Teamwork for Suburban and Urban Survival – Part Four

Okay, in part four Team­work for Sub­ur­ban and Urban Sur­vival, today we talk about a list of skills that we may think are impor­tant for you, your friends, and team to know in a short or long term sur­vival sit­u­a­tion.  As I scour the Inter­net for lists of essen­tial skills to pick and choose from, I came across one of Jack Spirko’s (Pub­lish­er of The Sur­vival Pod­cast) Website’s called Save Our Skills that tries to cap­ture, pre­serve, and pub­lish the process­es of skills that are just not taught any­more.  The site is in its infan­cy in my opin­ion, but has the poten­tial to blow up.

Here is a list of the skills that I think every­one should you should look at.  By no means do I think it is com­plete, nor 100% cor­rect. So feel free to com­ment and add to the list as you wish.

• Shel­ter (Why – to pro­tect your­self from the ele­ments, have a base of oper­a­tions, and pro­tec­tion from oth­er exter­nal forces of nature)
  • Con­struc­tion, Elec­tri­cian, Plumb­ing, mason­ry, HVAC, refrig­er­a­tion
    • Both cur­rent and more prim­i­tive meth­ods of con­struc­tion, plumb­ing, etc.
• Food (Pro­duc­tion of food and water)
  • Water, Farm­ing, gar­den­ing, hunt­ing, fish­ing, butcher­ing, preser­va­tion of food and water.  Hunt­ing is a skill that too many urban­ites or sub­ur­ban­ites have nev­er par­tak­en of.
  • Trans­porta­tion (I don’t care who you are, if you have to get from point A to B you want to get there in a rea­son­able amount of time that does not reduce your pro­duc­tiv­i­ty enough to incon­ve­nience you)
• Auto repair (this will be huge), Bio Diesel refine­ment, Motor­cy­cle and ATV (snow­mo­bile, quad, three wheel­er) repair, Boat repair, small engine repair
• Com­mu­ni­ca­tions (If you are in a closed com­mu­ni­ty, the com­mu­ni­ty may choose to run their own com­mu­ni­ca­tions sys­tems instead of rely upon the tele­phone com­pa­ny.  This can be accom­plished with an elec­tron­ic phone sys­tem.  How­ev­er, if this is the case, spe­cial­ized skills would be required to main­tain the sys­tem, and it would most like­ly be more than an a one man job)
  • Ham Radio, Short Wave Radio, CB, GMRS, FRS, land line, and mobile/cellular all will be impor­tant assum­ing the wired and unwired net­works are still run­ning post SHTF.  Assume stan­dard com­mu­ni­ca­tions via wired and cel­lu­lar mobile will be dis­rupt­ed and plan for that.
• Secu­ri­ty (Secu­ri­ty against dif­fer­ent threats both nat­ur­al and man-made)
  • Perime­ter secu­ri­ty, both tra­di­tion­al and non-tra­di­tion­al. i.e. non-tra­di­tion­al mean­ing more tac­ti­cal than one might expect pre SHTF to pro­tect from WROL sit­u­a­tions, civ­il unrest, etc.
  • Law Enforce­ment – (Post SHTF or TEOTWAWKI you may have to form your own law enforce­ment sub-group depend­ing whether or not you are in a self con­tained com­mu­ni­ty, your group size is grow­ing, etc).
• Med­ical Per­son­nel – (Besides imme­di­ate need after the SHTF, there will be long term effect, as well as rou­tine med­ical, den­tal, and oth­er needs of the group and the com­mu­ni­ty.  These peo­ple will be invalu­able.  The group may be great, but with­out med­ical per­son­nel, if some­one gets sick, there will not be much you can do with­out a doc­tor, den­tist, sur­geon, etc. around)
  • EMT, Nurs­es, Physi­cian, den­tist, Phar­ma­cist, fam­i­ly prac­ti­tion­ers, etc.
• White Col­lar Pro­fes­sion­als (Yes, I said white col­lar pro­fes­sion­als, such as accoun­tants, lawyers, actu­ar­ies, finan­cial pro­fes­sion­als, etc.  These peo­ple are pri­mar­i­ly well edu­cat­ed, and are very intel­li­gent.  Their blue col­lar skills may be lack­ing, a lot, but they may be influ­en­tial when debat­ing large deci­sions with the group, have the abil­i­ty to catch on quick­ly to new con­cepts, etc).
• Edu­ca­tors (enough said)
• Breed­ers (Well, let’s face it, oth­er coun­tries are buy­ing more oil, prices are going up, and gaso­line or oil prod­ucts might be at a pre­mi­um in a Mad Max world.  Revert­ing back to Hors­es, Don­key, Lla­ma, Camel, what­ev­er, may be the only option…  If that is the case these ani­mals serve sev­er­al pur­pos­es: trans­porta­tion, food, fer­til­iz­er, and pos­si­bly more.  I hate to bring it up, but it real­ly is what it is).
  • With this type of trans­porta­tion you will need peo­ple to care for the ani­mals as well as fash­ion sad­dles, build barns, etc… i.e. – more peo­ple required…

In con­clu­sion of Part Four, you might have MANY more cat­e­gories for dis­cus­sion.  If this is the case, please com­ment and let me know what oth­er “per­son­nel” you might sug­gest…   In part five of this series, we will exam­ine how the mil­i­tary might deal with orga­ni­za­tion and what makes them so effec­tive in a cri­sis sit­u­a­tion.