This is a sup­ple­ment to Bug Out Threats, Traf­fic and Fuel, Part One.  While trav­el­ing this week, it occurred to me I might have missed some­thing in the orig­i­nal post.  In fact it was brought to my atten­tion by a bud­dy of mine as we were chat­ting about the pos­si­bil­i­ty of hav­ing to Bug Out.  The dis­cus­sion was cen­tered around traf­fic that may be stalled on the roads post EMP or post mass evac­u­a­tion where fuel in vehi­cles might be an issue, where­in many vehi­cles run out of fuel while “on the road.”  Should this hap­pen there will be a pletho­ra of vehi­cles on the highway(s) and the pos­si­bil­i­ty of many strand­ed refugees. This could in fact, be an OPSEC night­mare if you did­n’t bug out ear­ly enough.  By that I mean, you wait­ed a day or two to see how the emer­gency or sit­u­a­tion unfolds only to find it may be worse than you sus­pect­ed it would be and you make the late deci­sion to bug out.  This assumes your bug out plans are lim­it­ed to major arter­ies that must be nav­i­gat­edto get from point A — point B.  This does­n’t include sub­urbs just out­side a major city which pro­vide their own OPSEC issues of trav­el­ing loot­ers / locusts that are tak­ing con­trol of home after home look­ing for resources to con­sume.

The point here, is if there is an inor­di­nate amount of traf­fic that is stalled and refugees milling around, and you come through in your bug out vehi­cle on the down the side of the high­way, you may find your BOV being fol­lowed, addressed, attacked by tired, hun­gry, angry refugees in need of shel­ter, med­ical help, and more.  The metaphor I would use would be zom­bies…

The point my bud­dy was try­ing to make was from a scene in the film War of the Worlds with Tom Cruise.  There was a scene where, he appar­ent­ly changed a coil or part on a vehi­cle that was dis­abled via EMP to get it run­ning.  when he did, a mob of peo­ple went after him and the car because it was the only run­ning vehi­cle that could escort (poten­tial­ly) some­one to safe­ty.  I per­son­al­ly do not remem­ber the scene, but my bud­dy remem­bers it pret­ty well, appar­ent­ly.