaway Since the time that humans began building and sailing ships, the premise of being stranded on a deserted island has been used in many epic survival stories. We laughed at Gilligan’s Island. That was being stranded in luxury! One story from recent popular...
The Influenza Pandemic of 1918: Using History to Protect Our Future
It's been a little over a century since the 1918 influenza pandemic--one of the deadliest viral outbreaks in history. As we see again and again, history has a way of repeating itself. We're watching news stories with concerns about the coronavirus and the spread from China to over a dozen...
Money Prepping: How to Protect Yourself from Fiat Currency Disasters
Let’s start with a little bit of history before we tie this all together with today and something to prepare for. Almost a half-century ago now, the American dollar was on the gold standard. This meant that our currency was backed by a fixed asset—gold. This system provided a self-regulating...
7 Survival Strategies to Teach Kids
As an adult reader of this blog, you likely have the skills and knowledge to protect yourself and your family in the event of an emergency. That’s great. But would your kids or grandkids be okay if they had to handle an emergency situation without you? The reality is that...
What’s Sheepdog Preparedness? A Deep Look
THOUGHTS ON SHEEPDOG PREPAREDNESS There’s a philosophy that gets talked about a lot in the preparedness community called the “sheepdog approach.” It comes from an analogy that describes humans as either sheep, wolves or sheepdogs. To give you a brief overview, I’ve broken down the analogy into its parts. The...
Rolling Brownouts Are Back as Emergency Plans Kick In
We call them natural disasters. Hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, etc. Mother nature cooks ‘em up and tosses ‘em at us. We either get out of the way or get sucked into their destruction. But wildfires? These are different. Some wildfires are natural disasters. When dry thunderstorms produce lightning without rain that...