Archive for the 'Survival' Category

I could go on for hours on this, but you don’t have hours, so …

I’m not a medical professional (although I will cite one in particular), but one of my best buddies texted me to ask what I thought, so here it is.

Here’s what we know at the moment about Covid-19 (I won’t supply the copious URLs since you can find them yourself or have already studied them).  Covid-19 is probably a weaponized virus.  There is still speculation that the practice of keeping animals in close proximity that would not otherwise be that way has caused animal to animal to human transmission of mutated viruses, but in my opinion this is a least probable origin.

China sat on the information for too long to allow for containment and isolation of it, so the entire world is now dealing with it.  It shows indications of behaving like HIV, inasmuch as the method of attachment to a cell involves a “hook,” and thus it is extremely hard to get rid of.  Animals appear to be able to test “weak positive” for the virus, even if they are asymptomatic.

There is a risk of recurrence of the virus, so this has led to speculation that the virus isn’t really killed with treatment, lies dormant, and can reappear later (maybe not much later).  Then again, it’s entirely possible these patients were released and declared well without really being well.

Two dozen “first responders” have been quarantined in Washington State.  The problem with this was explained to me by my daughter, a health care provider (in surgery and emergency medicine).  Health care providers see patients with HIV, TB and Hepatitis (and various other blood borne and airborne illnesses) all the time.  One cannot isolate and contain without knowing that the patient has a disease.  Diagnosis must precede isolation.  Otherwise, it’s just the common cold.  Covid-19 can be transmitted asymptomatically.

This particular virus has a transmission vector that makes it very contagious.  It’s difficult to diagnose and contain prior to transmission of the virus to others.  Moreover, my daughter is concerned about the level of understanding and training associated with this virus, as well as hospital procedures and equipment to deal with an epidemic.  The CDC can say what they want – the hospitals in America are unqualified to deal with this, and there may be no way to deal with it without assuming that every patient who comes into the ER has this virus (an expensive, time- and labor-intensive process for which America doesn’t have the resources or personnel).

So there is much bad news.  There is some good news too.  While there won’t be a vaccine for this for a long time, it appears that anti-viral drugs (such as are used for HIV) are effective against this virus.  Of course, that’s expensive.  It would stretch the logistics chain to the breaking point, especially since all of our drugs are made in China.  This is one effect of a global economy.

Here is a real time board (Johns Hopkins) of all Covid-19 cases, along with deaths.  If you examine the plot at the lower right, it seems to be indicating (for cases in China), 1 – exp(-lambda * t) approach to an upper asymptote (saturation and approach to a maxima).  I would like to see better correspondence before saying this, and I certainly don’t go on record with this analysis saying this.  I’m paid for my analysis, and I’m getting nothing for this post.

Seeing approach to an upper asymptote would be a good thing, but it requires intensive, aggressive isolation and containment, including stay-at-home workers, travel restrictions, and absolute border controls.

As to how to prepare for this, it all depends on your perspective.  If you believe this doesn’t even approach the deadliness or risk of the common cold or flu, there would be no preparation necessary except to wash your hands and cover your mouth when coughing.  If you believe this is TEOTWAWKI, you won’t be able to do enough preparations.

Not that I’m some sort of expert, but I said I was posting this for a good friend.  I don’t recommend anything beyond your usual preparations.  Do you have guns and ammunition?  You should anyway.  Do you have freeze dried and canned foods, oatmeal and grits, and other things that are non-perishable?  You should anyway.  Do you have means to filter and purify water?  You should anyway.  Do you have batteries and multiple means of fire starter?  You should anyway.

So if you’re just now beginning to think about being prepared, ask yourself why that’s the case.

I do have one very specific recommendation.  Our buddy Matt Bracken stated that he had purchased “rubber gloves.”  This is a good idea, but we need to be more specific than that.  There is a big difference between Nitrile gloves, Butyl rubber gloves, Polyvinyl chloride gloves, and Latex gloves.

Nitrile gloves protect the skin well against nonpolar solvents.  They offer good cut and abrasion resistance, and are often used in medical applications due to puncture resistance.  They are ineffective against some polar solvents.  Butyl rubber gloves are ineffective against nonpolar solvents but protect well against polar solvents.  Polyvinyl Chloride gloves protect against water solutions, acids, some polar solvents and caustics, but not well against nonpolar solvents.  Latex – natural rubber – is ineffective against nonpolar solvents, but offers good cut and abrasion resistance against water solutions and polar solvents.

