Cache network....

Discussion in 'General Survival and Preparedness' started by Tango3, Jan 4, 2007.


  1. Tango3

    Tango3 Aimless wanderer

    Idea...( bubbling to the top):

    Seems to me we have monkeys in various corners of the nation, Would think it'd be possible for each monkey to locate a "u-store" on the outskirts of town. individually keyed padlocks could be sent with the owner retaining the key. if you want to store a case or two of Mre's up here you'd send the mres' with a key,( perhaps a numbered seal or two padlocks one for the holder one for the "trusteee", photo/video everything ,lock it up photo the seal, mail the key back to the owner....Don't know the legalities, and there's quite alot of trust involved, Just an idea (something) to kickaround... Don't know if its legal to ship firearms without an ffl involved (?).
    Or a group keyed padlock...depends how organized you'd think it was safe to be....
     
  2. stimpy117

    stimpy117 Monkey+++

    H$ll the last time I rented a unit I paid 70 clams a month.
    Looks like a good idea though.
     
  3. Tango3

    Tango3 Aimless wanderer

    that sounds a bit steep for one person, ideally one could rent the "u-store" garage , equip it with locking "job boxes" or individuallly locked lockers and split the expense...
     
  4. TailorMadeHell

    TailorMadeHell Lurking Shadow Creature

    There are many factors to work out on this though I like the idea. I have thought of this too, though it is a big trust issue. I was trying to figure out how to get to a destination point on my route and bury a cache though that is a lot of work. Transportation to and from, bury in a location that you don't know much about, hope it's there when you need it, etc. etc. etc. Haha.

    I could see going splits on a unit though you would have to eval your unit partner. They could very well just take your gear with them when they got theirs. There is also the idea that if the unit is broken into, two (or more) people would lose their gear.

    We'll see where it goes. Sounds good, just have to work out the technicals.
     
  5. Tango3

    Tango3 Aimless wanderer

    I know, I can also see trust (human nature ) issues envisioning far enough ahead to if a year or two after the tshtf your kids are starving and #145 hasn't made contact in over a year ( too busy fighting his way outta kommifornia)...Perhaps it's just plain unworkable ( I've had an outright bad idea or two before)
     
  6. monkeyman

    monkeyman Monkey+++ Moderator Emeritus Founding Member

    I would think that if was going to do something along those lines it would work better to just arrange to store the things with the person at their home, assumeing they were in an area that would likely be accessable and would BI. That way the stuff would be better guarded than in a U-store where looters could grab it any time they wanted to. That would also allow for a kind of rest point where the person could pitch in for a bit and have the saftey of a larger group for a bit and such then move on unless otherwise prearranged.
     
  7. TailorMadeHell

    TailorMadeHell Lurking Shadow Creature

    Well call me crazy, though I give trust openly until someone proves that they cannot be. I work backwards I guess. I do like the home part idea a little more though.

    I can see if I had some stuff stored with one of you guys or gals that it would be okay. If I stored food and your children needed food, I would expect you to feed them. I am weird like that I guess. Children are the future so feed them. As far as the other stuff might go, I'm sure that your own supply will be able to handle that though if it is needed, then some of it could be used. I am of the mind that I will have such items in place for me to use in a bad situation, though if it is not meant for me to get to, there will be nothing left when I get to it.

    I will do my part to be prepared and will put aside things that will be needed to help me, though I place my faith that if it is needed for me to survive, it will be provided for me. Not as much as I would like, though what I need. That is how I look at some things.

    And speaking of the supplies, I would give an estimate of the time I think it would take me to get there and then if I have not reached it by that time or alerted the holder to my holdup then I would expect them to use it for the benefit of their family.

    Once again, maybe I'm crazy. Haha. Though I have faith that through all my planning, if I am to survive, I will.
     
  8. Tango3

    Tango3 Aimless wanderer

    do we have a "frapper" map account? Though whenever i've tried to add my name to one of those maps I find a mental disconnect,and can't seem to get it "figgered" out...Guess I wasn't born to frap??
    I'm not convinced I 've got enough stores for our bug-in yet, to be mailing stuff crosscountry...
     
  9. Blackjack

    Blackjack Monkey+++

  10. melbo

    melbo Hunter Gatherer Administrator Founding Member

    I think one may be better to take a little road trip along a possible evac/BO route and find a Mini Storage that is away from the main road and see if you can pay in cash for a year in advance.

    1 persons stuff, one padlock. Pretty safe.

    We have kicked around the idea of regional gathering spots for a few months after a collapse. Supplies could be pre-positioned ahead of time.

    I think the idea of a multi-person storage amongst relative strangers would likely cause problems down the road. On the other hand, I know of a few here that have storage space and room for a few warm bodies....

