Its 10:00pm on a February night and the temperature is in the teens. You turn on the oven to make a snack and a few minutes later you come back in the kitchen to the smell of gas. You crack the oven door and a small fireball shoots out. You quickly shut the door and turn off the gas.

This recently happened to us. My stepson was the one getting a snack. He told us what had happened, so I went to the kitchen. There was a smell of gas, but it seemed to be dissipating to me. Trudee didn’t think so and called the gas company.

They said we should evacuate the house immediately, explaining not to turn on or off any switches, not to even hang up the phone, and they would send someone out as soon as possible. The gas didn’t smell very strong to me so I didn’t think it was that big of a dead, but those are probably famous last words. The three of us and the four dogs bugged out.

I always thought I would have some kind of warning, and at least a few minutes to get the car packed, but that’s not the way it went down. We put on our coats, grabbed the keys, and jumped in the truck, where we sat at the end of the driveway, waiting for the service man.

We had one BOB in the truck, a couple blankets and some cash, with access to my BOB in my car, which was in the garage and my stepson’s BOB, which was in the driveway. That’s it! I really didn’t think we would be forced to stay out of the house, but I kept thinking, “what if we can’t go back in?”

We have the basics in our BOBs. I don’t know about you, but I want more than the basics to get by if I’m not in a survival situation. I was so focused on getting leashes on the dogs and all of us dressed and outside as safely and as quickly as possible, that I forgot to grab my money clip. We did have some cash, so if we needed to we could have bought some short term supplies.

The gasman showed up and said his meter was pegged in the kitchen when he walked in. He opened the oven and discovered our issue. Trudee had very recently inserted a cover to catch oven gunk, and it turns out it was covering a vent she hadn’t noticed, causing gas to build up and cause carbon monoxide and gas fumes to flood the kitchen.

This little event exposed some normalcy bias I didn’t know I had. I expected to have time to load up before bugging out. This just goes to show you that we all have opinions on how this or that will go down, but the truth is, we never know exactly what, or how things will happen!

Do you have some normalcy bias that needs to be put in check?
 
 
What Would You Do?

Put yourself in my position and think about what you would do. Had I done that previously, I would have thought I would have done better than I did. This just goes to show that theory is great, but simply can’t replace application and practice!

 
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From time to time, I write an article giving a possible scenario and ask you to consider what you would do in that situation. I then give my thoughts on what I would do in the comment section. I do this for a few reasons; first to help bring to light some of the “signs of the times”, and also to use this type of article to give you an idea of how I would respond. However, my favorite reason for this type of article is that some of you will share how you would respond!

Cyber-attack is a topic that has been on my mind for some time, and with the recent discovery of the Heartbleed vulnerability, I decided it would be a good time to cover it. While the types of attacks I’ll bring up are from my imagination, I do not think they are too far out of the realm of possibilities.

 
The Mother of All Cyber Attacks

While you are waking up, you turn the TV on to the local news, only to hear about a new cyber-attack that started taking place at roughly 2:00am. In that short amount of time, it is being reported that this attack coined “The Black Death” is reported to have affected 30% of all internet enabled computers and this number is rising quickly.

Once a computer becomes infected with the electronic plague, it installs backdoors into several well-known and trusted programs. Then the computer begins to replicate to any computer with a shared or network drive. The plague then sends infected messages to everyone in your email address book and all of your contacts in various social media on a continuous basis, re-infecting already infected computers, with a virus under a new name.

Interacting with infected programs will run executable programs that tax system resources so heavily that it will take up to ten seconds for any keyboard or mouse click to be recognized and responded to. Rebooting the computer flashes the system BIOS and the computer will only load the blue screen of death.

It is later discovered that this was just one prong of the Black Death, that the main focus of the attack was the internet itself. All infected computers join in a coordinated attack on various ISP’s and DNS servers in the largest denial of service attack in history.

The Black Death also takes advantage of a previously unknown vulnerability on switches, routers and other networking components of one of the world’s most popular brands. Routing tables that tell the router where to send information are deleted, causing the data to just drop.

As the days unfold, it is revealed that Russia and China have spent the last 10-15 years training computer programmers. Many of these well trained programmers have been hired in some of the leading IT companies. They used their position to hide malicious code in some very popular and widely used programs. Others created back doors enabling security breaches and vulnerabilities never thought possible.

Russia and China had a cyber-army waiting for these breaches to be exposed. Once they were, the very infrastructure of America was the target. The electric grid, water treatment facilities and various communications systems were all targeted with varying levels of success.

Between the denial of service attack, and corrupted routing tables, the internet is badly damaged in some places and completely broken in others. To stop the damage from spreading, the White House institutes the “Internet Kill Switch”.

Things to Keep in Mind

I’ll admit my scenario is a bit “out there”, but it doesn’t take something so dramatic to bring the Internet down. During the Arab spring there were countries that shut it down to stop the communication on social media sites. Many countries have very strict restrictions on it.

Aside from electricity, the internet is the single most used resource in business today. Many companies have their inventory tracking, databases, cloud storage, ordering systems and many more functions and features either hosted on the internet or communicated through it. There are some companies that would no longer exist if the internet was brought down.

How many things in your life rely on the internet? My job would be very difficult to do. This site and all others like it would not be reachable. Much of my entertainment is internet based; games, Netflix and so on. I honestly don’t know how much of our modern news is integrated with the internet. If the grid and water treatment centers were attacked, I’m not sure we would be able to tune in and watch the news.

The scenario described wouldn’t be a TEOTWAWKI event, but it would take some time and money to fix. The question becomes, how bad will things get in the interim?

See the comment section for my thoughts.

