 And now on the topic of Disaster Preparedness, our own Mike Hurd. I don't know how many people are coming, so I just made, I think, seven or eight copies, so if you could just kind of look through it and then pass it along to your neighbor. Doc emailed me last week just to gauge if I wanted to speak to you guys about general preparedness. It's a topic that we've been discussing since the inception of the Oathkeepers and what Stuart Rhodes has really been trying to push upon us that, you know, you can't be part of the community preservation without being prepared yourself. So there's a quote that Ben Franklin had that says, by failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail. So in essence, you got to get yourself started, figure out which is important to you, and then there's a couple of basic topics that we have actually discussed multiple times. We've had some experts in the room go through individually some of these topics. I'm just going to kind of breeze over a lot. There's a lot of material that I've compiled into this outline. We could talk for hours about each individual subject, but this is just kind of to review what we've been discussing over the past year or so since I've been with those Oathkeepers. So we all know the big three is you can go three weeks without food, three days without water, and three minutes without air. So if you start with the first one, right now the air is still clean enough to breathe, so we're kind of doing okay there. So the next most essential thing to survival would be water. So the real question is how many of you have enough water in your house to sustain yourself in a natural disaster? We all talk about, you know, the economic collapse or government takeover. We're not happy with the way things are in the government today, but, you know, what about something that's a little bit more unexpected, a tornado that hit Bridget in a couple of years ago or the tornado that hit Joplin? Are you really set up to be sustainable in the event that you have to sit and wait for someone to come get you out of a certain situation? So I think I haven't mentioned it here. We'll go through a little bit more what FEMA's recommendations are, but they're getting longer and longer. FEMA used to tell you to keep the days worth of supplies, move to three days, move to a week. Now they're up to 90 days as an individual, and they're giving SEMA, which is our State Emergency Management Association, telling our state to be prepared for about a year. So there's a lot of changes that are happening within the general preparedness situation that we're all living and breathing every day. So from a water standpoint, as an individual, as a person, you need one gallon per day for general consumption and sanitation. So it's one gallon for yourself, for your wife, for your kids. So you have to figure out how many people are in your household and then start doing the math, how many gallons you need per day, per month, and per year. And the recommendation on every website or every book that I could find is a minimum of a year. So if you can figure out how to store water for a year, power to you because that's a lot of damp water. What I've gone through and figured out is more from a purification standpoint. The means to get yourself water or the means to purify water is a little bit more sustainable than trying to store hundreds of thousands of gallons of water. If you live by a close body of water or you have the ability to collect rainwater, you can purify the water, which gets a little bit more to the topics of the different methods, which is all in the outline too, but I'm passing around. Bleach is a method, chlorine is a method, iodine is a method. There's a number of different methods that are out there for purification of water. You just have to find what is the best situation for you within your individual situation that you're going to be in post-disaster. And everything is going to be post-disaster and terminology because that's the easiest way. If you're preparing for a disaster, you're 90% of the way there for preparing for everything else that we've been discussing from the economy bottoms out or if there's some type of martial law or unconstitutional orders given that we as the organization are trying to stand up against. One of the pretty large overlooked situations when you're preparing for a grid down scenario or post-disaster scenario is sanitation. It's one of the very much overlooked scenarios because you don't really think about a way of running water today. Water comes on the faucet and you're able to flush your waste and it goes off and you never see it. If the plumbing is down or the electricity is down that's running those pump systems what are you going to do with all the waste from yourself, from your family? How are you going to make sure that you have a clean environment? There's a good saying, you don't shit where you eat. Well there's a lot of truth to that because of the coli and other bacteria you want to make sure that you have a sanitary environment where you're consuming your food which is going to be the next topic. But two things that really you want to make sure is before you consume anything you keep your hands clean and you keep your face clean. Those are the two dirtiest areas that you're going to be in contact with when you're out you're going to be doing a lot of physical activity you don't have electricity so you're going to be moving around a lot you don't have the same things that you would normally use to clean a house so you want to make sure where your sanitation, your lavatory is is far enough away from where you're consuming your breakfast, lunch and dinner wherever you're enjoying your purified water you just want to make sure that the areas are far enough away from each other that the two don't cross contaminate each other. Moving into the food storage, this is kind of the hardest and my opinion to figure out is collecting rainwater is one thing growing a garden is one thing too but it's a pretty large garden to sustain a family of four for twelve months because then you have to figure out how to store the food that you're collecting from the garden because it's perishable items. So some of the questions that I am, where do you begin it's financially hard to do so I threw in some inexpensive ways that I've just pretty much researched that