    Never keep all your eggs in one basket. I don't really plan on leaving my place except in extreme situations but I hold only about 1/4 of my stock here. Easier to cut and run if I had too knowing I had more stuff down the road.

    For those in large cities, I hope you can stick it out without having to move. I think your BO would go something like this:

    -Load all your stuff into 2 vehicles and head out.
    -Blowout on vehicle 1 and no more room in vehicle 2- 1/2 of stuff has to be left.
    -Get 3 miles out of town and find roads blocked/bridge out/traffic jam/etc
    -Leave vehicle and start walking with what you can carry.

    What you can carry more than likely amounts to about 3 days food, a hand gun and some clothes... Maybe the photo albums the wife won't leave behind?

    All in all a sad scenario. Get some stuff prepositioned.
     
  11. ghrit

    ghrit Bad company Administrator Founding Member

    Yup. Trust comes expensively when throwing in with a group sometimes. All this points to more than one cache and location, not only for a possible split in an otherwise unplanned direction, but also to keep any given loss to a minimum.
     
  12. TailorMadeHell

    TailorMadeHell Lurking Shadow Creature

    Don't anyone think of getting a unit here in SF. I checked it out and the cheapest that I could find was a 5x5 for $171 for a month. That is not a good deal even by a longshot.

    Maybe I'll do the Road Warrior thing. Get an old bus, load it up with as much gas as it can carry, armor plate it, load my gear and take off. Then again, I could just take what I can carry and put the survive back in survival. I ran across another saying for my bag. Most have BOBs that will take them 'home'. There are those that have INCH bags, (I'm Not Coming Home). Don't know the difference yet, though what it says to me is that for some reason your base is no longer yours or it is no longer there.

    My bag will likely be a lot bigger than most accounting for my trip, though I will practice with toting it so I can get used to it.

    Road trips to get storage units sound like a plan. A little here and a little there. Though it would have to be out of the way places that are cheap. Not like here. Sheesh, they are expensive. Maybe across the bay will be cheaper. Hope so.
     
  13. duanet

    duanet Monkey+++

    Not trying to push the Morman's, but they were basically driven out of New York and Illinois by mobs and a hostile govenment and established Utah as refuge in the middle 1800's. We talk about what if, they look at it as history. My great grandfather left Germany in the 1860's and came to the US. His father said that he didn't think the future of the area north of Hamberg looked too good. Well he missed out on the Franco Prussion war, and our family may have fought in WW1 and WW2, but it didn't happen in our back yard. We always hear of the Morman's going west with pushcarts, not being even able to afford horses and wagons. But they pushed that cart from one house owned by someone in their church to the next one. It was a organized bugout and according to history, one group would plow the land, the next plant, the next weed etc and so on to the harvest and stroage for the winter and spring. IMHO the best cache is with family who are like minded, next best with friends who also are into prepartion and last in a storage locker that is watched by the police as a place where drugs, stolen goods etc may be stored. That being said, I plan to bugin so my BOB is designed to get me from work to home. Roughly 25 miles, and to be coftorable if the old car dies on more pleasant times. If I lived in a city, I think that a rental cache about 30 miles out might be a good idea, but living 50 miles out, I know that our police and neighbors are probably not going to allow you to walk down the road and pick the stuff up in TSHTF. My biggest fear as you are aware of by now is that my neighbors and the government will declare all of our carefully stored survival goods a "community resource" and be "asking" us to turn them in at the local redistribution center. Thus I think that the local storage center will be checked and the "resources" allocated. Sorry about being paranoid, but I think my telling the local police, after TSHTF, that this is my cousin Charlie and his family and of course they are going to be staying with us and we will take care of them, will be much better than for you to be standing at a roadblock trying to tell the people in charge that you have a locker in town with enough supplies to handle the problem and that you will not be burden on the town and that they should just let you get it and pass through. I also think that a woodpile, a garden, a crosscut saw, axes, splitting mauls, animal feed "wheat" and such will be under most of their radar. It would be even more to your advantage if the people at the roadblock have a slight idea that I have a cousin Charlie and let him contact me. I think that "Lights Out" is perhaps the best model I know for surviving anthything but an atomic war.
     
  14. E.L.

    E.L. Moderator of Lead Moderator Emeritus Founding Member

    I don't see where having caches in different parts of the country would do you any good. I see having caches as close by, so that you could get to them quickly from your normal travels. If you are in town, and live outside of town and cannot get home, then you need something close to work. Or on the way to work/home. The other caches I see as being in your evacuation location. If you have to bug out, where are you going to? That is the place you need to have loaded with supplies. I keep food, medical equipment, tools, etc. cached in offices in the town in which I work. The next step is supplying my bug out locations.
     
