Anyone cashed their cache yet?

[turkeyrun]

Main cache is bug in. Storm situation or medical. Probably less than 2 weeks, but month or is not a problem.

Bug out location is less than a days walk. No need for cache in route. Vehicular assistance allows transportation of bug in caches, interned, injured, non-ambulatory, etc.

My caches are more towards sealed, resealable, moveable, stackable.

But, I'm not in a major urban area, so my situation would be a couple steps ahead of you.

My one remark to your plan. Why SE? family, property, ????? That area is a crossroads from population centers; Tulsa, OKC, Dallas, and all the surrounding. I'm thinking less populated.

Side note.
When we cleaned out my grandma's house, found some black eye peas she had canned. Jars still sealed, in dark cool cabinet. Had been there 11 yrs and they were DELICIOUS.

 

[1krr]

I'm thinking south east just because from where I live/work that takes me away from population areas the fastest. Also, SE Oklahoma seems to have good soil and water resources, natural shelter materials (trees, elevation changes, etc). As I understand it, the rocky soil and terrain makes it harder for large production scale agriculture vs western Oklahoma but for smaller survival garden type ag, it isn't as big a deal especially if you can prep an acre or two before hand. The population densities in the SE 1/4 of the state are also pretty low. The western side of the state would probably be the best place to avoid fallout but with the ongoing drought and wideopen spaces make it a little harder to blend into the scenery, it seems less harder unless you are already established there.

That said, any prefered direction is a 51/49 split subject to making the call on any given Sunday. Below is a link to some various fallout projection maps. These various maps are spread all over tin foil hat sites (is that hypocritical? ) but most are government or thinktank maps of some vintage. If you scan through them, they seem to vary along the lines of considering a counter-force vs counter-value stike and time of year. In Oklahoma, prevailing midlevel winds are generally west to east with whatever northernly or southernly component depending on the time of year.

http://becuo.com/nuclear-fallout-map-projections

Beyond drought, SE Oklahoma also tends to have more percipitation which means sustainence gardening is a little easier. Using tornados as a reference guide, SE Oklahoma has fewer tornadic thunderstorms which, subject to opinion, might translate to more rain out of slightly less severe storms that could damage shelters or crops/livestock.

http://www.srh.noaa.gov/oun/?n=tornadodata-county-ok-oklahoma

The reality is that it's a crapshoot and you will won't know until you are on the other side of this thing. But having a direction and a goal are needed survival tools themselves. It's when there isn't a sense of purpose or hope that bad things happen.

Would like to know more about those 11yr old peas!

 

[Blitzfike]

I'm originally from Broken Bow in McCurtain County, S.E. Oklahoma. I grew up in the woods and hills there. I often thought that would be a great place to bug in after a nuclear exchange. Several years ago, working in State Civil Defense, I was shown some maps detailing projected fallout regions as dictated by target locations and prevailing winds. S.E. Oklahoma is going to glow in the dark if that ever comes to pass. No place in Oklahoma is going to be safe in that case, too many targets both within and without the state boundaries that will create fallout for prevailing winds to distribute. West Texas looks to be one of the most fallout free areas within a few hundred miles of central Oklahoma. Should that come to pass, I think being at ground zero would be the best place to be. Subsistance gardening in West Texas would be a challenge as dry as it is there..

 

[1krr]

You're right, pretty much all of those maps say the same thing. Even counter-force strikes in Oklahoma would hit Ft Sill, McAlester, Tinker, Altus, and others. With Russia's nuclear policy of "all for any" as well as use of nuclear weapons for any conflict that threatens the existance of the Russian Federation as a state, I don't see any conflict with Russia being anything less than a total exchange.

The good news is that being in a fallout area doesn't mean uninhabital. The mechanism that makes fallout so dangerous also means it decays rapidly. The rule of 7s says that the radiation emissions of fallout decrease ~90% for every factor of seven hours of the radiation levels measures at 1 hour. So at 7 hours, the ionizing radiation levels are ~10% of what they were at 1 hour. At 49 hours (7*7), it's about 1% of what it was at 1 hour and so on. This is a useful planning number since it gives you a ball park of how long you need to stay in your shelter but it also tells you at what point the radioactive particles in your environment have dcayed to a point that you can start to work in it and for what amount of time.