could give you some type of satisfaction from calories and proteins and carbohydrates that at least can keep your body functioning so there's two ways of looking at it if you want to stay on the inexpensive side go with rice or beans, go with pastas, you can go with something that's dry store it, depending on how you want to store it there's different methods of storage in here again you have to figure out what works best for you your home, I have a basement, some people don't have a basement so I have flexibility on storage if you have a slab home or you live in a mobile home or you live in an apartment you may not have the same type of storage facility so you have to come up with what is best for the situation that you're in but when rice and beans are two of the key items even from an experienced, prepper if you will to somebody who's just getting into it there's a chemical reaction between rice and beans when the two are cooked together it creates the essential nine amino acids so when those two bodies are cooked together it's a sustainable, fully, it's called a complete protein it's a fully sustainable meal that will give you the necessary carbohydrates that you need to keep functioning it will help your brain function so you're not misjudging certain things now again, I don't know about you but I really don't want to be eating rice and beans three meals a day, seven days a week so you're going to have to start holding in other fibrous content you want some vegetable intake, you want some fruit intake to help give you that complete diet and you're going to have to figure out what that solution is for yourself if it's antimatos, if it's dehydrated, apricots you're going to have to figure out what is the best situation that you're in to store a lot of it, some of the research that I've done is for the dry products, the five gallon buckets you can get food grade buckets or you can get the five dollar buckets from Home Depot with Mylar bags also serves as the same properties that you're storing roughly about 25 pounds of a dry product and those buckets, they can sit out of the way stackable storage, you can't go wide or you go taller so you're going to have to figure out the dimensions of where your storage facility is to store whatever food you feel again, the recommendation for food storage is the same as water recommended for one year so you have your water set up for one year next thing that you're going to need to determine is how are you going to have food set up for one year to take care of yourself and your family I think I put the math on here so for a family of four three meals a day for a 30 day month not July, not December, just an average month that's 360 meals so when you start putting that math together and you're talking over 4,000 meals over the course of a year for a family of four so when you put it on an annual scale it seems like a very large number so I would start at the opposite end what do you need to start for three days what do you need to start for seven days start buying food that you're going to eat if you don't like corn why would you buy 20 cases of corn for when the disaster hits because then not only are you not going to eat it you probably will eat it then you're going to be really pissed that you're eating it so you want to find something that you're going to eat that your family is going to enjoy and then again start you want to avoid food fatigue which is consuming the same meal over and over and over again your body is going to start rejecting it your body is going to tell your brain that you're not hungry because you're eating the same product over and over again so you want to start mixing up your meals figuring out what you think is going to be best for your family I put in here advanced food storage this is a little bit more of the expensive side of the world and I know we've had some presentations on where to get some of these dehydrated and freeze dried products certain catalogs, certain websites but that's really that's probably the best long term solution it avoids the human error if you were to try and preserve something yourself or dehydrate or can something yourself typically the shelf life when you're doing it yourself is anywhere from one year to five years if you're really good at it if it's professionally done which is again I called it advanced because it's really financially advanced because these products are expensive because of the shelf life that they carry and they're taking these products and they're flash freezing them to preserve a lot of the nutrients which is something that as an individual it's much harder to do than when it's factory produced MREs are also a good long term storage they're expensive as well they are high protein, high carbohydrate high calorie to keep your body functioning at a very accelerated rate it's not something that I'd want to continue past maybe seven days or so before your body will start to figure out that it is too much to handle and it's going to do one of two things it's going to stop your bowel movements or it's going to hyper accelerate them so they're a very good short term solution if you need something again tornado comes through and you need a couple of meals until you know that the Red Cross is coming and they're going to be able to take care of everybody else MREs are a great solution you'll be clear, you'll be alert, you'll be sustained outside of that window though it's one of those things where it's really your personal preference and how you choose to deal with it gardening I also put in advance because it's not as easy as just planting a couple of seeds and you have to garden for a year this is my fourth year doing a garden still learning new things every year time to plant what not to plant next to each other the amount of water, the hydration presentation that we did a couple weeks ago gave me some ideas on gravity fed systems that I haven't tried before so we'll try it this year see if it produces a lot more fruits for me we'll see how it goes but it's not a skill that you pick up overnight a lot of the blogs that I read are the survival gardens that come in a can one acre crisis gardens if you get that can and toss it in your storage and you never attempt to try it changes are the first season or two seasons you're going to fail because you don't know the time of the year that you need to plant