Everyone always talks about how to survive in the outdoors if you’re lost or stranded.
But what about urban survival?
This involves tips and tricks you need to know about in order to survive if you’re trapped in a city during a crisis or disaster.
While your bug-out or grab-and-go backpack containing survival items can help you when you want to escape the city in an emergency, you can’t always leave. When sheltering in place, you have to know how to survive and thrive.
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10 Best Urban Survival Tips
Stock Up On Food And Water
If you have to shelter in place and you can’t get to the local stores to top up on your water and food supply, you’ll need to ensure you already have those at home.
Start stocking up on them now. Ensure you have enough food and water for you and your family for at least three days. The food you buy should be non-perishable.
Find Shelter
What if you can’t shelter at home?
You will need to ensure that you know of a place nearby to which you can travel by foot. This can be an abandoned home or property, retail store, or even school. If you’re really desperate, it helps to know that you can hide out in a shed.
Pack A Survival Bag
You might not be able to leave the city, but you’ll need resources.
Make sure you have a backpack filled with important items, such as flashlights with extra batteries, a first aid kit with bandages and tourniquets, a folding pocket knife, storm-proof matches, a shortwave radio with extra batteries, extra medications, water bottles, gas masks, gloves, duct tape, and anything else you think will be important.
Improve Your Security
You might need to protect yourself and your family from dangerous people, so you need to ensure wherever you’re residing is a secure place.
This means locking all doors with heavy-duty locks, securing windows with bars, reinforcing sliding doors with wooden dowels, and replacing your external doors with steel ones.
Make sure your front door has a peephole installed so you’re always able to see who is right outside your home.
Know How To Forage For Food
What if you’re not at home and you don’t have your resources available?
You’ll have to know what foods you can eat in the outdoors. Knowing what plants are edible is a good start and here are some you’ll be able to find in the city: dandelions, nettles, plantain, ferns, and cattails.
If there’s chaos in the city, you can also scavenge for food in abandoned places such as grocery stores, schools, office buildings, gas stations, and abandoned cars.
Blend In!
You don’t want to draw attention to yourself in a survival situation as people could target you for your supplies – remember, everyone’s trying to stay alive!
With that in mind, make sure that you blend in with your appearance. Avoid carrying expensive backpacks or other gear. Wear dark clothing that isn’t patterned or colorful.
Get Some Power
When emergencies strike, the power is usually one of the first things to be affected. Make sure you have enough light and heat.
Stock up on candles as well as emergency flashlights and batteries, and start making use of solar energy, such as in the form of solar flashlights, lanterns, and chargers for your devices.
You also need to stock up on fuel, such as gasoline for your car and generator. Aim for approximately 30 gallons of gasoline for a few days of generator usage. Finally, stock up on coal or charcoal.
Buy A Bicycle
If you don’t want to stay at home during the crisis and you can get out, you should ensure that you have a quick and easy way out of the city.
Forget your car – the main roads will probably be chaotic or they might not even be open, such as if there’s a natural disaster. So, your best bet is to purchase a bicycle.
Of course, it helps to have a map of the city – on paper as well as on your device in case you can’t access the latter – and a few routes planned out in case you can’t use one or more of them.
Stay Informed
Since telephone networks could be out, you need to ensure you stay informed and can get in touch with loved ones. Ensure you have walkie-talkies and short-range radios.
Regular radios with which you can hear the news as well as be informed of any emergency updates are a must, but make sure you use a wind-up radio so that you don’t have to worry about batteries.
Find Bartering Items
You never know when you’ll need to barter with people in order to get items you need, so carry a few packs of cigarettes and sweets with you.
These can also help you forge friendly relationships with people. Survival is always better when you have more people with you!
What About Survival Weapons?
You never know when you’ll need to defend yourself and your family, especially since emergencies can sometimes bring out the worst in people. Therefore, make sure you have survival weapons.
These can include firearms (as long as you know how to safely use them), pepper spray, or stun guns, but it’s also useful to have some survival tools that could double up as weapons if need be. Examples include knives and tomahawks.
Related Questions
How can you purify water in the city?
Make sure you boil water you collect or tap water if it’s unsafe. You could also use water purifying tablets or buy a portable water filter.
How can you survive if you’re caught in a riot?
You should try to blend in with the crowd and move with them. Then, slowly make your way towards the edges of the crowd. It’s a good idea to stay with a small group of people if you pull away from the main crowd to draw less attention to yourself.
Conclusion
If your city is in chaos, you want to be able to protect yourself and your loved ones. In this article, we’ve featured 10 of the most important urban survival tips you need to ensure that you’ll survive the disaster that has struck without letting it overwhelm you.