http://www3.nd.edu/~nsl/Lectures/phys205/pdf/Nuclear_Warfare_9.pdf

The bad news of course is that radiation exposure is cumulative so you have to plan for it. I am trying to find it, but I did see a cool wind map from Mesonet that shows the general wind patterns over time at various stations and it seemed like over a year, central and southern oklahoma more often than not have a northernly component. So if the jet stream is north of us with a warm front coming up from the gulf as often happens in the spring through early fall, se OK might get a minimum amount of fallout. What it does get will likely come from Dallas as most other military and industrial targets are far enough away that the heaviest (and most radioactive particles) will "fall out" before they get there. Also, counter-value strikes will likely be airbursts to maximize blast damage on soft industrial targets. This is good news for fallout although runways long enough to support heavy bombers will get dug up by ground bursts which is bad news for fallout. That said, even Castle Bravo which is arguably the dirtiest atmospheric explosion with a strong wind pattern "only" sent the most dangerous radiation about 100 miles and 100 rad levels at about 300 miles 96 hours after. That was a 15mt ground burst yeilding ~10mt of it's energy from fission (need to cite this but I'll find the article if I can). Fission products are by far the biggest contributor to fallout and if I remember right, it was the largest fission reaction ever including tsar bomba which of it's ~50mt only pulled about 3% from it's fission primer.

Castle Bravo:

I don't think we will face many megaton yield weapons as smaller mirved weapons are in vogue with their designers. A mirved attack allows a designer to attack multiple targets but it is also to amplify blast effects on targets since a series of relatively small ~80-500kt blasts are more destructive than a single large warhead of equivilent megatonage. This philosophy also bodes well for limited fallout since an attack of this type would likely also be an airbust attack since it's focusing on maximizing blast. This attack pattern will be the "city busters" I think we will face from ICBM and SLBM attacks. In the middle of the US, I'm not putting a great deal of emphasis on bomber based attacks given the characteristics of the Russian bomber fleet and the likelyhood that a decent number of fighters based in the central us will escape attacks on bases and be available to defend agaist bombers. In addition, bomber attacks will likely be offset weapons like cruise missles vs gravity bombs.

All that said is how I got to SE Oklahoma being a doable bugout location since in the best of my limited ability, the total fallout should be realitively limited by the distance to the targets I expect keeping the heaviest particles dropping out upwind and the ability to "wait out" the remaining lighter particles to decay to managable levels. Could be wrong about all of this (probably am) but given what I know, this is the best I've come up with so far.

Plus land seems to be a little cheaper down there so picking up a few acres somewhere obscure to cache on seems more doable. Since you are from the area, what do you think? Fallout not withstanding, am I way off base on my assumptions for personal scale ag and sustainability?


EDIT: sorry if I'm hijacking the original post. LMK and I'll move/delete it.

 

[turkeyrun]

You have put a lot of thought and research into this.
Interesting points. The heavy forestation would be an advantage.
We are in some of the least populated area, but as you stated; it's a crap shoot.

What do you want to know about the peas?
Grandad always had huge garden. What wasn't eaten fresh was usually home canned. When visiting we always carried boxes of canned goods back. A product of the Depression, poor, and self sufficient.
The seals were marked in Marks-A-Lot with the date.

After my Grandmother passed, we were cleaning out the house. She had kitchen cabinets lining the utility room. This was her canning storage. Many pints and quarts of fruits and vegs were in the cabinets. All were a minimum of 5 yrs old. 3 quarts of purple hull, black eyed, cow peas were found, date 11 yrs old.
All sealed were good. We ate everything we found. The peas, and everything else, was as flavorful as if it had been picked that day.

 

[Blitzfike]

I grew up eating mostly canned stuff, I can still remember seeing the little squirrels bodies packed 3 or 4 to a jar, no heads, or paws. They were really good, Mom used to take them out and make gravy with them or dumplings. You could also fry them and they were good as well. Lots of peas, beans, peaches, berries of what ever kind we could find to pick, and of course the wild plums. Best tasting cobblers in the world were the black berry and plum cobblers. We raised chickens, had fresh eggs and fried chicken on Sundays. Ate pinto beans and cornbread most days for lunch. I was a pretty big kid before I found out that salt pork wasn't bacon. As to S.E. OK for a Bugout-Cache area, If you were going to be there I would say no problem, but if you are planning to build something and leave it for periodic use, there has been a lot of vandalism and outright destruction of property there in recent years. If you plan to cache something, be sure to hide it well. Most of the soil depth in that region is pretty shallow unless you get near a river bottom or good size creek in a bottom area. Land has gone up a lot in the last few years, but is still a better deal than most of the rest of the state. A source of water is a big item in your search, drilling through that rock would be tough. I had kin folks all over that area, McCurtain and Push counties with hand dug wells, (or maybe blasted) so I know it can be done. I think somewhere down around Tom would get you to some tillable land and water, not much there though except maybe the drug trade.