the seeds how to cultivate the seeds how to start them, how to sprout them and then how to transfer them there's a lot that goes into it versus just buying a can setting it on your shelf a tornado comes through and let's say that we don't have any government assistance for a year chances are you're probably not going to get a very healthy crop if you're just busting those seeds out for the first time so if you can buy an extra one I think they're like 28 bucks for one of those cans buy two, practice all I can say is just it's all a trial and error I look at it we're an organization that embraces the Second Amendment it's just like firearms you wouldn't buy a gun use it once and then throw it in your storage and never look at it again train with it you learn how to operate it you learn how to handle malfunctions you learn how to clean it I don't think it should be any different for any of the other skills that you're trying to learn whether it's food preservation it's water storage energy I know we had a meeting on energy figuring out what is best for your scenario and then the next thing that I found on the post-disaster scenario would be medical supplies it's very easy to run down to Walgreens and pick up some ibuprofen pick up some pseudofed allergy medicine you know why you're there grab a couple extra boxes typically the medicine will last several years and you have to be careful you have to do your research on it don't use me as an expert I don't have a PhD not a pharmacist but I do understand a little bit about how the dosage works on medication to where even if it's past its expiration you just need to figure out the correct dosage and the life cycle of that dosage to where you could double up doses on expired medication to get a similar dose because it just loses potency after time and this is not the case for all medication but for a lot of the over-the-counter medication especially your painkillers your allergy relief one of the big killers in third-world countries is diarrhea I highly recommend looking into any anti-diarrhea medication if you're a matter of days if you get stuck with a case of diarrhea you will probably not make it so they have inexpensive medication that's over-the-counter that lasts 24 to 36 months something that you could keep in storage if you need to rotate it every couple of years you can do so it's uh... luckily we do live in a society that we're very fortunate that you can run down to the store and buy a lot of this medication today but I did have a presentation that went along with this that showed what the store looks like today what it looks like after Hurricane Katrina after one of the snowstorms on the east coast how empty the stores become in a matter of four to six hours so if that happens again a tornado comes through you can't make it to the store or you do make it to the store and you're left with the four or five things up down the shelf the EBT thing that just happened last year how quick those shelves were cleared off a Walmart because we had free EBT cards running around so soon as something like that happens people's mindsets change they actually go into what we're trying to do slowly they go into mass preservation mode it's a psychological thing that they have to go out and they have to buy everything that they can get their hands on in order to take care of themselves we're trying to do it today so we don't have to be one of the masses out there fighting over that last case of bottled water and that's kind of a lot of the stuff that we've been talking about over the course of a year or so so there's some other items I don't think that they're in the outline but it's smaller things like communication both keepers started up a ham club because we want to make sure that we can have the means to communicate with each other or with anybody else in the scenario if there's no cell phone signal we still have some type of communication between each other or other people who may be able to help us the Red Cross they have ham frequencies that they can reach out to so if you know where to locate these frequencies everything is out on the internet today it's a great resource if you're using it the correct way be careful because there are some interesting things out there some stuff you're going to have to take with a grain of salt because there's good and bad to the internet people can post whatever they want so you're going to have to find some reputable sources a lot of the FEMA we all look as the federal government it's really not the state that we want it but they have programs out there right now I don't look at why do we need to recreate the wheel it's just what they're using they're teaching their people about it so why can't we just take you back off and learn the same thing that they're doing today so again I put in there that they're telling our state emergency management association or agency rather that be prepared for a year before you get federal assistance they're telling them to buy masses amounts of supplies to sustain their states I don't think that we should be any different we are the government that's the beauty of America we are the people it's not a couple of guys at the top commanding what's going on down here so if that information is out there we should be all over it if you're not already into doing something like this or getting started I highly recommend today be a good day to start training I think is a big deal so kind of as I discussed knowing your firearms knowing how to garden take a first aid class take something that will benefit you knowledge I mean they can take away our money they can't take away what's in our hands so let's go ahead and be a little bit more proactive instead of reactive let's get ourselves a little bit more knowledgeable about as much as we can we don't have to be an expert at everything but let's have a general understanding of what we're trying to accomplish as a group fuel source that's a we can have as many number ten cans in the world but if you don't have a fuel source to boil water or to cook it you're going to it's not going to be a very pleasant meal so I'm going to figure out what that fuel source is what you want to utilize to help cook your meals or heat your home in the winter or whatever that whatever that purpose is that you need some of that energy figure out what it is figure out if it's a