We Are Moving

Hey everyone! Zombie Apocalypse Survivor is moving to a new blog IndianaMagnum.blogspot.com 

We've got lots of tips and stories about  prepping, Emergency Survival, disasters, guns, zombies  and other good stuff. 

Please follow us there! 

Brian

Zombie Gear Special At Marstar

 Things have been a little bit dark and serious on here as of late with all the talk of Bird Flu and Tornado's and such. So here is something a little more fun.......

Zombie Gear Special

Now I think the shotgun would be a fantastic Zombie Destroyer I am not sure about the single action revolver. The single action is nice and simple and reliable but its just so slow to reload.

Answer to Zombie Apocalypse Survival Quiz #2

 Answer:

 #3. Why? Because a snowshoe hare will run in a circle IF being chased. He will come back to his "home" or spot where he was hiding as long as he can't stop and hide somewhere else.

 So if one of you chases him, he'll run in a circle and come right back to where he was first seen. That's when the second person can be successful and bring back meat for supper. Snowshoe hares have very small and precise territories so it wouldn't take that rabbit long to return

Zombie Apocalypse Survival Quiz #2

It's the Zombie Apocalypse. Everyone in your group is hungry. You and a friend are out in the woods hoping to find game. You scare up a Snowshoe Rabbit and it runs off. He's running too fast to shoot with any guarantee of making the shot

Question: What should you and your buddy do? (i.e, what's the best way to get that rabbit)

1. Both of you should run after it
2. One should stay where you are, and one should run after it
3. Both should stay where you are and hope the rabbit returns

Answer to yesterday's Zombie Apocalypse Survival Quiz

Answer to yesterday's Zombie Apocalypse Survival Quiz:

Reload and wait. Because ducks pair bond for life  duck # 2 will do a circle as he/she flies off and will immediately return to his/her mate. If you take the dead duck away, the second duck won't come back because she will see you. Yes there is a slight danger that someone or something else will grab the carcass before duck #2 gets back but it should only take him/her about 2 minutes to return.

Global warming is a concern for preppers

With all the freaky weather the World has been experiencing the last few years it has become apparent that any one who is concerned about preparing for the future must add the effects of possible climate change into their plans.

How each person prepares for climate change depends on many factors. The most important of course being where you live.

We must each look at our location and think about what effects global warming is likely to have in our area. For example Florida is likely to experience more Hurricanes, flooding, extreme heat etc. The Midwest may get dryer and hotter and become more desert like.

We must also look at and prepare for the effects that climate change could have on the population and what the results could be.

One of the biggest problems with climate change is the devastating effect it may have on agriculture. Farmers all over the world rely on predictable weather. The farmer must know what the weather in his area will be like so he knows when and what to plant. But it seems that one of the affects of climate change is weird and unpredictable weather leading to crop failure. Now it is true the crops fail in one country or another almost every year. However in the modern world we are able to move food around all over the world with ease, so a crop failure in one country is not that much of a problem in the big picture.

However climate change opens up the possibility of world wide crop failure. If crops were to fail all over the world it would lead to mass starvation in poorer countries and possibly even starvation in some of the more wealthy countries. If crops were to fail 2 years in a row then you would have mass starvation every where.

We must also remember that starvation on a mass scale brings with it a host of other problems. Crime goes up. Populations start to move as they look for food. Governments can fall. You get an increase in all kinds of disease. And hungry countries may even go to war over limited resources. The list of bad things goes on and on.

So if you are prepping I would advise you take climate change into consideration. You may be glad you did.

Defending What You Have in an Emergency Situation

Defending what you have

So you are going to a lot of work to make sure you have all the supplies you need to weather the coming storm. Now it's time to start thinking about how you will defend what you have.

No one can tell you how to defend your place as only you know your unique circumstances. But there are a few general things that everyone needs to think about.

