What Are The Survival Kit Items

It seems as if every day that someone, somewhere is facing a survival situation due to a weather-related or natural disaster type crisis. What are some survival kit items will you need to ride out this situation?

So what are some of those survival kit items? You will need things such as aluminum foil, to a first aid kit, steel mirror, flashlight and even maybe a guitar string or two. You need to think of what is needed to survive at home rather than bugging out.

Surviving a disaster at home is easier than surviving anywhere else. Not only does your home provide you with shelter but you have pretty much everything you own all in one place.

There is just no way that you can carry as much survival gear with you when you are away from home as you will have when you are safe on your own turf.

Preparing Your Home For Survival

Nevertheless, survival at home is still a challenge that requires adequate preparation such as a survival kit.

While you may have everything you own in one place, there’s a good chance that you won’t have some things available to you that you are used to having. In most disasters, the normal infrastructure is severely damaged, eliminating services regularly taken for granted, such as electrical power and fresh water.

Additionally, supply chains are compromised, which means running down to the corner store to buy something you need is out of the question.

To properly prepare a disaster survival kit for your home, you must first take into consideration the worst disaster you are likely to face. There is no sense in preparing for a situation that you aren’t likely to see, like a tsunami in the desert, nor is there much sense in preparing for anything less than the worst-case scenario.

If you prepare for the worst situation possible in your life, then you will have everything you need on hand to survive a lesser calamity.

Because of where I live(South Florida) we are going to assume that the worst-case situation is a hurricane or tornado that disrupts electrical power, water supplies, communications and supply chains. Due to the lack of supplies, there is a breakdown in society, and looting and violence abound.

Survival Kit Needed Near Me

You need to figure out is the amount of time that will pass before life resumes as usual. It takes time to restore essential services when they are disrupted. A hurricane may pass through an area in 24 hours, but it could also be days or even weeks before life returns to its regular state.

The easiest way to determine how rapidly your life can return to normal is by looking at the aftermath of previous disasters.

How quickly were government agencies able to react? How long did it take to restore electrical power? How many days (or weeks) passed before stores had the standard level of stock back on the shelves? All this information is available, although it might take some work to uncover.

The answers to those questions tell us how long of a time we need to be prepared for. In most cases, it’s not surviving the disaster that’s the toughest part; it’s surviving the aftermath while things are being restored to how they were before the storm hit.

How Your Home Helps Your Survival

Besides the shelter that your home provides you, there are a number of other advantages of being caught at home in a disaster. More than anything, it provides your family with a safe place to congregate and support one another.

Being in familiar surroundings helps maintain a semblance of normalcy, even though the situation may be anything but. Nevertheless, those creature comforts can give your family confidence to overcome the situation.

Don’t underestimate the value of making your family feel comfortable as well as feeling that things are at least somewhat normal. The hardest part of surviving any disaster is the psychological strain.

People who are comfortable will be better prepared to confront the problems that are associated with a disaster and its aftermath. Take a group that waited out a long, difficult storm at home and throw them into unfamiliar surroundings, and their chances of survival will be drastically reduced.

With the right preparation, your home can do much more for you than provide shelter. While all homes are limited as to how much storage space they have, a house or apartment can pack away much more food and supplies than what you could carry on your back.

Of course, the more you do to prepare your home for disasters, the better off you will be when and if a disaster strikes. For example, if you have stockpiled food and water, then when a disaster takes away water service, you’ll at least have a week’s water to drink.

You might not have enough to last you forever, but you’ll be much better off than those who have not saved a single bottle. And there will be plenty of those people.

What Are The Survival Kit Items And Their Uses

The contents of my own survival kit:

Two pieces of heavy-duty aluminum foil, 30 cm square, to be used for cooking
First-aid kit
Micro Maglite flashlight
Steel mirror
Two pieces of paper, folded around the mirror to protect it from scratching plastic bag to use as a canteen (one of two) an to store items 4 & 5
Gerber Grylls Survival Multi-tool
Gerber folding knife
Aquamira Frontier Emergency Water Filter Straw
Water purification tablets
Waterproof match holder with built-in whistle and compass, filled with storm-proof matches
Wire saw (3-wire type)
Emergency rescue blanket
Sewing kit, consisting of 3 meters of button thread, two buttons and two safety pins (thread doubles as fishing line)
Mechanical pencil with one meter of duct tape wrapped around it
Spare battery for flashlight
Magnesium fire starter
One-quart plastic bag to use as a canteen (two of two)
Eight meters of parachute cord, spooled
Sewing needle for sewing kit
Four cotton balls soaked in petroleum jelly as fire starters, packaged wrapped with hair band
Fishing bobber with two fishing hooks stuck into it
Split weights for fishing
Guitar string for use as a snare
Food

First-Aid Kit In The Survival Kit Contains:

5 cm by 7 cm sterile pad
Two fabric knuckle bandages
Neosporin, an antiseptic ointment
Two alcohol towelettes
Two standard Band-Aids®
Ibuprofen
A very effective medicine for diarrhea
Antihistamine

If needed, the duct tape in the survival kit can serve as medical tape. If larger dressings are needed, they would need to be cut from the individual’s clothing. Moss also makes an excellent bandage if a larger bandage is needed and nothing else is available.