This is all very complicated.  If you’re not sure which you need, or what the risk is (water solution, acid, caustic, polar or nonpolar solvents), then look it up. If you can’t, double up on gloves to ensure protection against unknown agents.  Nitrile gloves offer good puncture resistance.  They are cheap, they can be found at your local hardware store, and they can be used in concert with other gloves to protect against most agents.  Get some.

Also get breathing air protection.  Be able to filter the air you breath.  Very fine filtration media (HEPA filters would only be available for full face respirators SCBAs and are expensive), combined with charcoal filters is your best bet.  By the way, activated charcoal filter fines are made in Sri Lanka by charcoaling green coconut shells.  Consider logistics and location.

Not the kind parents will teach their children in home schooling (not necessarily so, but maybe, I certainly would), but with a different emphasis.

Following the same procedure, we can see that even over an 18-year span we have a 10% chance of violent revolution, which is an interesting thought experiment to entertain before you have kids. It’s also important to note that a violent nation-state transition doesn’t just affect people who live in a floodplain. It affects everyone stuck in the middle. Especially the poor and defenseless.

The authors try to do some PRA (Probabilistic Risk Assessment) with a limited failure data set.  After all, violent revolutions in North America is a limited data set.  A better statement follows.  “The tech preppers do not necessarily think a collapse is likely. They consider it a remote event, but one with a very severe downside, so, given how much money they have, spending a fraction of their net worth to hedge against this . . . is a logical thing to do.”

This is better because it boils it down to its essential elements.  We’ve discussed this many times before in the context of concealed or open carry.  The minimization of risk means understanding high risk scenarios, and risk = probability X consequences.  So for example, if something is low probability and the consequence of the event is low (for example, a spoon breaking when you eat your morning cereal), you don’t invest in a new set of expensive china.

If on the other hand an event has high probability or high consequence, that can drive the risk high, meaning it’s something you need to plan for.  Preppers see the event for which they are planning to be a high consequence event.  They are right.

It’s just that simple.

This guy almost didn’t make it.  It’s useful he had the presence of mind to grab a few minutes of film to catalog his misery.  Here is a more detailed account of his experience.

So I have to say that I’m no expert, but neither is Bear Grylls.  Bear Grylls is a fake.  Following his advice nearly got this guy killed.

If I would have been in that predicament it’s obvious I wouldn’t have had fire starter, bedding, or shelter for the night any more than he had.  But I would have been smart enough to stop way before he did.

He was still moving on the first day at 4:45 pm.  Anyone with experience in the bush knows, in the winter it gets dark early.  In the mountains in the winter it gets dark even earlier, and in the mountains in the winter among the trees it gets dark even earlier.  If he had stopped at 3:00 pm to make a good shelter for the night, he might not have gotten his feet wet and might still have the leg that was amputated.

He needed a shelter of evergreen bows, leafs, pine needles and whatever else he could find, or in other words, a debris hut, with separation between him and the ground, as small as he could make it and still have room for himself.  Heating it would have been easier with his body heat than a large shelter, or one made of ice which would remove body heat by radiation.  He needed to go to bed earlier, and he needed to be dry.

He needed to get up the next morning and backtrack his exact footsteps to the place he began this misadventure.  Instead, he lost energy, slept with ice for insulation, and continued to go the wrong way.  He lost his leg for it, and could have died.

If you have the time, this is a unique solution to the problem of improvising a shelter in the bush.  I do have one comment from an engineering perspective.

For the ropes he used on top for “widow makers,” since he didn’t cut the rope and attach each piece to the trees (he just wrapped it around repeatedly), one falling tree with enough force to break a single strand of the rope would cause the rest to fail since the parts are all connected.  For more protection, cut the rope and attach pieces to trees.  He may as well have just attached a single strand except for the force of friction on the trees for the wraps.

Via Uncle, this extensive testing from Widener’s.

To help navigate this frontier, we’ve put together all the information you need to find the best portable filter for your needs.

Our intention is that this guide will serve as a resource. Inside, you’ll find a ton of data and research from accredited health and water monitoring agencies. You’ll also find filter testing we commissioned through an independent accredited laboratory.

There is simple no way to summarize their findings.  I intend to print this out for reference later.