A Strong Defensive Perimeter

You need a strong perimeter. No matter how big or how small your perimeter is you must make it as secure as possible. Now perhaps your perimeter is only the walls of your apartment. Maybe it's the walls or yard of your home in suburbia. Or it's the fence around your 100 acres in the country.
The principle is still the same. You want to make it as secure as you possibly can to keep the bad guys out and you and your stuff safe.

Secure Doors & Windows

With that in mind start thinking about what you can do to strengthen your perimeter now and what you can do when the Zombies hit the fan. Look at your doors. Look at your windows. Look at your fence. What can you do to secure them. Extra locks? Bars on the windows? Some barbwire on your fence.

What can you have on hand to make them even more secure in an emergency? Big chains and padlocks? Heavy furniture pushed up against the doors and windows? Plywood to nail over the windows? Boards with nails in them to slow down attackers? There are hundreds of things you can do.

Do What You Can NOW, Not After the Crisis Hits

But you must start to plan it now. You won't be able to run to the store and get what you need in the middle of a disaster. And you may be too stressed out to think as clearly about what you need to do during a disaster.

And don't forget, you are planning what you can quickly do to strengthen your perimeter until you can fortify your dwelling even more or better. This is your Quick Plan for Defense.

Make Your Emergency Defense Plan

So make your plan and discuss it with others who will be there with you. Make sure everyone knows exactly what their job is to secure your shelter and your food stores.

We'll talk about weapons in my next blog post.

Record Heat Wave Affects Millions Without Power

It's been a week of record high temperatures in much of N. America. Millions are without power after storms knocked out power from Georgia to Missouri to New York.

Imagine yourself in this situation. Power is out and doesn't look like it's going to be restored for a week or more. Are you prepared? Can you manage and be self-sufficient during this time? Or will you be one of those who has to go to a community shelter and depend on handouts?

If you're new to thinking about being prepared, or if you've been a prepper for awhile but want more tips and suggestions for food storage, defense, bug-out plans, bug-out bags,  food preparation during a survival situation, please read our articles on Zombie Apocalypse Survivor Blog.  Topics are on the right.

Don't be someone who has to sleep in a crowded shelter because you haven't got a survival plan or any food stored.

Bath Salts Drug Turns People into Zombies

Are bath salts turning people into zombies? A new powerful street drug called Bath Salts is causing unpredictable and violent behaviour in users.

Bath salts, a lab-brewed drug that unpredictably mimics a powerful combination of coke, meth, and Ecstasy, are suspected behind the naked face-eating attack in Miami that left a homeless man nearly dead.


They are suspected in the case of the New Jersey man who stabbed himself and threw his own intestines at officers.

Some reports:

Man skins himself alive while on bath salts

‘Bath salts’ drug believed to be behind violent assault on Toronto cops, arrests in Calgary

Bath Salts man due in Court in California shovel attack

Are these the zombies we should be worried about? Is this the start of the Zombie Apocalypse? You decide. 

Texas Man in Zombie Like Attack Eats Dog

There has been another bizarre “zombie-like” attack in the United States. The latest involves a Texas man who attacked several people, before brutally killing a dog and eating it, according to police.

These are the zombies we need to worry about if there's an emergency situation or crisis! If the economy collapses, if there's a horrific flood or earthquake or super volcano eruption. If there's any kind of collapse of society or a viral outbreak and people are starving because they didn't prepare... this is what we will have to defend our homes and families from.

Make sure your prepper plans include a defense plan. I'll talk about that in a later post and share my plans and ideas. Would like to hear yours!

Don't Make Excuses to Not Prepare for Emergency Situations

People often tell me they can't stockpile food for emergencies because a) they can't afford to or b) they have no room in their house/apartment.

Well I'm here to tell you how wrong you are!

