For the sake of planning, try to imagine that something huge has happened and your state is largely affected. The content writers below use an example of a EMP (Electromagnetic Pulse – an unusual and sometimes frightening by-product of a nuclear bomb) as part of their planning!

1. Collect intelligence on the current situation
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.

Next thing you need to know is how widespread the EMP is so you’ll have to communicate with someone not in your immediate area somehow. Unfortunately, communicating long-distance pretty much means you have to use electronics. Hopefully you stored a ham radio in some kind of shielding (and not had it still attached to the radio). Many ham operators do this and most repeater stations have emergency power backup. I personally have a Yaesu 857d, that works very well for things like this.

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.

What, or who, you check into next will depend on your own circumstances, but at this point, you should have an idea what happened. Based on that assessment, you decide that it meets your criteria for leaving town.

2. 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 cannot somehow 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.
3. 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. In a real situation, you may not be able to establish comms with every member within the time you can safely stay at home. In that case, hopefully you’ve planned and practiced and would each recognize what’s happened and that they need to now move out. Otherwise, you’ll spend a great deal of time just randomly trying to find each other.

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.

4. 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.

Also, consider that you may find out that your primary rally point isn’t useable. The neighborhood may be rioting, the forest could be on fire, a roving band of baboons may have been given human-like intelligence by a mad scientist and started a commune there – all sorts of things. 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.

Essentially, you need to get to some rally point and wait for everyone to show up so you can figure out what to do next.

5. 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.

6. Collect intelligence on the situation
Now is when you realize that going it alone would have been a stupid idea. You’ll have to make sure you’re set with food, water, shelter, fire, etc and set up guards who can scan the area so a threat presents itself in time and distance to react effectively, but you have to know your situation first.

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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?
In a lot of cases, you’ll have temporary rally points that are good for easy meetup and security but won’t be the same as your ultimate destination.

• Either way, 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 what 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.

We found this whole article from Gray Wolf Survival very entertaining! Although their scenario is a bit more advanced that what we foresee happening, it's always good to think BIG and worst-case-scenario. And from the 9 items listed above, it give you a great outline to tailor it to your specific needs. To read the entire article, visit them here.