I ran across this a little while back and wanted to embed it.  It’s the only way to keep from leaving your rope behind.

I’ve rappelled before and may do so again, but I think I’d want to practice this before trusting it with heights greater than a few feet.  If you want to see more, this video also explains it.

CNN:

Five men exploring a cave in southwest Virginia were trapped inside, and authorities are working to get them out safely, according to Billy Chrimes, search and rescue coordinator for the Virginia Department of Emergency Management.

Six men entered the cave in Cleveland, Virginia, on Friday around 7 p.m. and planned to spend an extended amount of time exploring it, he said.

One of those men emerged from the cave, known as Cyclops Cave, on Sunday morning around 2 a.m. and told authorities the others were having difficulty getting out, Chrimes said Sunday.

That man, who is 22, said the other men were exhausted and were starting to have problems with hypothermia, according to Chrimes. The men are not lost and aren’t too far into the cave.

The five trapped men are between the ages of 34 and 59, according to Emergency Management Coordinator for Russell County Jess Powers. Powers said the group was planning to camp in the cave until Sunday, but a heavy downpour Saturday night made conditions muddy and wet and likely contributed to their difficulties.

One of the men was rescued on Sunday afternoon and is being assessed by a local volunteer rescue squad, Powers said. The rescue took much longer than anticipated, Powers said, and the rescue teams have gone back inside to help the other four men.

The cave explorers did not have a lot of extra food or water, and Chrimes said the temperature underground is in the 50s. While that is comfortable under normal circumstances, it can cause problems with hypothermia when you’re not active and moving.

That has nothing to do with it.  Caves are confined spaces, and as I’ve explained before, I don’t go spelunking.

But here is the mistake they made.  There are four different kinds of heat transfer: convective, conductive, radiant and evaporative.

The cave walls were rock, and were a heat sink.  Their bodies were radiating heat to the walls of the cave totally apart from convective, conductive or evaporative heat transfer.  They suffered hypothermia NOT because of the 50 degree F air temperature, but because of the temperature of the cave walls (even if they were suspended in mid-air and with no air movement whatsoever, their bodies would still have been radiating heat to the cave walls).

They should have prepared for this.

NatGeo:

In the study, survivors’ most frequently mentioned source of warmth was clothes (12 percent). Their prevailing form of shelter was camping gear (11 percent). Most survivors had a water source—either their own (13 percent), or one they found (42 percent), be it a lake, creek, or puddle, or derived by licking leaves or sucking moist moss. None of the survivors except one were missing long enough to make starvation an issue, but 35 percent had food they could ration to keep their energy levels up. All these data points suggest that the best way to survive getting lost in a national park is to already have the clothing and gear needed for warmth and shelter during the night, as well as some food and water.

This is not the case with most day hikers, who are more likely to bring a camera than extra clothes in a backpack. Herrington concurs. “If you go backpacking and you get lost, or you get caught out in bad weather, it’s like oh well I’m going to be out here another night and maybe go to bed hungry. No big deal. But when you’re out there and you don’t have a sleeping bag and tent, or extra clothing for the overnight experience, you’re much more vulnerable, and that tends to be where most people get in trouble.

[ … ]

In Herrington’s wilderness survival courses, he teaches day hikers to pack a puffy jacket for warmth, and a 200-litre trash bag for rain protection/shelter. Even in warm states. “If you’re wet—because it rains or you fell into water or you sweated through your clothes—and its 65 degrees (18°C), you can still get hypothermic,” says Herrington. “Texas is one of the leading states in hypothermia deaths, and look how warm it is there.” An injury compounds the risk of hypothermia by compromising the body’s ability to thermo-regulate.

Well, you can carry a trash bag if you wish.  I’ve given you my list before.

Bring a good rip-stop nylon tarp.  If it’s good, it’ll be light and it will pack up small.  A gun (with a couple of extra magazines of ammunition), a tactical light, 550 paracord, a first aid kit, water purification equipment, decent clothing, a tactical knife (I prefer one with serrated edges), Mylar emergency blankets (which will also be very light), energy and protein bars, and multiple means of fire starter.  Finally, wear a hat on the trail.  The absence of one will cause sunburn to the head and freezing at night (a large portion of the heat leaving your body does so through the head).

Know how to make a brush shelter (leaf hut) quickly.  It’s that time of year.  There is no excuse for going into the bush unprepared.