Securing survival shelters will be paramount in the aftermath of a SHTF event. Undoubtedly, the primary survival strategy of those who had not prepared for SHTF will be to find those who did prepare and simply take their stuff.
Suppose your family’s survival depended on stealing food from someone who has enough food stored away for years. Would you honestly let your daughter die of starvation because “Stealing is wrong?” If good people can be driven to do bad things, can you imagine what bad people will get up to in a post-SHTF world?
I often tell my kids that one of the biggest problems we face due to growing up and living in a time of abundance, is that we have no real practical experience of how people react in times of scarcity.
A drowning man will grasp at anything to try and stay alive. In a SHTF world, everyone will be drowning, and your supplies store will be the only lifeboat around. It would take a fearless man not to be scared by the prospect of starving looters coming for your supplies.
Concealment Is Key
While you may not have control over your home’s location, you can make it far less noticeable to potential looters by using clever concealment techniques.
Consider blending your home into its surroundings so that it doesn’t draw unwanted attention during a crisis. Avoid anything that makes your property stand out, like bright exterior colors, visible solar panels, or flashy security systems. Before you rush to build a tall fence for added security, learn here why that could backfire.
You could also enhance concealment by using natural barriers like trees, bushes, or camouflage netting, which can obscure key features of your home from both ground-level observation and drone surveillance.
You can also employ visual tricks, such as using debris, rocks, or fencing to make your home blend into the landscape. The key is to make it look like there’s nothing worth looting.
Reinforce Entrances and Windows
Even if looters find your shelter, making it difficult to break into will buy you time and potentially force them to move on to an easier target. Reinforced doors and windows are critical for this.
Steel doors or heavy wooden doors fortified with metal bars can be nearly impossible for looters to breach. Add deadbolts, crossbars, or even improvised barricades like 2x4s that can be placed across the door when inside.
For added security, install a peephole or small camera that allows you to see who’s outside without opening the door.
Windows, if you have them, should be minimal and located in places that don’t give away your shelter’s position.
Metal grilles or shutters can be installed to keep looters from breaking them. If possible, place windows higher up or in areas where it’s harder to reach.
Maintain Noise and Light Discipline
One of the biggest mistakes you can make during a crisis is inadvertently drawing attention to your shelter. Noise and light discipline are essential to keeping your presence undetected.
At night, any light can serve as a beacon to looters, so blackout curtains are a must. Keep your lights dim and use them sparingly, relying on low-profile lighting that doesn’t leak out. Solar-powered or battery-operated lanterns with adjustable brightness can be perfect for this situation.
Noise discipline is equally critical. Avoid using loud tools or speaking at high volumes, and minimize any sounds that could give away your location. This is especially important if you have a generator or other powered systems running. I recommend building this DIY powerplant, which operates quietly and minimizes any noise that might reveal your location
Build Perimeter Defenses
Physical barriers can deter looters from even approaching your shelter.
Start by setting up a defensive perimeter around your shelter with fencing, barbed wire, or thorny bushes. Even simple deterrents, like broken glass spread across vulnerable areas, can make looters think twice.
For a more advanced approach, consider installing motion-sensor alarms or tripwires connected to noisemakers. These don’t have to be high-tech—something as simple as cans on a string can alert you to unwanted visitors while also scaring off looters.
Another strategy is to make your property look like it’s already been looted or abandoned. Diversion tactics, such as placing decoy supplies in visible areas or scattering debris, can create the impression that there’s nothing left to steal.
You can even tag your property with symbols or marks that indicate it’s already been searched.
Install Hidden Compartments and Escape Routes
Even if looters get inside your shelter, that doesn’t mean they need to find everything. Hidden compartments for storing valuable supplies are a great way to keep looters from accessing your most important resources.
False floors, concealed storage areas, and hidden safes can be easy to install but difficult for looters to locate.
Related: 9 Hiding Spots in Your House Where Looters Always Look First
If things escalate, you’ll need a secondary exit or escape route. Shelters should always have a second way out in case the main entrance is compromised.
A hidden tunnel, trap door, or exit disguised by debris or vegetation can give you a way to escape unnoticed if looters become aggressive.
Trust No One
In a crisis, it’s vital to adopt a mindset of caution and skepticism. Even those who appear trustworthy may not have your best interests at heart when survival is on the line.
Keep your plans and resources close to your chest, sharing information only with those you have thoroughly vetted over time. If someone approaches you seeking help or information, question their motives.
