Survivalist Anthologies Volume 1

by George Shepherd

  JWR: I would say in range of three to six families. Anything larger you’re probably going to run intoopsec issues, and anything smaller you’re not going to have the manpower to maintain round-the-clock security. In addition to round-the-clock security, 24/7 security, you’re going to need 360 degree security. That’s quite a bit of manpower. And by the time you staff all that, if you only have a couple of families, you don’t have the manpower available for summertime, which is your peak manpower need time, for when you’re going to be both cutting firewood and gardening. You can either feed everyone, and have incomplete security, or have full security and quietly starve. That’s not a very enviable decision to make. So I do recommend having at least three families.

  Ed: Now, you hear a lot of talk, when it comes to grid crash and long-term grid crash – where we’re basically starting back from square one, we’re down to 19th Century methods and techniques – and I’ve lived an extended period of time without electricity. It’s not a big deal to me. But there are still some things that require electricity that would be nice to have. And a lot of people have misconceptions about alternative forms of energy, like solar power, where they think they’ll just slap a couple of solar panels on the roof, and you’ll be all set. And that’s really unrealistic both in terms of cost and viability. But you have a lot of great ideas about small-scale solar and alternative sources of energy, as well as other types of lighting arrangements and things like that. I was wondering if you’d talk a little bit about that.

  JWR: Sure. We discuss those at length in my blog – once again it’s survivalblog.com. We’ve got thousands of articles and letters that have been archived. A lot of those have to do with alternative energy.

  A lot of how people go about setting up a home power system is really dependent on where they live. For example, for someone in the Southwest, photovoltaics might be a good option. For someone who is on some high mountain ridge somewhere, wind power might make sense. For someone who lives in a canyon lands who has a year-round creek running through their property with plenty of fall in it, then micro-hydro probably makes the most sense. But regardless of the initial power source you have, there are some constants. You have to think of the total loads that you’re going to have to run in your house. People have to get used to a much more modest lifestyle. You’re not going to have big capacitive loads. You’re not going to have things like an electric stove, or an electric hot water heater with an alternative energy system. It’s just not realistic. Unless you are blessed with living on a piece of property that has its own natural gas well so you can run a big generator – you know, a ten or twenty kilowatt generator – twenty-four hours a day.

  For anyone else, if you’re on an alternative power supply – whether it’s wind, or photovoltaic, or micro-hydro – you have to have very modest expectations and scale everything back. And of course, if it’s a long-term scenario, grid-down scenario, you have to look at the useful lifetime of battery banks. A typical lead-acid battery needs to be replaced every eight or nine years. There’s a few tricks you can do to minimize the sulfating of batteries. But still, ten years is probably the maximum lifetime you’re going to get out of a lead-acid battery, with the sulfating that goes on. So if you set up a photovoltaic power system, and you do go into a long-term scenario, you may start out a system with a nice battery bank, but ten years down the road, you’re going to end up with a daytime-only system with no overnight battery capacity. You have to think through each of those issues, and make plans accordingly.

  I’m a big believer in always having a “plan b” and a “plan c.” So you have to think through what you will do when things happen, like battery banks become useless in a really long-term situation. I even look at things in multi-generational terms: What are your great-grandchildren going to do when the fertilizer you have stored is no longer viable, or the ammunition you’ve stored is no longer viable? Here, we’re talking one hundred years out. If you look at things on a multi-generational scale, the challenges become pretty overwhelming.

  Ed: Right. And that’s the crux of the biscuit right there, is that any kind of alternative energy system that you set up is ultimately going to come down to the batteries, and nothing lasts forever. I’m of two minds about it: On the one hand, it’s best to [be] living a more – I wouldn’t call it “primitive,” but a non-technological lifestyle, and just completely do away with any kind of electrical device. If you have those systems, it’s not a bad idea. No, it won’t last forever, but it will help you get over the hump, until you do get on your feet. I get a lot of e-mails from readers of my magazine, Survivalist magazine, and anytime you mention anything having to do with an electrical powered device, they say “What are you going to do when the grid goes down? What are you going to do when your battery’s bad?” It doesn’t mean that you should throw the baby out with the bathwater. It’s a good idea to have these systems in case things aren’t real drastic, real severe right away, so you can kind of ease out of the situation.

  But when it comes to generators, what types of generators do you recommend, as far as like a fuel source?

  JWR: Well, primarily propane-fired generators, because you don’t have the safety issues and short storage life issues of gasoline. And with the propane generators or diesel generators – depending on where you live; for people who live in Canada, or say you live in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, for example, where you have really cold winters – I don’t recommend diesel at all. But in most of the country, diesel is a very good option. It stores quite well; you’re talking eight to twelve years, probably. Now, propane, though, can be stored indefinitely.

  For flexibility I recommend tri-fuel generators, where you can have a carburetor kit where you can burn propane, or gasoline, or natural gas, piped natural gas, very easily. They are fairly high-RPM compared to diesel generators. They don’t have quite the same longevity. But in terms of the fuel flexibility, I think that is definitely the way to go.

  Then again, unless you live on a property where you have your own natural gas well, you’ve got to look at that, unless you’re a millionaire and you can afford some huge tank farm of propane tanks, it’s a short-term potential there. Long-term, I lean more toward photovoltaics. And I believe that systems should be sized based on people’s budgets, rather than going deep in debt. And at the very minimum, people should have at least a modest photovoltaic system with a minim of, say, thirty watts – a couple of fifteen-watt panels, so you can at least do some battery charging so you can at least keep a cellphone charged, so you can charge a few batteries, and run a couple of small lights. Those batteries are crucial for your home security, because you want to be able to run a passive intrusion-detection system, like a Dakota alert, and you want to be able to run night vision optics. You’ll need batteries for those, to be able to charge your nickel-metal-hydride batteries.

  So it’s important to at least have a small system, because with that you are going to greatly improve your chances of maintaining your security, and you can make a very small security force operate as if it had the power of a much larger combat force. If you have the advantage in night vision, for example, and intrusion detection, you can be much more effective with a small force.

  Ed: Now, you recommend the nickel-metal-hydride; why not lithium-ion?

  JWR: Lithium-ion are definitely an option. However, the technology isn’t quite as mature. The cost-per-watt is fairly high for lithium-ion. They do have the same number of cycles as nickel-metal-hydride. They also have the advantage of no memory effect, like nickel-metal-hydride. Of course, both of those get past the traditional bugaboo of nickel-cadmium batteries, which the memory effect, where they won’t hold a full charge at some point down the road.

  Lithium-ion is definitely a possibility. But generally because of the maturity of the technology and the cost-per-amp hour, for small batteries I lean toward nickel-metal-hydride.

  Ed: I should mention to my listeners that tonight we have John Milandred on the line. He’s t
he founder of the Prepper Podcast Radio Network, as well as my producer. John, I don’t want to hog up the whole time; do you want to ask Jim any questions?

  Milandred: You know, I had some questions, and every time I’m thinking about it he’s already answering them. [Laughter.] So he’s already ahead of me. One thing: Have you ever done any experimentation on heating your water at home with compost?

  JWR: No, and that’s one technology I haven’t really gone into detail in my blog. The other one I’d like to address that deals with manure or compost is which is producer gas, which is also known as gobar gas -- that’s what they call it in the Middle East – where you can basically create home methane. You’re essentially capping a cesspool for primarily agricultural – you know, coming out of cattle or swine, or sheep – and capping that and piping off methane gas. I think both of those are fascinating technologies. The problem with space heating with that biowaste is getting past the smell issue. I guess if you want to live 19th Century-style, and can deal with what the Germans call landesduft – the smell of the land – it’s probably a good one. But otherwise, you have a thermal barrier, you need to conduct heat from one side to the other, and then be able to push heat with forced air past that barrier, if want to have an odor barrier. Without the odor barrier it can be a pretty pungent situation.

