Is Your Home Your Castle?

Written by Wild Bill on The Prepper Journal.

Why leave a perfectly good home, one with an emergency generator , water and food stored, ammo, hidden gun safes, and an understanding of all the points of approach and egress? What could drive you from such a place, other than a Preschool opening next door?

A walk-through of my home with the goal of answering the above questions, was scary, period. Under the premise that my home was “intact” after a natural disaster, or not at ground zero when the SHTF, how does it really stack up for the short-term as a place to hunker down?

The “NOT GOOD” list: My electrical panel and water shut off are outside the fence, which is a gated 7’ cinder block wall, nicely painted so they are exposed to the street and anyone walking by or wanting to “drop in”. I have to leave the house to get to them. The electrical panel can be locked with a padlock or combination lock (yeah, right, who in their right mind puts a combination lock on a box they may need to open in the middle of the night, in a blizzard?) But mine, probably like yours, is made of metal barely stronger that aluminum foil soaked in spray starch. And locking down the water shut off valve? Kids, toilets, toys placed in toilets, magic lever pulled, you get the picture. Plus, there is an additional exposed water shut of valve at the connection of the house plumbing to the city water supply, the one the city will “lock down” if you don’t pay the bills and the one that would surly on a fine if you even look at it.

 

Next issue, my fenced property, again, is a cinder-block wall, but only 7’ high and even I can still scale a 7’ wall, plus pistol rounds from a 9mm, 40 mm, or a .45 ACP will penetrate it, it may take two to three to get through both sides, but the wall can be taken down with a pistol. And the house is stucco over a wood frame, dry wall, lots of windows, and on a corner lot. The only thing this stops is the screams from inside getting out.

It gets better, all the windows are ground level, easy to approach, and the landscaping has some softball sized rocks readily available. It is a single story with blinds and shades that are very nice but print the inside lights even at dusk or dawn.

Okay, what else? Having a fuel-powered portable generator means it must be ventilated, read “outside”, the now mostly-mostly-closed dwelling as I have to run the extension cords into the refrigerators location as well as power cords to recharge other electrical devices; I have an electric stove, so do I plan to cook outside on the BBQ, again, outside!

Of course, noise from the generator will give away the fact that you and yours are there, fuel for the generator must be safely stored and rationed. And then, it gets ugly.

 

Disposal of waste – human and otherwise. If city water is lost, then disposing of human waste becomes a real issue. Dig a latrine in the side yard? I do have one bright spot here, I have a 12,000-gallon swimming pool. But what I do not know is just how many buckets of pool water it will take to get solid human waste through the house plumbing to the now not-operating city sewage system? Common sense tells me that this will work temporarily. At least it is a good use for the chlorinated pool water, other than putting out flaming arrows in case of an attack.

So, what is my plan? First thing is to see if I have enough disc space to write a plan, a big plan. Then to figure out what I missed in my assessment. I was caught in the first of three blizzards that shut down Denver International Airport, in 2003. (Others occurred in 2006 and 2016.) What was the item people ran out of first? Disposable diapers. No stores at the airport stocked them and parents traveled with small supplies. It was bad, we were locked down for three days! Point is what you don’t think of can kill you, or in this case, make you many new enemies.

And yes, there is a GOOD list: Guns, ammo, food and water are in abundant supply, just not stored in the best location. I suggest doing a similar walk through of your “castle”, the resulting depressing is only temporary.

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