Aaron M

Aaron submitted this post prior to the recent disaster in Japan. As we are now being educated in real-time as to the value of developing preparedness in advance of calamity, the guidance below becomes even more relevant. This article complements Aaron's earlier "Practical Survival Skills 101" posts on fire, water, and shelter.

Preface: What is an emergency? 

There is an awful lot of academic banter in which we try to “identify” emergencies before they happen. Pedantic issues are categorized and specifics are assigned to them as potential resolutions. This is not a “flawed” approach, but it’s endemic in the American mindset, which is obsessed with micromanagement.

In order to distance ourselves from the details, which are too stochastic and specific, we can generally state that an emergency is a shortage of resources.

Resources can be defined as:

Authors Note: For this edition of Practical Survival Skills, I want to make things more interactive, as I believe that this format is really beneficial for learning. During the “Mesoscale” discussion, I’ll ask the reader a series of questions that they should answer based on their location. If you don’t want to participate in the conversation, that’s perfectly fine! It’s simply an exercise to get you thinking about how to improvise under pressure.

The Survival Saw gives us three hours of exposure before we begin to succumb to the elements. 

This essay is going to largely fill the “mainstream” ideas of what constitutes a wilderness shelter, but I believe in simple, effective techniques, practiced towards perfection, and mental flexibility. Once you understand the concepts, it becomes easier to ‘improvise.’ This is critically important here, because it’s extremely difficult for me to write giving adequate consideration to all environments; it’s incumbent on you to learn your area, know its tendencies, and have the mental flexibility to survive.

In this continuation of our series on practical survival, we’re going to discuss water: where to find it and what to do with it to make it “safe.”

Water is a common theme in survival – it is unique in that it is both an absolute necessity and a looming threat at the same time. Behind breathable oxygen, it is the single most important element on our survival saw, and we have just three days to ensure a clean, potable supply of water if we are to survive. This is an overview of the “hard” way of procuring safe drinking water. Obviously, Katadyne filters, iodine tablets, and other methods of purification are superior, when they are available. However, we can’t always count on technology, and so here we’ll talk about how to strain impurities/debris and kill microbes in the water.

When determining how we’ll come by water, there are several things to consider: