Why you need to Hide your Supplies

A disaster is exactly that. Everything around you turns to chaos, and you need to keep your head on a swivel in order to stay alive, and keep your family safe. Today, we're going to run through one of the most important techniques to make it successfully through a major crisis. Having more than one cache of supplies. You'll read many prepper websites that talk about storing a year's worth of food and water in your basement, which I agree it's a fantastic start. But there's a big problem. In the real world, you're not going to be surviving in isolation, and your biggest enemy isn't going to be a lack of supplies. It's going to be other people. People who want what you have. The people who failed to stock up on water and food are going to do whatever it takes to keep themselves and their families alive. Now, I've already taken a lot of steps to ensure my home is secure. We've got security doors and screens, alarm systems and lighting, as well a guard dog which means we're pretty aware as soon as anyone approaches our front door. Against a couple of wannabe thugs in a crisis, I'm confident we'll be able to hold our own. Now let's flip the situation. Instead of one or two attackers, imagine it's a group of twenty or thirty. They're hungry, armed, and determined to take everything that we have. Now we may be lucky, and survive the first wave of attack. Possibly even the second. But eventually, our home is just that, a home. It's not a medieval fortress designed to hold off an army. It's a two-storey brick home. Probably the easiest way to get us out would be to light it on fire. It doesn't matter how well prepared we are, our home is simply an obstacle, and against a group of attackers intent on taking it, we wouldn't stand a chance. In this situation, we'd be out on the street in a matter of hours, and everything we have painstakingly gathered over the last eight years of prepping would be lost in an instant. This is where your backup plan comes in. Personally, I'm a big fan of contingencies. You're setting yourself up for failure if you don't plan for the worst possible scenario, and even though there is only a slim chance that we're torn from our home in the aftermath of a crisis, if it did happen, my family would survive. Want to know how? Because of our back-up caches. You see, the basement full of food, water and the tools and equipment probably only made up about 25 percent of the supplies I have. Our bug out location contains more, we've got another two locations with enough gear to see us through a few months at least, just in case. For most survivalists, losing their primary residence is the biggest risk in their plans to survive. Having all of your food, water and sustainable systems torn from your hands is brutal, and is a nightmare none of us care to think about. But a true survivalist is always thinking "what if." What if the garden you've been cultivating is no longer yours. What if the sustainable rain catchment system you built is no longer under your control. What if you have to leave your home in the next few minutes and could never return again. This is what sets a real survivalist apart. By planning ahead, you can diversify. The best technique is to use multiple locations to store your gear. Of course, some supplies should be hidden within easy reach. Perhaps there's a section of your home that could conceal additional supplies, that looters may not find if they do a quick snatch and grab through your home. Others may be a bit further, like a couple of boxes of "stuff" you've got stored in your parent's garage. Heck, we've even got a couple of storage sheds that are filled with random junk and old furniture, to conceal the boxes of real survival supplies buried at the back. Oh and there's also our buried caches. Now this gets a bit tricky as you're storing gear on land that's not your own. The key is to keep it low-key, and camouflaged with the surroundings. You'll need a storage canister that's sturdy enough to withstand a good amount of weight, and watertight to stop any moisture seeping in and ruining what you've stored inside. Burying these without anyone noticing is going to be a challenge, but so long as you get them at least a foot underground you'll greatly reduce the risk that they'll get found, plus you'll keep your stores at a more constant temperature, which will help them last longer. Find secluded areas off the trails, where no one is going to think of looking for supplies. The hardest part of all of this is remembering where each is buried, without placing a sign above that announces to the world there's something hidden underneath. We've got ours marked out via GPS, but they're also stored in places we frequent regularly on hikes and camping trips, a risk yes, but the familiarity we have with the area means we're very unlikely to forget where a cache is buried. Strolling into the woods and picking a spot at random would probably be more secure, but if our GPS devices are fried I'd rather not be spending my days digging random holes in the woods looking for tinned beans. All of these caches took considerable effort to do, from purchasing the supplies to setting up all of our hidden storage locations, but it's definitely worth it. Everything you've prepared may just save your life, and there's nothing more precious than that.