Ragnar Benson - Ragnar's Urban Survival

As an interesting aside, the French Resistance generally kept larger supplies of ammo and explosives cached separate from guns. Immediately before use, they were all brought together. It is lost in history exactly why. Perhaps it was part of their security plan.

Heavy duty, 4-inch SDR pipe retails for about $.95 per foot. Six-inch pipe costs about $1.55 per foot, and 8-inch—our most commonly used size—is still only about $4.15 per running foot.

End caps must be placed on the tubes. Cache tubes are virtually always buried vertically. This minimizes readings from modern metal detectors that can locate a ¾-inch steel pipe 35 feet down in the ground!

Once buried vertically, cache tubes are impractical to dig up and use again. Bottom end caps are usually permanently sealed to the pipe with ABS cement. Plain, slip-type end caps for 4-inch pipe cost about $1.50 each. Six-inch caps are $7.00, and common 8-inch slip caps cost a whopping $21.00 each. Top caps are simply slid onto the pipe; no cement is used. In place of ABS cement, use regular automotive grease. Properly done, a positive pressure builds inside the pipe when the cap is slipped on the tube, acting as a deterrent to moisture.

One more precaution before burying. Place a stout disk with a sound piece of nylon cord attached to it at the bottom of the tube. This allows the retrieval of small items that may fall to the bottom.

To bury cache tubes, first purchase, borrow, or rent a 10-inch auger-type posthole digger. In times past, 12-inch hand-operated models were available that made this work easier, but these went with the dinosaurs and family farms. But, by slopping the auger around a bit, a 10-inch auger can be made to work with an 8-inch tube. Renting a power unit that bores true 12-inch holes is also possible.

The big problem with either hand or power diggers is getting down a full 6 feet. Cache tubes must be placed no less than 1 foot underground to the top of the pipe.

Lengths of ¾-inch steel pipe can be used to extend handoperated auger diggers. Most rental outfits have standard auger extensions they send along, allowing for much deeper holes when using their power augers. Boring one of these holes by hand is labor intensive and time consuming. At best, plan for one or two cache tube holes per afternoon.

Try to be clever about tube placement. For starters, never hide tubes in the septic system or sewer. It’s the first place federal agents look! Inside cities attempt to place cache tubes as far from the retreat as practically possible. Every doubling of distance creates four times as much territory to examine. That’s enough that if you haven’t bragged about the cache’s existence: authorities may be discouraged and give up on the project.

Cities are also full of cables, wires, buried junk, pipes, and other metal clutter. Near these obstructions are wonderful places to bury caches in contrast to the country, expert metal detector users claim.

But leaving cache tubes to revisit storage methods and philosophies, I am often asked how one can go about implementing a foolproof storage plan that won’t leave big holes in one’s storage inventory after it is too late to add more items. There is a plan that is something of a Golden Rule of Storage Accumulation, but it only works when there are at least 14 months remaining to crisis time. Survivors in Kosovo, for instance, could no longer make any use of this plan.

Start by working your way through your own basic Rule of Threes. For instance, what supplies are required to implement your own development of three energy, food, shelter, and water requirements? Carefully calculate all the tools and implements needed that can either be scrounged after commencement of the crisis or, more realistically, should be on hand before it hits.

In the instance of water, this might include five or six covered plastic buckets to carry water, five or six plastic tarps to collect water, a large supply of nylon rope with which to deploy the tarps, a wooden carrying rack for the buckets, plastic barrels, pipe, bleach, chemicals to make bleach, filter racks, sand, handpumps, well pipe, and whatever other specific items might be required to run a three-element water enterprise.

Do the same for food. Specific recommendations were covered in the food chapter. No need to list these again.

But what about livestock-keeping supplies, including cages, feed, water dishes, and sources of breeding stock? Some of these should be stockpiled now. What about guns and ammo to collect wild and semi-wild game? Will traps and snares be required? Better plan for these as well.

Energy requirements are similar. Many of us rely on a pipe to bring natural gas into our homes, or on oil, firewood, or even heat pumps. Will there be generators to power freezers and some minimal heat and light? Should large LP gas tanks or diesel fuel tanks be purchased, buried, and filled? Some city survivors have as many as twelve or fifteen 55-gallon barrels of diesel fuel or gasoline tucked away in mini-storage units listed under an assumed name. Burning scrap wood is a fine plan for city survivors, but what about a stove or simple device in which to burn this wood? Are there sufficient matches to last a year or more?

Are portable tents and sleeping bags one element of your shelter plan? Several tents in good repair, as well as eight or 10 plastic or canvas tarps should be placed in storage. Rope, it was mentioned, is always in short supply. Currently it is easy to stock up on it just go to the hardware store and buy what is needed, all to be placed in storage.

Often city survival sheltering is more a matter of preparing for several different possible city collapse situations, and of being sufficiently flexible to camp here and there. This is more important than making a great, long list of needed supplies. After tents, tarps, rope, and a few tools, that’s about it.

All this notwithstanding, there really is a Golden Rule of Survival Storage that infallibly leads to each survivor having pretty much all of the stuff he or she needs for his or her own use and for trade. As mentioned, this plan works wonderfully, but not overnight. This plan involves double-buying all goods, commodities, and supplies in the current scheme of one’s normal shopping. Absolutely every time a purchase is made, that purchase should be evaluated for survival storage and trade potential. When it fits, buy two or more.

In real life it worked like this, just last week, for me. Our shopping list included the following:

• A 2-gallon yard and garden pressure-type hand sprayer. I bought one extra to trade.

• Fifty pounds of wheat flour. A 50-pound bag of flour lasts us 7 months. We already had one extra, but I decided to purchase two more.