Money and Budgets

Let's talk about money and budgeting for emergency survival preparedness:

Even if you can't budget $50.00 a month, maybe you can set aside $25.00 to purchase basic survival foods such as a bag of rice

Try buying one extra item each time you grocery shop. Buy one can of tuna (on sale of course) one week. Buy a box of cereal another. These are your Zombie Apocalpyse Supplies! Set them aside. Label them "ZA" or "Survival" or whatever you want to call them. Do whatever you need to do to start stockpiling food supplies for emergencies

Buy bruised fruit on sale (my wife got 20 bananas for $1.00 a few weeks ago) and then dehydrate it and store it.

I'm pretty sure that you can give up one or two cups of coffee each week to buy some food for survival and emergency crisis situations.

Lack of Space

My wife's amazing at finding spaces where she can store our emergency survival foods. Here's some of her ideas:

* Under the bed. Guess what - you can store a lot of bottles of water or cans of food under a bed

* In closets. Use the floor for boxes of food, then put your shoes on top. Move your purses off the shelf and put food there

* Inside empty containers. My wife collects antique tins. One day she realized that all the tins she had on display are empty. They're already taking up space so all she did was start storing candies, soap and other little items in them. You will need to have a sheet in your Survival Emergency Plans binder that outlines where every food item is stored

* Re-organize the Spare bedroom. You should consider turning your spare guest room into a ZA room. Why waste the space on a few guests a few times a year? Turn it into a storage room for emergency supplies. We started by stacking wine pails full of pasta, rice, corn, wheat etc between the guest bed and the wall. We quickly ran out of room so we added cheap plastic shelving in the same room. These hold small items like canned goods, sugar, honey, oil and so on.

We were still too limited space-wise so we got rid of the guest bed. Now we have a choice. We can eliminate the guest bed completely and visitors will have to get a motel/hotel room OR we can have pails of food/water with a mattress on top.

We could also go with empty rain barrels full of food or water instead of wine pails, then put a mattress on top. We'd fix it up so it looks good and put a long bed skirt over the pails so it doesn't look junky.

* Under the sink(s) You don't need all the junk that we all keep under the kitchen and bathroom sinks. Clean it out and store small food items that will not be harmed by moisture. We store soap, extra toilet paper, shampoos, dental supplies such as floss and toothpaste, as well as canned goods under our sinks. You can also store water there.

Dehydrating Foods for Survival in a Zombie Apocalypse

Ronco  5-Tray Electric Food Dehydrator

Dehydrating Rhubarb

Dehydrating fruits and vegetables is a great way to store nutritious foods for a Zombie Apocalypse. It's cheap and it's easy. You can buy a dehydrator for anywhere from $30.00 to $300.00. Yes the more expensive ones are faster and more efficient. But the cheaper ones work fine. We have both.

You can also use your oven as long as you can set it to 125'. Some ovens won't set that low. Ours has a special dehydrator setting. We bought mesh to cover the oven racks so the fruit and vegetable pieces don't fall through.

We use ours to dehydrate rhubarb, lemons, celery, potatoes, yams, mushrooms, cabbage, bananas, apples, zucchini and more. We pick fresh from the garden. We buy bruised fruit on sale. We dehydrate leftovers that were sure to be tossed or fed to our pigs.

Cut the Rhubarb

To dehydrate you need a sharp knife. There's other things you can use such as a shredder for cabbage, or a saline solution to stop apples turing brown but you don't have to have them! Just thinly slice your fruit or vegetable, put it on the trays, turn the dehydrator on to the correct temperature (usually 125-135' for fruit or vegetables) and let it go for 8 to 12 hours.

Check on the food after about 8 hours to be sure it's not over-drying. When it's hard or leathery, let it sit for a few minutes to cool then store in a clean glass jar. You don't have to buy fancy mason jars, just save and wash your jam jars, salsa jars, spaghetti sauce jars - whatever you have on hand.

Dehydrating foods to store for emergency situations is a space saver. Recently my wife took 10 cups of fresh rhubarb and dehydrated it. She ended up with 2 cups of dried rhubarb.

Label your jar with the name of what's inside, the date (we use month and year) and if you remember, the amount of fresh you started with. When you're ready to use the dried food, you will need to find out whether you leave overnight in water to rehydrate or toss it in as is and cook as dried or eat right from the jar.