It’s been a long time since I’ve done a “What Would You Do?” post.  I thought today would be a good time to have another.  For those who haven’t seen these, the reason I write this type of post is because of the book The Survivors Club.   Author Ben Sherwood explores a theory developed by a man named John Leach called “The 10/80/10 rule”. In summary, the rule states that the top 10% of people in a crisis excel; they think clearly and take immediate action. The middle group comprises 80% of people; they are “quite simply stunned and bewildered”; “reasoning is significantly impaired and thinking is difficult”. The last 10% of people are the “ones you definitely want to avoid in an emergency”.

A few pages later he explains something called ‘behavioral inaction’; “The current theory of behavioral inaction goes like this: As your frontal lobes process the site of an airplane wing on fire, they seek to match the information with memories of similar situations in the past. If you have no stored experience of a plane crash, your brain can’t find a match and gets stuck in a loop trying and failing to come up with the right response. Hence: immobility.”

The scenario I describe today has a slim chance of happening just as I describe it but, as was discussed on Monday in “Current Threats to America with AlertsUSA”, North Korea has clearly put the Unites States in its crosshairs and made claims they would use a preemptive nuclear strike.  As AlertsUSA mentioned, what it might take for North Korea to attack, “…, we believe that move would not come out of aggression, but fear. Fear of attack and fear of the further choking of resources needed for the survival of the state.”

I chose this scenario because, if I was Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea, and was faced with extreme sanctions by the UN and threatened by joint American and South Korean military operation, this is how I would attack America; a sucker punch.  The event’s I’ll describe may seem far-fetched but I’m sure Japan attacking Pearle Harbor and destroying a large portion of the United States Pacific Naval fleet seemed far-fetched on December 6^th, 1941 until it happened the next day.

What would you do, North Korea Attacks

Due to continued nuclear testing and repeated threats of preemptive strike to the United States, the United Nations has passed the heaviest handed sanctions given to any country in its history.  The Chinese, Russian and Iranian leaders condemned planned joint military operation with the South Korean Navy that are to take place in the near future.

At 12:00 PM PST North Korea launches a low yield nuclear bomb on Seoul South Korea and a barrage of conventional missiles at American and South Korean military bases inside of South Korea.

At 1:00 PM PST a modified cargo ship hailing from China but originally from North Korea, has taken a long trade route and is currently in the Atlantic, roughly 500 miles from the East Coast, when it launches two mid-range nuclear missiles.  Both are headed to Washington D.C.  One is destroyed a minute before detonation.  The second detonates.

At 2:00 PM PST a modified cargo ship originally from North Korea, last docking in Hong Kong and now located in the Pacific, 200 miles away from California, launches two long range nuclear missiles.  The first missile, targeting military bases, detonates in San Diego California.  The second detonates in the stratus-sphere over the western hemisphere of the United States, destroying the electric grid over much of the western half of the U.S. and causing scattered blackouts over the rest of the country.

So, what would you do?

(Check the comments section to see the answers from myself and everyone else as well as to add your own.)

It’s been a while since I have posted a “What would you do?”, so I thought today is about time.

You and your husband/wife/best friend are on a late fall vacation and are given a discounted rate to a local tourist attraction.  It’s a two hour flight leaving at 4:00 PM that explores some of the most popular landmarks and scenery in the area, showing off the fall colors. The flight offers a small snack and drink at the half way point.  Shortly after the one hour mark the plane flies into a flock of large birds, possibly geese.  One of the birds breaks through the windshield and has either killed or knocked the pilot out.  The plane was at an altitude of maybe 1000 feet and you’re quickly crash landing into a wooded area.  From the crash the fuselage is nearly ripped in half, the radio is destroyed and fuel is leaking from the only remaining wing.

There were a total of twelve people on board, not including the pilot.  Only four others including your husband/wife/best friend are responding.  Your husband/wife/best friend has a broken leg, one of the others who is responding is bleeding heavily from the head, but seems alert.  You and one other flier are relatively unhurt.  You cannot tell immediately if the others who have not responded are simply unconscious or dead.

It’s an hour before you’re expected back, but it might be longer before any worry is aroused.  It could be a couple hours before anyone even knows something has happened.

What would you do?

(Check the comments section to see the answers from everyone as well as to add your own.)

In this “what would you do” I want you to think about a possible future situation where many people are not able to feed their pets. They have begun to take them to distant areas and release them, letting them run wild.  Many dogs have gone feral and some have formed packs. 

There are two things to consider:

1. What will you do to keep from being in this situation with your pets?
2. What will you do if you live near an area with feral dogs?

Its late spring and you’ve decided to try your hand at foraging.  You have a couple of trusted reference manuals and have found a place off the beaten path, so things shouldn’t be too terribly picked over.  You’ve seen a few different plants that you’ve been able to identify and pick. 

Then it dawns on you that you have been walking for a while and you decide to take a break and have some water.  While you are looking at everything you’ve found, it occurs to you that you’ve been out for well over an hour.  You realize that you’ve been looking so hard for plants to identify and going back and forth to your reference book, that you’re not sure where exactly you are. 

You’re sure you can find your way but after fifteen minutes, nothing looks familiar…  You’re lost and there is no cell service.

So, what would you do?

Dinner is cooking and you leave the kitchen briefly. A minute later the fire alarm starts screeching.

So, what would you do?

(Check the comments section to see the answers from everyone as well as to add your own.)

A quick note

I wrote an article last year about fire safety called Fire Safety, Before and After the Fan. If you haven’t read it, I recommend it, especially if you have small children. If your family doesn’t have an evacuation plan, this article can give you some pointers.