Things Preppers Forget

The survival kit just described is what I would call a bare-bones survival kit. It is what I take with me wherever I go just to have something to fall back on. If I am going hiking in the woods, I take it along as well. But if I was to be caught in an emergency situation, I’d much rather have a larger kit.

The problem with a larger kit is that it can be very hard to carry it around with you, hence the need for the bare bones kit. Nevertheless, having a large kit as well, for the times when it is possible to bring it along, is an excellent idea.

In that case, there is enough space to carry a number of extra items along, making it much easier to survive and travel through the wild. How much of what you can carry along will depend a lot on how big of a survival kit you build.

Assuming that a backpack is used, such as for the 72-hour bag, there’s a lot of room to add extra survival equipment. Even more important than that, there is room to carry food and at least some water. A 72-hour bag will usually contain three days’ worth of food, either dehydrated or vacuum-packed.

All food that goes into the 72-hour bag should be high in carbohydrates, fats and protein. Don’t worry so much about the micro-nutrients, such as vitamins, as this is merely for short-term survival. It must be lightweight and compact so that there is enough room in the bag for everything.

In addition to food, consider adding:

A sleeping bag – Makes for warmer nights and greater comfort; can also prevent hypothermia
Camping cookware – Lightweight backpacking cookware and eating utensils, made out of aluminum or titanium, are much better than cooking with a stick or piece of foil.
Canteen with cup – This provides a much better method of carrying water with you. Some tactical backpacks are designed for a water bladder, which works well also.
Clothing – Clothing is bulky so you don’t want to take much of it. Nevertheless, a change of clothing will do a lot to help you maintain your personal hygiene.
Gloves– Many people hurt their hands when traveling through the wild because they aren’t toughened enough to handle rocks, thorns and other things they encounter.
A hat – Keep your head warm and protect it from the sun
A larger first-aid kit – The biggest thing to add to a first-aid kit is larger dressings to care for larger wounds. Additional medicines can also be useful.
Folding camp shovel – For building fires, digging latrines and creating more comfortable sleeping spots.
Hatchet – Very useful for cutting firewood and making shelters in the wild.
Honing stone – Any knife that is used a lot will become dull.
Knife – Only a folding knife is in the basic survival kit, but a straight sheath knife is much better.
Maps – Assuming you are trying to get to somewhere, it helps to have a map to show you the way. These will need to be changed and updated to match the places you go to.
Rain poncho – There’s nothing more miserable than being wet and not having a way to get out of the rain. A rain poncho will help protect you and keep you warm, and in a pinch, it can be used as either a tent or to carry things.
Toilet paper and toiletries – Personal hygiene is important to prevent sickness. Pack tissues, a toothbrush, floss (doubles as string), deodorant, etc.
Tent – If you can find a nice, lightweight backpacking tent, it will save you the considerable time and stress of making shelters out of what nature provides.
Larger tactical flashlight – The small flashlight in the small survival kit isn’t very powerful; a larger one is very useful.
Weapons – Depending upon your situation, weapons can be needed for hunting or for personal defense.

Always remember that anything you put in your survival kit, whether the small kit or the large one, is something that you have to carry. You don’t want any more weight than necessary. Therefore, seek out lightweight items. If there are two items to pick from to accomplish the same thing, you’re probably going to be better off with the lighter one, unless the heavier one provides enough additional capability to justify the weight.

Speaking of capability, items that provide multiple uses are wonderful. A hatchet that can be used as a hammer is much more useful than one that is designed for throwing. Ultimately, you’re more likely to need a hammer to drive tent stakes than you are to need a hatchet to kill an enemy by throwing it at them.

Emergency Preparedness Plan

Survival, whether at home or on the road, depends mostly upon preparation. Those who are properly prepared for a disaster are much more likely to survive it. It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about a natural disaster or a man-made one; the need for preparation is the same.

There are three types of preparation that are needed in order to be ready to deal with a disaster: attitude, knowledge and stockpiling.

Anyone’s ability to survive is going to be greatly increased if they have the right attitude—the attitude of a fighter, a survivor, a winner. Those people are also the ones who are going to do whatever is necessary to get themselves ready for a disaster, by learning the necessary skills and stockpiling the necessary equipment and supplies.

While it is possible to survive without the right items, it is much easier to survive when they’re on hand. Each of the essentials for survival that is missing from one’s survival kit costs extra time and energy in creating or finding the items to meet those needs. Considering that surviving alone is a very time-consuming and energy-draining challenge, anything that can be done to make it easier is worth the effort.

You never know when a disaster will strike or where you will be when it happens. Therefore, it is necessary to be prepared at all times.

That means having a disaster survival kit at home and a portable one that you can take with you. In that way, you’ll always have something to work with should a disaster strike.

Building the best survival kit isn’t something that you can do in one day. It takes time to develop the necessary skills and find the necessary equipment and supplies to make it possible to survive even the greatest catastrophe. People who are serious about survival are constantly improving both their skills and their kits.

Nevertheless, every journey must start with a single step. Nobody ever became ready to survive a disaster and its aftermath without getting started. Perhaps you can’t do everything now that you need, but you can take the first step and build a bare-bones kit.

That step will make you a little bit more ready to survive any disaster that comes along. By continuing to take one step after another, you will soon find yourself ready for anything that life can throw at you.

Don’t wait. Begin to make your preparations today because none of us know how close the next disaster is to strike.