Dried rhubarb for example rehydrates well if put in pan of water (you don't need much, just barely cover the dried fruit) and leave overnight.  When we do apples we sprinkle sugar and cinnamon on some so we can eat them as a treat. Experiment. Remember to try things out now so that when the Zombie Apocalypse hits you aren't left wondering what the heck you do with the stuff you prepped and stored beforehand.

Excalibur 3900 Deluxe Series 9 Tray Food Dehydrator - Black Here's the big 9-tray food dehydrator we use. It works great. It gives efficient all-round drying as there is a fan inside that circulates the hot air.

You don't get even drying in the cheaper dehydrators but we have one of those too. All my wife does is rotate the trays every few hours.


Caveat: I use the words Zombie Apocalypse tongue-in-cheek. It's a way of making us all sit up and take notice of what's going on in the world. Hopefully it will encourage you to get started on your Emergency Food Preparation and Survival Plan

Stockpile Things Other Than Food

Human beings by nature tend to be short sighted. We often think only of today or perhaps tomorrow. We have a hard time thinking a year or perhaps longer down the road. But long term planing is very important for any of us who believe that the ZA (Zombie Apocalypse) could last for more than a few days or weeks.

Stockpiling food is a prime example of short sighted thinking. While I agree it is incredibly important to have as much food on hand as you possibly can. You also need to think about what you are going to do when that stockpile inevitably runs out. What do you need to have in order to start producing your own food. Do you have seeds for planting? Do you have the tools you need? Do you have the skills you need? Do you know how to hunt? Do you know how to fish? And yes you can stockpile skills and knowledge. You may not hunt of fish or farm but you can learn about these things and stockpile it in your head for a rainy day. You can also get books and print things of value off the Internet and add them to your survival library.

Medical supplies are another incredibly important thing to stock up on. You will not be able to run to the store and get a bottle of peroxide during the ZA. Ammunition for your guns. Fuel like gasoline, diesel, propane. Matches. Cleaning supplies like bleach and ammonia. The list of things that would be great to have is endless so each of us has to come up with our own ideas of what is important.

Remember also that you may be able to trade extra things you have for supplies you need. So if you have the opportunity to get more of something than you think you need don't pass it up. I found .22cal ammo on sale for $10 per box of 550 rounds. I now have way more than I need but I know lots of people wont. It could be worth more than gold to someone who has run out.

So yes food comes first. But food is only the beginning.
 
   

This is why you need to prepare for the Zombie Apocalypse

Haiti was on the edge of anarchy last night as looters fought with earthquake survivors over food and water supplies.

UN peacekeepers battled to keep control in the devastated country, where the death toll could reach 200,000.

International agencies were desperately battling to deliver life-saving aid yesterday but the desperation of survivors left without homes, food or water led to widespread looting and violence.


Read More

Low Cost Weapons Part 1

So you need to arm yourself for the coming Zombie Apocalypse but you have a problem, no cash. Well rejoice my friend because all is not lost. You can still arm yourself with some pretty effective weaponry and not break the bank doing it. Now for the purpose of this discussion I have divided the types of possible weapons into two categories. Hand to hand combat weapons and projectile weapons.

Low cost hand to hand combat weapons

Hand to hand combat weapons are the easiest to either purchase or make do to the simple and obvious fact that any object you can hold in your hand can be used as a weapon. However it’s not advisable to try to defend yourself with a tea cup. But if all you have is a tea cup, then by all means use it. Hand to hand combat weapons also have the advantage of being legal to possess, at least for the most part, in most places. Check the laws ware you live. You don’t want to be in jail when the apocalypse happens.

