Much of the hype around preparedness and urban survival focuses on the concept of the “bug-out” bag and its various incarnations; and why not? It’s a much simpler concept to wrap one’s head around than all the preparation involved in setting up your home as the spot you intend to stay in a post-disaster or even post-SHTF scenario. We teach bug-out scenarios, caches, escape and evasion and much more related to bugging out at my survival school – The Human Path – and it is important to know the full range of skills and equipment and realities around every aspect of bugging out.
But the cold reality remains that “bugging out” should be your absolute last resort. If you have spent any time and money at all on preparing your home (or even if you haven’t), your chances of roughing it through a disaster at home are still much better than driving, biking or walking out on your own (or in a group) – possibly to a destination that is a worse situation than the one you are leaving.
While it’s of course a great idea to have a bug-out location and bug-out bag (or a set of them), along with “get-home” bags in the car (probably a better initial investment in time and money), I’d like to walk through some of the major points of prepping your own domicile and hopefully even your neighborhood for a post-SHTF situation.
If it’s not already obvious, one of the nice things about survival is that “simple” is almost always best. In this regard, let’s look to the basic necessities of survival and determine how we can fulfill those in our own home or apartment. These necessities are typically: Water, Fire, Food, Shelter and Security. For instance, one of the first things that students have to do at our Urban Core Basic (urban survival) course is to work as a team figuring out their resources from scrap and salvage spread all over about 5 acres from a “hurricane.” Students work on what they learned in class to be able to create decent, secure shelters (that they can and will have to sleep in) in a minimum of time, while figuring out their resources and knowledge in the team. Read more “Urban Survival at Home (Bugging In)”
We all know about grey man and the idea that we should merely bugout of any major metro area in the event of a disaster. These are good pieces of advice but I think it’s time we take this base knowledge and begin to apply it to our specific neighborhood. If you are truly going to be successful in the urban survival scenario you should apply these five urban survival processes. Read more “5 Steps to Developing a Better Urban Survival Process” 
On “The Prepping Academy” for this episode our host Forrest and Kyle are discussing urban survival. You might be thinking to yourself this doesn’t apply to you. Let us assure you it does. Current statistics say that approximately 82% of the United States population lives in an “urban environment.” That number is projected to climb to nearly 90% by 2030. 
