The Shtf Stockpile: 33 Items You Will Need to Stay Alive When Disaster Strikes

By Mike Burns

What happens when it all hits the fan? Are you ready? What would it take for you to be ready?

If you struggle to answer those questions, then you need to get prepared, right now.

Disasters do not arrive on a scheduled timetable and they do not announce themselves politely. They come when they want and they hit hard and fast and put people, cities, and even whole countries at risk. If you are unprepared, your survival will be at the will of fate. If that’s acceptable, don’t buy this book.  But if you’re like me, leaving your life in someone else’s hands or up to fate is utterly unacceptable. If that’s so, you need this book to discover the 33 most important things to stockpile.

This guide book will detail the necessary preps and items for any person to survive a crisis. Some of this is common sense, but much of what I share in this book are things people don’t really consider until it’s too late. 
This guidebook can help you prepare for a disaster we hope never comes. But as well we all know; it is far better to be prepared and never need these skills, than to desperately need them and not have them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: JVzon Studio
• Release date: Mar 4, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386969945

Mike Burns

Mike Burns has climbed, scrambled, and hiked extensively and has been teaching outdoor skills--navigation, climbing, or section hiking--for decades. He is a longtime contributor to Mountaineering: The Freedom of the Hills and has also written numerous articles for The Mountaineer and Climbing magazines. He lives in Seattle.

Book preview

Introduction

What would you do if disaster were to strike today? I suspect you’d be in trouble. Long time ago, before I became a prepper, I would have been dead if I had been faced with a crisis in the middle of the day. Let alone if something struck in the dead of night.

When it all goes south you are either ready or you will be in serious trouble, and you will be forced to improvise. And for me, I would have been an improviser. But one day, I was in my car with a friend of mine; it was late one winter evening and we had been out, having a good time. You know what I mean. He never saw the ice patch going into the turn. We were doing sixty miles and the guardrail never had a chance. We hit it at a good sixty miles an hour. I was knocked out. My friend was too. When I woke up it, was light out and my head was killing me. I was in a hospital bed with an IV feed running into my arm. I was in stable condition, but I’d be fine. My friend would, too. We had dodged the bullet.

But what if emergency vehicles weren’t a couple of miles away? What if I hit a patch of ice in the middle of nowhere? What if I couldn’t dodge the bullet and it got me, what would I do then? The quest for those answers led me to the awareness that we cannot avoid disasters, the only thing we can do is be prepared for them, as the emergency services were. And that was the start of my new life.

This book will get you started on how to tackle an emergency situation. Not an accident, like the one I got into, but a bigger situation that threatens the safety and security of individuals across a greater area.

The SHTF Stockpile: 33 Items You Will Need to Stay Alive When Disaster Strikes comes from my personal journey, my experience and the research I have carried out since that eventful day, which now I would love to share with you.

Chapter 1 – When It All Goes South

My little accident was not the end of my world. Thankfully, I was fine and able to make a full recovery. That’s one of the advantages of localized accidents. They don’t imperil anyone else apart from those who are immediately affected. But major disasters are different. They will disrupt life for an extended period of time for thousands or millions of people. The type of crisis may vary. Maybe it’s a hurricane, an earthquake or other natural disaster. Perhaps an act of war or terrorism that threatens normal day to day life. Sometimes medical emergencies provide the back drop for the disaster scenario.

No matter what happens, the emergency is going to impact how you conduct yourself in the time immediately following it and for some time afterwards. What this book seeks to do is ensure you can overcome the emergency, no matter what it is.

To accomplish this, we need to keep in mind the essential elements of survival. The behavioral psychologist Abraham Maslow postulated that all humans have a hierarchy of needs. Any survival crisis threatens those most basic biological, physiological and safety needs that make up the bottom two levels of Maslow’s pyramid of hierarchy. Without successfully providing for these needs on the lower levels, our other needs, those that bring happiness, fulfillment and achievement, can never be met.

The following are samples of the needs that Maslow listed in his theory: food, drink, shelter, sleep, security, stability, order and freedom from fear. In a crisis all of these preconditions for happiness are threatened. Of pre-eminent importance, our lives themselves are threatened in crises. This is what makes being prepared for disasters so vital not only for our survival, but for all the things that make life worth living.

In the pages that follow, we will review those essential needs on which Maslow rests our happiness, sense of fulfillment and ability to achieve our desires and dreams. Surviving a crisis is