One of the first things that most survival experts will tell you to have is a good knife. This is good advice as you should never be without a good knife, except perhaps on an airplane, they get all funny about that. You should in fact have two knives, The first a small pocket knife, you can get them for almost nothing at any hardware store or you may already have one laying around at the bottom of a drawer someplace. The second knife should be larger, more of what you might call a combat knife. A good knife will not cost you all that much. In fact one of the best things for this purpose is an old army surplus bayonet. You can get them online or at junk shops or army surplus stores for just a few bucks. In fact I just found a bayonet for a VZ-58 for six dollars at a flea market.

If you are willing to spend a little more you can get the knife that you think will be best for the task at hand. Choosing a knife is a personal decision and no one can tell you what knife is best. I personally recommend the Kukri or Gurkha knife. The Gurkha in my humble opinion is the best all purpose knife ever invented. It can do any job you ask of it from stabbing to slashing. No other knife is as handy.

Now if you want to go for a free knife, an old kitchen knife is better than nothing. You will need to make sure the blade is thick enough. Kitchen knives tend to be thin. This makes them more susceptible to snapping if you use them for stabbing or prying. One way to overcome this is to shorten the blade a bit. You can easily do this on a grinding wheel. If you don’t have a grinding wheel GO OUT AND GET ONE. You can get one for about thirty dollars and you are going to need it later.

You will also have to find or make a sheath for your homemade combat knife so you can carry it safely. It’s not hard to make a sheath but it will take you an hour or two. You can make a good sheath out of leather, wood, plastic or metal. I won’t go into detail as I’m sure you can figure it out. In a nutshell just lay your knife down on whatever material you have selected and draw a line around the knife a little bigger than the knife itself. Do this twice and then cut them out and fasten the two pieces together. Not hard just time consuming. Remember that if you use wood or something that is not flexible you will have to hollow out the two pieces before you fasten them together. So go with leather its much easier. You can get it from an old pair of work boots of a leather purse. However, like I said before a good knife is not expensive, so it hardly seems worth all the time and trouble.

More to come…

Anti Zombie Weapons

Anti Zombie Weapons

A lot has been written over the years about what kinds of weapons one should have on hand when the Zombie Apocalypse is upon us. And quite frankly most of what has been written is useless dribble. The uninformed opinions of people who have neither the experience nor the expertise to even have a valid opinion on the subject are worthless. Now im sorry if I sound harsh but it is of no use to any one when some twit suggests you get your self a bazooka or a machine gun. Yes we would all like to have access to such weaponry but the reality is that most people do not, and will not, be able to access this kind of firepower. Indeed what weapons you can acquire will depend on three factors. What country you live in, how much money you are willing to spend and how resourceful you are.

What Country You Live In

What country you live in is probably the most important factor when it comes to what kind of weapons are legally accessible. For example if you live in a country like Canada or the U.S.A. you can arm yourself quite well for little expense. On the other hand if you live in a country with strict weapons laws, like England, you will need to be a little more resourceful. But no matter what country you live in you can still arm yourself in some way that will drastically increase you chances of surviving the apocalypse.

How Much Money You Are Willing To Spend

Like many things in life it often comes down to money. And sorry to say it but rich people do have more resources at their disposal, and resources matter in a survival situation. But that being said you can still do what you need to do, no matter what your budget. If fact one of the goals of my blog is to teach people how to make the necessary preparations with little or no money.

How Resourceful You Are

One of the most important factors in any survival situation is resourcefulness. The person who is able to make effective use of the materials at hand is the person who will survive. This is also true in preparing for survival situations like the apocalypse. For example it costs NO money to store water for emergencies but how many people actually do it. And it costs NO money to keep a baseball bat handy in your car or closet. In fact an individual can acquire or fashion many useful weapons for little or no cost. It just takes a little work.

More on weapons at a latter date.

Welcome

Welcome to Zombie Apocalypse Survivor. The intention of this blog is to provide practical and useful advice on how to survive the coming zombie apocalypse. This blog will cover such topics as weapons, shelters, combat and survival gear, food storage, survival plans and many other useful subjects. With over 30 years of weapons and survival experience it is my hope that I can help you prepare for the coming onslaught.