How to tell when to bug out of a city

Why we prep

Here's another reason why you – and your friends and family – should prep:

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'Prepper' Obama: Says nation is on its own, preparing is your 'duty'

Okay, I'll admit that using Barack "Prepper" Hussein Obama as a front man for prepping is probably counterintuitive, especially since prepping is intimately associated with self-sufficiency and BHO has never met a individualist he didn't "hope" to "change." But since, as the article points out, his number-one SHTF concern is "climate change," individual prepping turns out to be a darn good idea. Why?

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Our political leaders are either dumb as posts or lie like rugs. Either way, when the train jumps the track, you can't count on them.

And that's one of the reasons we prep.

The mailbox

Lots of great comments from the last two columns. I especially want to commend the "You Can't Win" (YCW) consortium for your strong showing in the last column (entitled "Don't listen to these idiots"). Well done lads! Micro-evolution is always a winner with folks like you in the vanguard!

Then there's a comment from a regular reader who wrote: "The problem with Pat McLene is he gets distracted way too easily. Each week he announces what he will talk about next week then doesn't. Does he ever complete a topic? Not that I can see."

Hmm. Pretty sure I've completed all of the topics I've started except this one, which is on-going. And since NOT listening to those who tell you NOT to prepare IS a major part of the topic of this series, I'm feeling pretty good about things, on-topic-wise.

Is prepping the right thing for to do for Christians? Or should we just be trusting in the Lord? Learn about that balance in "Be Thou Prepared" by Carl Gallups – "Equipping the Church for Persecution and Times of Trouble."

Let me recap something I wrote last week concerning an article called "How to Survive a Disaster" in which a survival expert notes there are three types of people in any disaster: Seventy-five percent are the "just sit there and die" types. Fifteen percent are "... calm and rational enough to make decisions that could save their lives." And the other 10 percent? They're the anti-survivors who get in the way of the all the others.

Look, WND is a pretty busy site. According to Alexa.com, during the month of August 2016, WND had over six million unique visitors and around 23.5 million page views. If we go by the 15 percent "survivors" mentioned above, this means there are 900,000+ survivor types who read WND. If we also use the figure of 10 percent for "anti-survivors," those who gum-up the chances for others, we get 600,000 "you can't win" (YCW) types as well.

The goals of my all my columns are as follows:

To supply the survivor-types with information and instruction that they may not have to improve their chances of survival;
To try to move as many of the 75 percent of the remaining folks into the survival column as I can;
To harass and tweak the YCW's as much as humanly possible. Call that last goal the icing on the cake. Death to the YCW'ers! Oh wait ... that's their goal too.

Now for the dirty secret: this series on Bug Out bags (BOBs) is kind of a smoke screen for a much bigger and far more complex subject. Now don't get me wrong, everyone should have a bug-out bag. No kidding, no lie. But there are a lot of people in the pepper blog-o-sphere who make a BOB out to be an end, as opposed at a means to an end.

Please re-read below some of the points I made two weeks ago about when a BOB is necessary and why:

Fleeing from a disaster so immediate and devastating that the alternative to running away is death and/or destruction.
Until you know where you're going when the SHTF, there's no point in planning to make the trip. There's no reason to assemble a bug-out bag if you don't know your bug-out destination. If you don't have a bug-out destination, all city escape routes are the same … and all of them suck.
Bugging out is only a temporary reprieve. It doesn't actually negate the real potential that you'll die. At best it only puts off the inevitable.
If conditions are so dire and so widespread that you need to bug out, then you need to have a prepared destination ahead of you.

So before we go into the Pat McLene-endorsed bug-out bag, we need to finish up with where you're going to go in a lights-out scenario, and how you're going to get there.

So let's take a trip. We're going to bug out of a small city. Just for this example, I pretty much randomly chose Richmond, Virginia, population 220,000, as the city we'll leave. Richmond is listed on Wikipedia as the 98th largest city in America. Below is a Google map with a 15-mile circle around the center of the city.

Richmond is surrounded by farming and ranch lands. Your cousin Ned has a real nice farm there, near Old Church up Highway 390 about 15 miles from Richmond. (Remember Ned from a previous column?) The good news: because you were over at his farm often, helping out around the place, meeting the neighbors, bringing bug-out supplies and flowers to Ned's wife, Ned didn't die from overwork. Additionally, while making your frequent pilgrimages to Ned's farm, you also joined the local Elks Lodge, frequently attended a local church, volunteered at the Hanover County Fair and maybe even bought a small parcel of land. If the SHTF, Ned and his wife know you and yours will be on the way. And because you can name-drop (since you know the pastor, many Fraternal Order fellow members and several county officials), the locals probably won't shoot you immediately. Becoming even a part-time member of your bug-out destination's citizenry will pay big dividends.

Check out some options in the WND Superstore preparedness department. New products of all kinds being added regularly for all your prepper needs – from informational books, movies to shovels, water purifiers, and food from soup to nuts!

So when do you bug out? An acquaintance of mine who is an experienced security and intelligence analyst suggests establishing "phase lines" or "trip wires." What that means is you create a list of, say, ten events that – taken together – would mean an end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it situation. Triggering these "trip wires" results in a "go/no-go" situation. Below the threshold, you stay. Over the threshold, you go ... no exceptions.

Here's a few examples of potential trip wires: The lights go out; you can't get radio reception, or maybe you're hearing news stories about major disruptions regionally or nationally; you hear a lot of gunfire coming from the direction of the city center; water stops; and some folks you know that work for the city are no longer around. (The list is something you create based on your own situation.)

Now let's suppose that, all of the sudden, six or seven or eight of these "trip wires" are sprung. Maybe it's just coincidence; but you've already determined that when six of those events occur, it's rubber-meets-the-road time, because if you wait any longer, you'll be walking instead of driving.

So why wait? Grab your BOB, your family, your pets, and skedaddle. Remember, it's only an hour's drive to Ned's.

And you'll be driving all the way because you had that "go/no-go" line in the sand. You won't be sitting at home, dithering like most people will. You probably won't even be walking. By the time most folks realize the problem isn't going away, you'll already be in that travel trailer you left at Ned's place, safe and secure.

So what happens if you jumped too soon? Nothing much; you just go home and maybe adjust your future "trip wire" number from seven to eight. But here's the thing: Each time a trip wire is triggered, the next one becomes more likely, not less.

So what about an instantaneous event, something that triggers every trip wire you've got all at once? Well, not much changes. See, you'll still be ahead of 75 percent of your neighbors because you've already made up your mind to go. Your "go/no-go" has hit. You'll be on the road while most folks are still waiting for the lights to come back on.

Assume for a minute that the maximum leader of North Korea, the Glorious Dough Boy, actually manages to get an EMP popped over the U.S. Nothing is working. Well, in the case of Richmond, you've got fifteen miles to hoof until you get to the farm.

This is where your BOB comes into its own – and we'll cover that next week. But just to let you know, it ain't your daddy's BOB anymore.

Until next week, keep those flowers (and maybe a little candy) headed to Ned's wife ... and get prepared.