  Milandred: I’ve been pretty much doing small-scale testing, where I take and I actually do my composting system, and I have the pipe on the inner circle so it’s actually three layers of pipe, in three different layers. And I’ve been generating my hot water through that, so I don’t have to boil it, ‘cause that’s a pain. I live just like the pioneers, so...

  JWR: Does this provide pre-heat levels, like 140, 150 degrees?

  Milandred: Yes – so that I can wash the dishes. It’s warm enough. And then what I did is took an old radiator, basically, and modified it to where the water is just pumped through the radiator and then back in, so it’s on a continuous loop. And it just gives you radiant heat in your house. We need to go a step further –

  JWR: For someone that lived in the Plains States, where you didn’t have firewood available, where you could run a water jacket for heating water, that probably would be quite viable and economical. Any time you develop a complex piping system, though, you’ve got to worry about leaks in the long-term, and spare parts, and all that sort of thing.

  Milandred: Yeah.

  JWR: And, of course, the thermal control. If it’s, say, a boiler system, you’ve got to have some pretty heavy-duty safety features. And if it’s a low heat produced by biological sources, that really isn’t a big issue. For water heating, I think it’s quite viable. For space heating, again, you’ve got that thermal barrier issue.

  They’re all fascinating technologies. I would really like to get into experimenting with producergas, the gobar gas.

  Milandred: Yeah.

  JWR: Because not everyone is going to live in eastern Wyoming and have a natural gas well in their backyard, or in the Four Corners area of New Mexico. That’s where my new novel is set, in fact, is in natural gas country, around Farmington, New Mexico, is the main locale of my new novel that’s coming out in October.

  Ed: There’s something I forgot to let you mention about the release of your book. Do you want to tell the fans, the listeners, rather, when it’s coming out – and also you have a book bomb planned, and I want you to explain a little of that.

  JWR: Right. The release date for the book is October 4, and that’s also our book bomb day. It’s an idea I borrowed from Ron Paul’s presidential campaign, the last go-around. With the book bomb, the goal is to try to push the book quite high into double digits or single digits on Amazon’s book rankings. And that’s what we did with my previous books – both my novel “Patriots” and my non-fiction book, “How to Survive the End of the World as We Know It.” Both of those in the book bomb days ended up in Amazon’s top ten. And that generated a tremendous amount of publicity. And I think that with what we have planned with “Survivors” hopefully we’ll have similar success – at least somewhere in the top twenty. So I’m encouraging people to hold off on ordering their copy of “Survivors” until October 4th. And by concentrating all the orders on that one day, and subsequent days, it will run that book right up the sales ranks. And that will get the attention of everyone from the New York Times to the library publications. They do watch those rankings very carefully. And when a book zooms up into the top ten, it is newsworthy.

  Ed: And your first novel, “Survivors,” that was on the New York Times bestseller’s list, if I’m not mistaken. And a lot of people were surprised; that kind of came out of the blue, as far as showing up in the mainstream. Do you find that more and more people are waking up, and they’re getting aware?

  JWR: Oh, definitely. There’s definitely a stronger interest in preparedness, because a broader and broader segment of society is recognizing the fragility of our society. And it’s just rational self-interest that people want to get prepared. They see how fragile our society is, they see what a horrible job government agencies do at providing aid in the event of a disaster. I often refer to FEMA as standing for “Foolishly Expecting Meaningful Aid.” [Laughter] So people are definitely waking up. There’s definitely more of an interest in preparedness, and it’s coming from all angles. I mean, from the quasi-comedic side, from people who joke about “Zombie Apocalypse,” to people strictly looking for self-sufficiency, for gardening, and the Soccer Mom crowd, all the way to more serious preppers and survivalists that are looking to disaster where there will be a period without rule of law.

  It pretty well runs the gamut, but what is surprising is that the segments of society that are interested keep growing and growing. And if you look at popular culture, you look at the movies that are being produced these days, you know, everything from “The Book of Eli” on, there’s definitely a strong interest in preparedness. And I can’t blame folks. I think they’re quite rational for being interested in learning about self-sufficiency and preparedness and self-defense and everything else that goes along with it.