generator test it out three or four times a year make sure you have stabilized fuel for it solar is a huge hot market for it I've looked into it it's an extremely expensive market to get into but it's renewable energy so it's definitely on my agenda to continue to research and see what the best option is and at the end of the day you want to make sure you have the ability to protect what's yours we work very hard for what we do and you've taken the time out to get your family taken care of to get yourself taken care of and you want to make sure that you have the ability to protect it so on that that's what I have to say hope you guys enjoy it you want to take a few questions? yeah love to take some questions comment on a question if you have medical supplies the doctors and nurses to treat they will run out of medical supplies so you don't have to worry about as much as you're using when you're stabbing them we're talking about dental tools I didn't mention it but you did your hand out what were you referring to? any if you have dentures if you anything that you have on a preventative dental maintenance skill toothpaste flosses in my mind preventative maintenance you know there's you want to make sure that your mouth is clean you don't want to because if you end up with a toothache something that you can't fix there's not a dentist that you can go to to get a drilled out to get your cavity drilled out so proper preventative maintenance again think of it that you have no services that you have as the general society today what do you want to have on hand I mean a tube of toothpaste lasts for quite some time Sam's Club sells those packs of toothpaste I think they're like 12 bucks, 13 bucks I mean that's one thing I'd said on the store show that would be about a year's worth for four people there's a lot of toothpaste there so some of those commodity items if you will are really luxury items that we take advantage of today that we may not have the ability to purchase tomorrow if a tornado hit us right now or stock market crashes tomorrow and it's at 2,000 points when we wake up in the morning I think people should camouflage their resources because for some reason as society goes down the hill you won't have military authorities, police whatever came up, knock on your door we're here to do work position and they will take what you have and then leave what they think is what is deserving of you got a position on it absolutely and that's the real thing it makes you work harder because there can be a time when the central government is far ahead that is one scenario of what could potentially happen and until we're all put in that scenario I think the idea of having multiple caches is a brilliant idea camouflageing your resources is another great idea again as oath keepers I think that's where we stand up and as a community and part of the community preservation act is you and your community FEMA doesn't get to your door you as a community stand and meet FEMA at the line they're not allowed in your community because you have everybody standing behind you so there's a lot around it I don't think we're in any position to take on a very large organization such as FEMA and if they do come into your house you're going to have to make that decision on what the outcome is it's just like what you said because I've already seen in places where they have what they call like a distraction storage you know what I mean then they think they got your storage and then they leave it only in really the storages over here yeah I think that happened in 1775 too the British troops went to the storage facility oh right that was what I was talking about yeah no I think having multiple options if plan A doesn't work you have to have plan B plan C and so on and so forth you know there's no one right answer I'm a historian I read a lot just like when the federal armies were marching through the south for the civil war a lot of people in the south basically were neutral but when the federal army came in in an eight year war they took every bit of your smoke bacon and the wine yards and they burned basically your whole row to boil their coffee it devastated the farmers and forced them to pick sides because the next time the federal armies were marching through these people would literally be devastated because they didn't have Walmart back in 1860 right well that's yeah and that's again I think that's the purpose behind it anything that we can do today we may not have Walmart tomorrow and I think it makes a lot of sense to if they come and knock on your door for what is rightfully yours you have to make that decision nobody else can make that decision but you at that point in time we can learn a lot from history so I mean there's no doubt about it that there's a lot of things that are happening today that have happened in other large government empires so it's just what we choose from history and what we can do to make sure that we're in a better position than what those people in history were I'm concerned about bottled water do you say to recycle it every six months? that's a recommendation what do you do with it? I would drink it well I'm not sure you're still right but how do you do that in 4 or 5 cases of water well you should be on a rotational basis I mean you should be rotating it in monthly and I mean if you had a year's worth of bottled water in your house I mean you'd probably be taking your entire household I think the recommendation of that it says minimum 6 months but a lot of it has to do with ultraviolet light so if you keep it in a cool dark place it probably lasts twice that ultraviolet light when it passes through these plastic bottles there's a chemical reaction that can happen from the plastic that can bleed into the water so that's why they talk about rotating it because of the plastic that it's contained in one more question what you could do is market and use to wash your fingers yeah well that's in the sanitary I mean that's why you need one gallon per day it's not all for consumption there is sanitary okay Geoff last question your setup to have 55 gallon drum barrels that are long term storage I mean that's awesome because I don't have that ability to do so well this is over I'll give you a name of a source or a product to give you a 5 year shelf life on 55 gallons of water what set of bottles 35 gallons okay thank you