In a world where desperation can lead to betrayal, relying solely on yourself is often the safest bet. Be especially observant of your neighbors; watch for these tell-tale signs that indicate your neighbor could become a looter in a crisis. This awareness will help you stay one step ahead and protect your home effectively.
Prepping is about more than storing food and making fire. It’s about staying alive when SHTF. You better be ready because it will be brutal.
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Great info for people living in that climate, region of the country. Many of us preppers are not living in the country, we are spread out in the city to suburb areas and small towns. This an other articles must be taken at face value and adjusted, modified to where we are at that is the key.
Also learning from other prepper websites and formulate what we need at this time. The article says trust no one but at the same time you can’t trust your own family that votes opposite of what you think is right can be a future kerfuffle not including neighbors. We can work together in small units or teams like the military, but large groups have too many working parts, like who wants to be in charge. Or that one jerk don’t want to go along with the rest of the group.
Most of us are not going to do all that is needed. We are average people in the prepper mindset that have better knowledge of what we can do in certain situations we may encounter in life.
The argument of the lone wolf and being in a community is not one or the other. There are some situations were we must be both as currently seen.
Some communities may become more restrictive of rules to go by than original implemented by the founding members.
What we doing now to ward off looters, that is more likely what we will do in the future. Using traps, barbed wire stuff all sounds good until the aftermath of what happens to the looters. Where in a lawless environment do you dispose of the bodies when you have gas to run the vehicle or no vehicle, you can’t drag a body somewhere else in a small town or neighborhood without attracting suspicious activity for example.
These article suggestions all sound good until put into real action. If you did similar scenario of what articles suggest, the rotting corpses are things not talked about with these armchair preppers in fantasy land websites. Where preppers think a lot of this survival life is simple in daily living during a crisis.
Look at the recent hurricanes on the east coast that is basically what a SHTF is in real life. The Harris, Walz administration will give money away to the open border illegals and foreign countries first than Americans first.
What is interesting about the ion lithium batteries in EV’s, Teslas and lithium storage batteries storage plants for backup electricity to the surrounding cities is they can’t get wet.
Florida has found this to be true about these Chinese slave mine battery materials can self ignite with or without water, plain or seawater.
California has had in southern city a couple very large lithium storage battery fires sending toxic fumes into the air and takes several days to waste precious potable water on those chemical fires.
Ev’s should not be parked inside a garage or next to other vehicle when the batteries short circuit to start large fires.
Ev’s are not climate change safe, nor less toxic than the gas powered vehicles in our current stage of technologies. You can thank the brainwashed social environmentalist from Chinese manipulation for safer clean environment.
Next the nuke plants like three mile island coming back online for the energy gobbling AI super computers to eventually control all facets of our lives. Can you trust the AI programmed by liberal high tech California software programmers?
AI will take over the digital dollar that will be able to track every step of our lives til an anti-AI uprising happens by the public worldwide, not just here.
Wow, you’re so scared and triggered. It’s actually comical ready this.
but large groups have too many working parts,
The more complex the system, the greater the chance for failure.
“The more complex the system, the greater the chance for failure.”
Our so called government is a perfect example of your statement!
Let’s get real and drop the gloom and doom fantasies. I understand that attracting eyes to websites using such subjects is good for business, but only community is the only way we could survive in the long run. Human history is the proof. True prepping is organizing to defend as a “village”. There is no deterrent greater for a looter to know that to assault your front door means being taken out by your neighbor across the way using his long gun. Organize volunteer civil defense groups together with your town’s authorities, preserve your local churches, scouts, co-ops and those with military and medical training. Turn your “village” into your fortress, not just your puny homes.
Who’s living in a fantasy now. Trust the local authorities. My town has had 26 police officers quietly retire because of their corruption. They should have all gone to jail and every case they ever worked on should have been brought back up for review. If you think this is an isolated incident you are mistaken. Perhaps you should think twice before poking somebody in the eye and do a little more listening. Perhaps you’re one of those law enforcement officers you’re talking about. The eagles of these types of people usually result in them thinking they’re better than everybody else. Nobody in the right mind wants something like this to happen as you call it a fantasy. All we have to do is just open our eyes and see what’s happening right now. This has been orchestrated by a group of people I call The syndicate and it is worldwide. But perhaps your mind is not large enough to accept and see through all of this. Good luck.
I once met an officer like you are describing. In the course of a conversation I asked him if he was a prepper. He looked at me, patted his side arm, and said “this is all the prepping I need”. In my opinion the majority of officers are family people and support the community. In the case of this officer he would get “fragged” early on to protect the community.
