Thank you Tom and DaveF for talking dirt-bike escape logistics.
First, I must admit, that I have absolutely no idea what I am talking about. But, aside from that problem, I do read a lot of post-apocalyptic novels and in my imagination I had traveled thousands of miles, rescued fair maidens and dispatched all manner of evil men who prey upon the weak and defenseless.
Ideally, get to where you want to be just before the disaster. If not possible, then in the first 3 day grace period while people are still well fed and haven’t figured out “this is the big one.”
Take your stuff there and cache it before hand, so it is just you and a minimal pack.
Ways to travel.
Dirt bike–quick, carry a single person cross rugged terrain 20 - 40 miles in just a few hours, noisy, easy to capture and easy to stop with a cable or trench across the road. Get the hell away from the crowds and stay out of lines of cars at a standstill. Very hard to wear a heavy pack while riding–center of gravity is high. If you don’t wear your pack and you abruptly come upon trouble (like an ambush) and must lay down the bike and run into the woods, you lose all of your camping gear. Limit of distance to the size of the gas tank. Can carry a siphon hose to take gas from abandoned cars (provided that they are NOT abandoned because they are out of gas).
Horses–most flexible in rural terrain. Horse carries packs on the horse itself, not on the rider. No problem leaving the road way if ambush spotted. If food is available along the way fuel problem solved (in the correct season). Hands are free to work rifle, though shooting from horseback will make horse bolt, so you’d better jump off the horse before shooting.
Walking. Travel at night. Stay off roadways. Ambushes happen on roadways. Cut through fields and brush. Back roads, animal trails. Everyone you meet will want to kill you and take your stuff. You will have to kill them first. (Except for damsels in distress, they are OK) No noise, slow and quiet. Avoid detection. Campfire destroys your night vision and the smell of cooking food announces your location. (Cook food just before leaving camp for the day.) Don’t cook near where you sleep. Works best with a small number of people–take turns on watch, not much noise. No chatter along the trail. No lights. Look over the terrain with binoculars before going out into an opening. Send one scout around each corner first. Add a hunters game cart to carry larger supplies and if the terrain is not too rough.
Bicycle with pull behind trailer. If the terrain is not too dense with hostile people and you can safely ride along the roadway, this is pretty efficient. Small pack on your body incase you must abandon bike and trailer suddenly. Hard to shoot from a bicycle, both hands used to control the bike.
Big priorities:
Finding water, filtering and storing it. Gotta carry a backpacking water filtration device so you can drink from a puddle. Shelter when rain, snow, wind and cold weather. A tarp and paracord is a good start. Food. You can burn 4,000-5,000 calories per day when exercising in cold weather.
Good shoes, moleskin.
The damage estimates continue to climb, as expected.
(Source)
The size of Harvey was extraordinary in terms of its breadth and rain intensity. We’ve never seen anything like it in recorded history in the US, and such a thing has never happened to such an economically concentrated area before.
So predicting greater-than-initially-expected costs is the safe side of the bet.
I guess we’d have to go back to the destruction of a city during a war to see a similar impact, but rain and bombs are very different in how they go about ruining things, so we really will have to wait and see.
This next week will be packed with new findings and ‘unexpected’ effects.
Aloha! Here is a photo of another polluter the EPA needs to get after as it has been spewing 2,000 tons of toxic gases into the atmosphere since 1983!
Kilauea Volcano
That New Republic news story measures Chevron pollutants in pounds. Kilauea Volcano measures pollutants like sulfuric acid in tons per day for the past 34 years! Ever been to Kalapana Hawaii or any of the other islands?
WE WANT OUR CAKE!
While the EPA and California movie stars and elite politicians crucify the State of Texas as a “polluter” they bask in the glory of their $20mil mansions in Malibu or their $15mil Hamptons Summer Homes! There are consequences to having cheap oil and gas, but there is nothing on Earth that does not have total 100% pollutant free energy. If you think it is solar then think again! Got to Silicon Valley Solar Toxics report and their scorecard on the solar manufacturing companies polluting the Earth and using Third World exploitive labor to do their mining. Then start contemplating the landfill and incinerator issues when all these new solar panels need to be discarded.
I suggest if environmentalists want their cake and they want to eat it to then they need to either cut their own consumption by half or allow drill rigs and open pit mines in their backyards!
We ask communist China to sign the Paris Plan but then we demand full consumption rights in the same breath! This is what Huntington Beach, CA used to look like 100 years ago before we exported all our pollution to Third World countries and attained the new “Holier Than Thou” eco award!
Globalism today is nothing but “out of sight-out of mind” Third World exploitation. The same exploitation the British Empire was doing for 500 years!
There has never been a time in human history when there was no 1% or 99%!
Given that some of those Texas refineries provide 25% of America’s jet fuel and gasoline perhaps look in the mirror if you want to complain about deliberate chemical releases from forced shut downs. Either that or start walking and swimming on your next family vacation to the Bahamas! Al Gore … that means you too!
By the way here is a photo of a road that is fifteen minutes away from that Kilauea Volcano photo above …
Aloha! Kilauea Volcano spews 2,000 tons per day toxic gases into the atmosphere over a 34 year period. MATH
2,000tons x 365days = 730,000tons per year
730,000tonsper year x 34years = 24,820,000tons since 1983
A little more than the 100,000 pounds Chevron did during Harvey!
Now lets add all the global active volcanoes toxic gas tonnage over that same 34 year period and see what we got! https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs169-97/
We recently sent some of our hiking clothes (pants, shirts, socks, hats, neck gator) to be treated with permethrin to repel ticks and mosquitoes while hiking (under normal conditions, not like the hell in the gif above). My wife currently holds the US record for southernmost case of Lyme disease (southernmost part of Everglades National Park) and has more recently had one of the other diseases ticks can impart to humans that doesn’t show up on Lyme tests. I am a mosquito magnet.
Anyway, we got our hiking clothes back from https://www.insectshield.com/shop.aspx and tried them out under normal conditions. Sitting still, we watched mosquitoes buzz around our clothes but very, very few even landed. The few that landed immediately took off again as if they had landed on a hot stove. I would trust them to repel mosquitoes in the above conditions, but would definitely get the netting for the head as seen above. https://www.consumerreports.org/insect-repellents/permethrin-treated-clothing-mosquito-bites/
There is recent evidence that most lyme disease is due to immune system deficiency (Antibody Sub-Class blood test by Quest Diagnostics). Over the last six days I have partly rebuilt by gut microbiome resulting in the best GI functioning for me since well before my 2014 cancer surgery using Dr Zach Bush’s ‘Restore’ product.
We’ve used “gut shot” from Mom’s Organic Market, and my wife brews her own Kambucha from a S.C.O.B.I.E. Both seem to do a good job of helping our bodies restore their own natural intestinal flora and fauna, especially after using anti-biotics. Not sure if that would help with overall immune health, but the more she and I learn about the complexity and ecosystem of the body, the more convinced we are that natural homeopathic remedies offer better long term solutions than pharmaceuticals. We’re pretty convinced that most chemicals we produce today that go into our food, clothing, and homes are probably more a cause of our un-health than anything else, and that the pharma industry is more a part of the problem than the soluton…but that’s just a gut feeling rather than a statement backed by evidence, since neither of us are experts on the industry, nor chemistry.
In other news, Houston and the other affected areas are no longer in it, at least locally. Everything must be hunky-dory down there now!