  Ed: Yeah, I’ve started to notice the same trend myself. Over the years it’s gone from me having to beat people over the head with preparedness and survival to where it’s not really an unknown subject that much any more; when I approach it with strangers or just people I meet on a regular basis. It seems that a lot more people are at least somewhat on board with it, as people can see what’s going on with the economy. People can see what’s going on with government. You don’t even have to stray into conspiracy theory, or talk about “2012,” or anything like that.

  JWR: It’s mainstream now.

  Ed: Yeah.

  JWR: And the people that 10-15 years ago were teasing us about getting prepared, are getting prepared themselves now. So people are definitely coming around, and there’s definitely a stronger interest. It’s just a matter of make sure people look at this in the long term. It shouldn’t be a flash-in-the-pan. It shouldn’t be like Y2K, when everybody went out and bought an AR-15 and a generator and thought they were ready for Y2K, and then as soon as Y2K turned out to be a non-event, all those AR-15s and generators ended up on the secondary market. I’m hoping that people who are preparing now, including the ones that are fixated on the Mayan calendar and 2012, I’m hoping that they’re preparing for the long haul, and that they will stick with their preparedness, rather than having it be just a short-term little fad. I don’t think it’s a fad this time.

  Ed: I think Y2K did a disservice, in that most people’s reactions when you talk about prepping now are like, “Oh, yeah, look at Y2K, look what happened – nothing.” I think for a while it became hard to convince people, “Don’t think about Y2K; there are a lot of other things coming down the road that we need to be prepared for.” Even with just a solar flare – we’re entering into a Solar Maximum – and there’ some disagreement among scientists as to whether this will be a catastrophic thing. But it could happen, and you should be prepared for
that.

  And this brings me to another subject I wanted you to talk about, which is protecting your vehicles and what-not. And I know you recommend older vehicles that do not have any fuel injection or that have electronics. Is there anything in particular that you can suggest, as far as like a make or a model?

  JWR: In terms of both EMP and the natural equivalent, which would be the Coronal Mass Ejection and solar flare events, the effects are very similar, and the shielding that you need, and the precautions you should take, are very similar. For vehicles I recommend that you buy a pre-1972 gas engine vehicle out of Detroit and restore it. Or you can get away with up to the middle-1980s by retrofitting a vehicle with an electronic fuel system, you can retrofit it back to a traditional points-plugs-and-condenser arrangement, a traditional motor ignition system.

  For diesels, my favorites would either be a pre-1994 Ford or Chevy diesel that does not have fuel injection or other electronic controls. The only electronic components that you have would possibly be some circuitry that leads to the glow plug. But otherwise, they’re pretty darn EMP-proof. You might want to stock a few spare parts and check out wiring diagrams and make sure there aren’t a lot of fancy electronics between the ignition switch and the glow plug. But diesels are pretty straightforward.

  For passenger cars, I like the pre-1985 diesel Mercedes. The perfect vehicle there would be a 1984 or earlier W 123 chassis Mercedes wagon, like a 300 D or 300 TD diesel wagon. Again, all you’ve got is the glow plug and a relay. You could have incredibly high EMP field strength and that vehicle is still going to start and run.

  In terms of home electronics, the crucial thing is to have redundancy and to remember to keep your antennas disconnected on all your primary electronics, and to keep all of you secondary electronics in Faraday Enclosures. The least expensive per square foot is just a standard galvanized trash can that you can get at any hardware store. A typical 25 or 30-gallon trash can with a tight-fitting metal lid makes a perfect Faraday Enclosure. You’re just going to put all your spare electronics – you can wrap them in plastic, just put a couple of trash bags around each component and stack them up. You can fit a tremendous number of spare radios, your spare laptop – any other spare electronics should be spared in a Faraday Enclosure like that. If the field strength is strong enough to fry something in that Enclosure, then you’re going to be at ground zero of an explosion, and EMP will be the least of your concerns. You’ll be pounded with so much hard Gamma you’ll have maybe a 24-hour life expectancy. So you’ll be right in the blast radius.