Consider this scenario: A massive survival crisis has just struck. You are not sure what it is or its scope.

What do you do? The info below will give you a framework.

Collect intelligence on the current situation

Before you start phase 1 of any operation, you’re essentially in phase 0. This means that you should be shaping your environment, to include setting up ways to know what’s going on (which is what’s called Intelligence). During an EMP that blasts across most of the country, the first thing you’ll notice will depend on what time of day it is.
Make sure you get in touch with your neighbors. This could be critical not for just figuring out what’s going on, but for neighborhood security and augmenting skills you don’t have.

At night, the first thing you’ll notice is all the lights just went out. If you’re driving, your car will most likely stall. I say “most likely” because we really don’t know what would happen in real life and the exact circumstances would vary widely depending on the type of EMP, its altitude, atmospheric conditions, and the type and placement of the electronics and any shielding. We just don’t know.

Let’s assume you’re home, and it’s just after dark. All you know at the moment is that you lost power. So how would you know that this is a widespread event and not just that a tree fell on a powerline?

First thing would be to pick up something that would be susceptible to an EMP but not tied into the power grid. Check your cell phone for power. Check any battery-operated device.

Also consider that an EMP would develop massive power along any power lines or phone lines, which would most likely cause fires in the affected area.

Gather gear and personnel for movement

If you’re already at your primary rally point, such as if you’re bugging in, best thing to do is immediately fill your tubs, sinks, pots, and other containers with water because that pressure probably won’t hold for long. Then move to gather your stuff in case you have to leave. Your plan must on some level involve bugging out at some point.

This is where you grab your bug out bags. Hopefully you’re not like most preppers and have 70 pounds of gear, or even worse – don’t have your stuff together and end up deciding at the last moment what to put in your bags. My bug out bag is currently is only 25 pounds plus whatever water and food I’m gonna carry (except when I’m traveling on my Harley, in which case all that gear and more is on my bike).

Establish comms with your team

Hopefully, you’ve set up an emergency communications plan with your family and team, well in advance, and trained with it. If you haven’t read my article on SHTF communications, you should check it out too.

If you can’t use electronics to reach someone, you should leave a message somehow.

Have a predetermined location that everyone knows to check. Make it something that is out of the ordinary, can’t be accidentally done, is unlikely to be changed or moved, and easy to notice without having to walk right up to it. An example might be to bend the road sign at a particular corner as the sign that you’ve decided to bug out and they should move to the primary rally point and/or make comms with you.

Move to the primary rally point

In most cases, your primary rally point will be someone’s home but not in all cases, and for all you know, that home may not be there once you get there. Everyone should have noticed something happened and remembered during training that when ‘X’ happens, they should move to the primary rally point somehow.

You should all have already planned your bug out routes to get to where you need to go, which makes it much easier. Shit happens though, so you can expect that once you get there, someone will be missing.

Also, consider that you may find out that your primary rally point isn’t useable. You need to have a secondary and at least a tertiary rally point set up that hopefully wouldn’t be affected by the reasons you can’t use the primary.

Establish security

Once you’ve arrived, in a very rare set of circumstances (such as a regional EMP strike), you’ll need to worry about people who wish to do you harm. Hopefully you’ve already shaped the battlespace of your bug out location to make it easier but if not, you need to do it now.

Quickly set up defenses (such as set up a few people on the perimeter) and then work on improving those defenses later.

Collect intelligence on the situation

First thing to do once you have a hasty defense set up is to do your three inventories (read that article for more details). Essentially, you need to figure out what you have on you in the way of gear and skills (and what you don’t), what your immediate needs are (medical, water, security), what’s in the immediate area that could be of use (or isn’t), and what’s in the extended area that may either present a problem or a solution.

Establish comms with your missing team members

Once you’re at the location you’ll be staying at for a while, you may find that not everyone is there yet with you. If you’ve already established a radio plan with everyone (and they have comms that were protected and still work), you’ll probably have a time of day and a frequency to transmit and monitor as well as a couple of backup freqs.

If everyone knows the general area where you’ll be, such as a town or a particular forest area, you can agree on very obvious locations to leave messages, such as the top of a very large hill or a unique building, etc. As before, prior commo planning will allow you to leave more accurate messages to your team while not giving away the message (or hopefully that there even is a message).

Link up with missing team members
Once you’ve establish comms in some way, you need to get everyone together. Either you have to get them where you are or you need to go to them. Your primary mission continues to be assembling the team, even if you have to divert resources to other missions such as collecting food or water.

Decide your next COA

Now that you have everyone together, you need to decide what to do next. Do you stay where you’re at or do you bug out to a different location?
You’ll have some larger decisions to be made once you have everyone.

• What do you do if approached by others who may be of use – or may be a threat?

• Should you start the process of preparing to make a long journey to a possibly unaffected area?

• Is there an imminent threat at your current location that may require you to move out?
Continue to collect intel, improve your position, assess your process, and make plans, and you’ll be much better off than anyone who didn’t do all this planning in the first place.

Hopefully, you (or I) never have to endure a survival crisis that looks massive, long-term and devastating, but we do not know we will not do we?

So preparation for that type of an incident is critical unless you are content to throw caution to the wind and take your chances.

To learn other tactics for responding to a survival crisis, please check out Greywolf Survival.