  15. E.L.

    E.L. Moderator of Lead Moderator Emeritus Founding Member

    I think there is a good chance of this happening also, but I do not believe it would happen right away. If a true series of catastrophic events occurs, LE will have more than their hands full trying to control the source of the problem, or preventing chaos from occurring in the streets. I think it would be a good idea to take advantage of this time to either relocate your items in storage, or begin using them. Those of you that are in bigger cities, I feel for you. Get out ASAP.
     
  16. Tracy

    Tracy Insatiably Curious Moderator Founding Member

    Yep! They teach preparedness from beginning to end - not as a paranoid reaction, but as a lifestyle - and will help each other at any calling.
     
  17. melbo

    melbo Hunter Gatherer Administrator Founding Member

    4 x 8 unit in my area is ~$130 a year. Cash discount paid in advance under a Scuby Doo name

    The LDS website has excellent information on long term storage and emergency preparedness. I visit there often.
    http://www.providentliving.org/
     
  18. duanet

    duanet Monkey+++

    Speaking of caching, I had a secondhand Katrina type experience last week. A very good friend had a fire at his house. A ceiling fan in the upstairs bathroom went bad and set fire to the ceiling joists in the attic. They were downstairs and found out about it when the shaving cream and deodrent cans blew up. Memo need more smoke detectors than the law requires. The volunter fire department was there in about 5 minutes and saved the house. Now the lessons. All of their clothes were burned or suffered major smoke damage, insurance said throw them out. The roof is gone and it is January and raining. Would be very hard to live in that house in a SHTF situation. All of the wood and woodstoves will not help if the windows and roof is gone. The basement is full of water as well as the downstairs rooms. The insulation, sheetrock, floors and wireing are ruined. That would destroy all of my carefully stocked emergency supplies in my house and without the quick action of the fire department, a celler hole full of hot embers would be of even less use. The people in the forom who survived Katrina were talking about what happens to your survival plans when your house is gone? You know what, it looks like it would be a real nasty situation in even normal times. What about all of those good books and firearms, or clothes and bob etc?

    Wonder about a root celler or some kind of fireproof cache for the place. I live in a wooded area and without a working fire department, if a fire gets going it could burn for miles. It would be worse in a city or close packed suburb, or out west with grass and brush fires. The problem IMHO would be that if TSHTF, people trying to heat or cook with wood and not having proper stoves or chimnies, and using candles, kerosine lamps or coleman type gas lamps, would almost guarntee that fires would be started. Do I need to work on a firebreak, or set up a situation where I can use my generator to pump water to wet the place down. How fire resistant are the shingles on the roof if embers blow in from the woods?

    Well on that cheerful thought, I am going to stop, have a cup of coffee and think for a while and enjoy my warm comfortable house.
     
  19. Tango3

    Tango3 Aimless wanderer

    Thanks for sharing those insights...Ive still got all my eggs in one basket right now, its the only way I could start preparing without being completely overwhelmed...
    Sounds like more smoke detectors and some kind of mobile pump or gravity fed water system on the roof for the upper floors for would allow firefighting without power or city water pressure..Plenty of fir eextinguishers If this is a real concern for you. Got a water bed ? add a pump and a hose...

    We just happen to have some of those LARGE plastic tarps ( 20x20ft?) from when we did the roof...I've thought of precutting plywood for the windows and stashing it in the shed...And precutting 2x12 boards toinf to be very nice way to live, o block the doors ( the 48" from the inside of the door to the oppositewall.standing on the 2"wide edge).The basement is our planned refuge; windows are easily removable., I figured peieces of 3/4 or thicker ply with a couple of foot or longer carriage bolts smooth side out. sandwiched together through the window opening..Quick way to "batten down the hatches"..Loosing the house is scary enough , losing it during tshtf could easily prove fatal...plus the loss or all "preparations and lifesupport". To me a home base is essential ( I believe the idea of living out of a bob is a nonstarter; you just can't realisticaly haul enough.) I hope none of us ever needs to "head to the hills "(with what we can drag.)It's not going to be real "nice",
     
  20. ghrit

    ghrit Bad company Administrator Founding Member

    Thought I'd bump this one, see if some of the newer folks had some thoughts on the caching ideas, whether a random selection of folks sharing a Ustore, or prepositioning at a trusted friend's house. Near (as in less than a day's hike) mid range (say within a day's drive) distant (wherever) or what? My situation is going to change within a year, and I need to think more on this. I expect to have some space for a jobbox on the property somewhere, and the idea of planting one with another member of the tribe has a bit of appeal, too.
     
survivalmonkey SSL seal        survivalmonkey.com warrant canary
17282WuJHksJ9798f34razfKbPATqTq9E7