Why we prep
Here's another reason why you – and your friends and family – should prep:
Caught on tape: Militarized police turn peaceful Native American protest into war zone
Now don't get me wrong; I am, you might say, intimately aware of the overreach of some of our tribal "nations." And it must be understood that that the Indian angst ballyhooed by the mainstream media over the proposed pipeline location doesn't usually include the fact that the pipeline never actually crosses any tribal land.
But really. MRAP's? Riot gear, tear gas and helicopters?
The days of the Mayberry style of law enforcement are rapidly coming to an end.
Still and all, it's a high-profile case with lots of media-hyped danger. But how about this?
The video above shows the home of the late Mr. David Cady. Mr. Cady missed some court dates over a DUI conviction. Despite a four-month unsuccessful attempt by local police to apprehend the married and working father of two, the cops decided that the best way to capture the miscreant was to hold a toga party at his place and invite about 150 officers from other local and state agencies to join in the fun.
In a statement concerning the cop-kegger, the Tompkins County Sheriff's Department said. "Eventually, law enforcement knew and anticipated needing to enter the residence, in order to take the subject into custody. ... Based upon the information being developed through interviews and practices used by other agencies in the past, it became necessary to breech part of the outside area of the house to ensure the safety of all involved."
Part of the outside area??? You mean the parts between the ground and the roof?
The world is becoming a much more dangerous place. And those who used to be charged to "protect and serve" are all too often operating under a new motto: "CWA and serve well-done."
And that's one of the reasons we prep.
So last week we looked at how to keep burglars from walking away with too much of your stuff. This week we'll go into a little more detail about how to keep things safe from the kinds of people who have all the time in the world, the very best equipment for finding your hidden treasures, and the motivation (à la the Cady story above) to reduce your home to a powdery duff in their righteous search.
But first, a reminder: In a finite area, with enough time and effort, anything hidden can be found.
With a house thief, if you can stretch the time out, you can save a lot of valuables. But if you can no longer affect the time variable, your only real option is to modify the area to be searched. And that means caching.
So what's a cache? Well, here's a dictionary definition:
1. A hiding place, especially one in the ground, for ammunition, food, treasures, etc.: "She hid her jewelry in a little cache in the cellar."
2. Anything so hidden: "The enemy never found our cache of food."
Caching valuables is as old as people. But like so many other words, the term "cache" has been diluted by the media mavens to mean any accumulation of "icky things du jour."
As an example, consider this headline from a Fox News piece: "Blues Traveler frontman John Popper arrested after cops find weapons cache, drugs in his SUV."
Weapons are "icky," so any accumulation of weapons must be a "cache." This is the same logic as: Because I'm a prepper living in the American Redoubt, any home and out buildings I own must be declared by the press as a "compound."
But a bunch of guns in a car isn't a cache; it's a mobile closet.
A cache of anything valuable has to perform only three functions to be successful:
- It has to be situated in such a way that it won't be found by anyone;
- It has to protect its content against degradation;
- It has to be find-able and ultimately accessible by its creator or designates.
To those interested in the concept of caching, I highly recommend the book "Modern Weapons Caching" by the inimitable Ragnar Benson.
This book was written in 1990, so it's a bit dated; but it's still a great read on the theory of caching with lots of historic examples and a pretty good coverage of the basics for hiding stuff using the greatest technological advance in caching ever: PVC. Poly vinyl chloride pipes, caps and glues make caching cheap, easy and practically foolproof. You can buy complete caching systems online or make your own.
If you decide to go the DIY route, the only important thing to remember is that just sticking that old British .303 in the tube and gluing on the caps won't provide the satisfaction you'll be looking for when you dig that tube up a few years down the line. Any fine metalwork you want to preserve needs to be treated with rust and corrosion preventatives designed for long-term storage.
Here's an article from one of my favorite periodicals, Backwoods Home Magazine, on a tested weapons cache method. The only thing I'd want to emphasize is that you make sure any wooden components (stocks, guards, etc.) are kept away from the metal preservatives, and that the desiccant chosen for inclusion in the cache pipe be of the silica variety rather than the iron-salt types commonly used in long-term food storage.
So why should you cache? And where?
Caching weapons, food, clothing, equipment and other valuables is a pretty common action among preppers. If you're removed from your compound ... er, home for reasons either natural or political, it's comforting to know you have some additional supplies waiting for you down the road. In fact, the only certain way to extend the time and/or distance range of your 72 hour bug-out bag is to have hidden caches along your route to your bug-out location.
But even if you decide to ground-vault a little closer to home, just don't make it too close. The further away you are from your house, the less chance that someone equipped with the latest technology will be able to devote the time and effort needed to find your cache. Modern professional-quality metal detectors can tell a skilled operator the depth and orientation of deeply buried metal objects, and even identify the types of metal. Additionally, hand-held ground penetrating radar units can locate even small voids to depths of multiple tens of feet. So a lot of the old ways of fooling the detectors no longer apply.
For example:
- Don't scatter nuts and bolts and metal scrap around your cache site. Metal detectors can now filter that stuff out. Besides, if I'm looking for a cache, that bulls-eye of scrap will definitely pique my interest.
- Forget putting the cache tube in the septic tank. Like I said before, there's no new location in which to hide things. Every pro-searcher these days will show up with a septic pump truck. All you did by putting your cache in the tank was to limit the search to a finite area again.
- Don't hide your cache under that old wrecked truck or car (unless you own a wrecking yard). That's another place on the "first-check" list.
- Don't forget – a pile of dirt is a "dig here" sign. You've got to haul away your spoils pile. Spreading it around usually won't cut it because sub-soil often isn't the same color or consistency as top soil.
Remember, the goal here is to run the hunters out the time, so increasing the area to be searched is your best friend.
Here's an example: If you place your cache 100 feet from your home, the search area around your house is roughly 31,000 square feet. Walk a little further before you dig, to 500 feet out, and your professional searchers have to cover 785,000 square feet. Get really energetic and place your cache a mile from your domicile and you've handed your opponents an 88 million square-foot search area.
There's a lot of info on caching on the web. Go look for it. The one thing I disagree with is the commonly suggested orientation of a PVC-tube cache. Most folks go with burying the tube in a vertical orientation, mainly to limit the area that will be picked up by a metal detector. But being an expert at post-hole digging, I can tell you that if you want to bury an eight-inch diameter, four foot long cache tube in the ground with at least a one foot cover of soil, you better have your hole digging muscles really tuned up. And besides, with modern detectors, orientation is of little help. Go with increasing the potential search area and leave the post hole digger at home.
So until next week, exercise your digging muscles, tell the guy at the hardware store you're putting in some storm water runoff, and get prepared.
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