If you get down to it, the essence of survival comes down to avoiding the common mistakes that can impede your progress or in a few cases, kill you.
While some mistakes require a lot of things to go wrong to truly be deadly – a sequence of sorts – the most common harmful or lethal mistakes are fairly simple and are usually a product of bad judgment.
Not Having A Plan – So you have water purifiers, food storage, cooking implements, first aid kits, etc. But do you have a plan? It’s important to think about what types of disasters could happen in your area and how you and your family would react. You need to know how to exit your home safely, have a location where you can meet up with friends and family, know the best way out of town in case you have to bug out, and so forth. Be sure to think these things through ahead of time.
Neglecting Home Security – If your plan is to shelter in place, have you thought about how to make your home safe from intruders? Burglaries skyrocket during disasters. You’re much better off taking precautions than planning on shooting anyone that sets foot on your property. Hopefully looters will decide your home is more trouble than it’s worth and move on.
Refusing To Bug Out – Since bugging out can be difficult and/or dangerous, I believe it’s important for people to learn how to shelter in place. However, there are certain situations where you must bug out, and ignoring them could be deadly. Don’t be one of those old folks who die in hurricanes and wildfires because they refuse to leave the home they’ve lived in for decades. If there’s a chance your home could be destroyed, bug out.
Not Purifying Tap Water – People are so used to their tap water being safe that it’s easy to forget how easily it can be contaminated. For example, tap water can become unsafe during natural disasters when pipes are damaged and contaminants leak into them. There have also been scenarios where water departments didn’t properly treat their water because they lacked funds or because their workers stopped showing up. Purify all tap water during emergencies just to stay on the safe side.
Have you ever discovered you are missing something only once you need it?
Of course, you have. We all have done that.
That is they type of mistake we are talking about – nothing mind blowing, just a simple example of putting something off until it was too late.
That is what these four critical mistakes are, but each one can be harmful or even lethal if taken to an extreme.
To learn more about common mistakes survivalists make, please check out the Urban Survival Site.