That ‘village’ must have all their people pulling their own weight. ALL must be prepping, not just some.
Otherwise you will have lazy leeches feeding off your labor and supplies.
Another problem with groups is you have ZERO way to know if they are government spies.
Even those you have known since childhood can be swayed by the government ‘carrot’, or extorted into spying.
Villages may attract looters because they will assume there are plenty of thigs there to loot.
Tiny homes generally are not going to be worth the effort as they usually have little to nothing.
Just another yeah but!
The “village concept has worked for thousands of years.
I prefer to stand on my feet than to hide on my knees in a little hole in the ground. In the military you depend on the man on my left and the man on my right. Perhaps you would not know about that, otherwise your training would have stuck.
In a true dystopian environment not many of us will
survive without a well provisioned almost fortress like
community.
We should be able to kill off the first small bands of
marauders.However as time goes by larger groups
will show up.They will be well armed and intent on
killing us and taking everything.This group not be
easily deterred.We will have to kill everyone of them.
Gruesome as it sounds our plan is to hang them in
the trees with a warning sign.
For my friends and countrymen I wii you remind you.
“ If you fail to plan you are planning to fail”.
God bless all that deserve it.God bless the USA.
Preppers must use discernment that there maybe some who want to join a club or “the Community” for safety, so don’t terminate everyone that comes in contact, trust and verify.
Communities can also be hell, no one can leave as to tell the communities secrets to the outside. That can happen depending on what kind of governing structure the group has put into action.
fortress like community.
Here comes Biden’s F16’s…
Romans used to line some of their streets with crucified bodies, some even still alive.
A strong deterrent for most but some aren’t dissuaded.
Some may demand retribution for killing people they are related to or know.
And you get a faction against faction war.
You might want to use the neutered males as labor in the fields. Women as comfort women and breeding stock. Have to keep the gene pool diverse.
Of course you have to feed them. But if you can get more out of them than you put in, your situation can improve.
You did get the part about preserving churches, scouts and the rules of law? What kind of people are you hanging out with?
This makes me sad, as I lost my security of my small ranch, due to Deception and theft. I’m living in an apartment in a large complex right now. I feel so unsecure. I don’t even know how I would protect myself if anything happened. I have things in place, but it’s nothing like being. On a ranch secure
Go as gray man as possible. You could start by pressure canning to stay in if things get stupid. Urban life is different. Let the rowdies off themselves while you sit tight. Stock pile wash clothes, buckets and bleach. Not TP. Anytime you go to the store buy an extra pound of beef. Have a canning day. Protein and fat is what you want especially if eating once a day or every other day. Make chili. Can it. Make chicken soup. Can it. Can your leftover meats. Learn to make pemmican and hardtack. Youtube these. I dehydrated 24 eggs and ground it into a pint jar with an O2 absorber. There are things you can do under the radar. Main thing is to keep it quiet and have your soul prepared.
Klatt
The day will come if you can, you will retake that ranch back through unsavory terms and gruesome results as those who took the ranch, if you are up to it.
But the question for the rest of us is how did it happen and were you at fault, we have little information to go by. The bank repossessed the property maybe?
I love how paranoid everyone is, I find it amusing.
People only know about you what you tell them and show them. And stop parading around in a shiney new (I have a small penis) truck. Stop buying the state of the art 5th-wheel and driving it around. Number 1, they’re ugly, number 2 they don’t fit in normal spaces. If you make good money, great, but showing it off makes you a target.
Keep your big ass mouths shut.
Mans best friend is the best solution DOGs
Mans second is the answer LIGHT s
But Most Important is Prayer , crying out to God , and letting Him be our savior
let God Be God so the evil all around you cannot win.
When people have No fear of consequence or price for action s this is what happens
everyone does what is right in thier own eyes
like we see everyday
The people sat down to eat and drink and got up in perversion, depravity, evil all the day long.
We all must give an Account for every action , thought, intent , we do
so TURN OFF THE LIARS NETWORK S PRAY , SEEK GOD, BELIEVE IN JESUS CHRIST FOR THE SALVATION OF YOUR SOUL , AND READ THE BIBLE , TEN COMMANDMENTS , LOVE YOUR FELLOW MAN , LIKE JESUS TEACHS
NOT LIKE THE WORLD TEACHES
Trust , Believe , obey God s Word forgive , help, give to the needy , not greedy
live with in your means the book of hebrews in the bible read