I have made some editorial changes and will clarify the Monetary Resources. I believe that these changes will be more effective as a teaching tool.
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Welcome to America’s Volunteer Disaster Response Teams Logistics course. This course is designed to teach participants the basics of Logistics. After all, it is foolish to think that you could help anyone in a disaster or crisis if you are not able to care for yourself.
This course is based on a foundation in the manner that a house would be built. If any piece of that foundation is weak then the sections above that weakness will fall apart. Let us get started in the building of your foundation.
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The means of building and later maintaining our Logistics Tower requires Monetary Resources most commonly called an income, this income is what we build our tower with and so it is suitable to maintain our current level of preparedness. This is true as long as nothing happens and we do not strain our tower often or suddenly. Therefore the greatest threat to maintaining the tower is to maintain the income. Unless you have the good fortune of owning your own business this could be a perilous venture. So preparations must be made to secure your financial well being.
Your existing Monetary Resources have gotten you to this point. Most of you could live comfortably for a day or two, maybe longer. What needs to be considered is that if you aspire to become less dependent on the socialized infrastructure of our nation as it exists currently you must slowly wean yourself off of it. Reduce the amount you use and it will cost you less to operate your household every month. This money then can be used to make improvements that will allow you to produce your own electricity, and supply your own water. Remember as long as there is a power pole with a meter outside your home then you give consent for the power companies employees and designee's access to your property to read it. The same holds true of the water department. Reduce the amount of usage and you also put less money into the pockets of these subsidized companies. More money can therefore go into the pocket of a patriotic citizen concerned with how much money the government gets from taxing the use of the subsidized infrastructure. The less money that the government has to operate, the less they can do. Enough of that.
Make a list of your current expenses for the year. Create a category for each of the lower levels of preparation. An example would be... Water (everything that influences your water consumption), Food (everything that influences your food consumption, this includes eating at restaurants), Shelter (Clothing expenses, and of course everything that influences your home. this would be insurance and electricity bills), Communications (this would be everything that you use to communicate with; stamps, phone, internet, radios, television, cable, satellite, etc...), Networking (this is a gray area that you put club memberships and the expenses of attending training sessions), Financial (this would be where you put things that you must maintain to maintain your income, certifications and things of that nature).
Add all this up. Pretty big number isn't it? Well there is good news. You are making at least this amount of money with a little left over. Now that is done and your heart is slowing down some I want you to double that number. That is what you should have coming in to maintain and improve your Logistics Tower. Well, no one said it was going to be easy.
I want you to think about your employment income for a minute. If you stayed in your present occupation could you ever make enough to meet that highest number? What would it take for you to make that much in your present occupation? Write down your findings, and put them with the previous results.
The next thing I want you to do is search for a means to make that much money. You can search online databases and that should assist you immensely. Be realistic in your assessment, it has to be something that you are physically, and mentally capable of, as well as morally capable of. Write this information down, and put it with the other information. Now look at all the information and determine how large you want your tower to be and how much stress you want it to be able to endure. The taller the tower the more you can do. The wider the tower the more stable it is, and the longer you can do it.
Let's look at what occupations provide incomes that could improve your Monetary Resources and why I am no in any of those currently.
Over The Road Commercial Driver - This position brings in around $1k a week ($896 bring home). While this is appealing on the surface you must feed yourself and keep yourself clean with this money. Showers are $5 each and if you use food bought from grocery stores you can get away with $15 a day in food. So that is $20 a day * 7 days = $140 a week. This brings your bhi to $750 give or take $20.
Marine Security Specialist - This position brings in around $600 a week if you work for a company that has armed positions. The draw back to this position is that you must maintain your uniforms and equipment yourself. You should be able to bring home about $480 a week to pay bills with.
Mason - Pays usually $10 - $15 an hour if you work for someone else. If you take on your own projects and have a crew that will work off of commision you can easily bring home $1500 a week. The draw back is that it is heavy work and if your crew becomes sluggish your income will become sluggish as well. If the weather is rotten it will affect your income as well.
Carpenter - Pays also similar to mason and the points made above apply to this position as well.
Welder - again the same as mason. Is not as dependent on the weather since most of the time you can put up an umbrella and do well.
I will add to this as I get more information.
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The average human body is 70% water. What this means is that without water you will die a horrible agonizing death fit for any horror tale. In a disaster or crisis the importance of having water on hand is even more important. Water is used for many things and the cleaner it is the better.
In order to calculate how much water you need for you and your family you will need a notebook to keep track of your requirements and progress. Another notebook will be needed so that you can write down the procedure for acquiring water under various circumstances that you may be faced with in your area. Lets get you started.
Add the weight of everyone in your home together and write down that number. Divide this number in half. Change the pound descriptor to ounces and this is the amount of water that you need to have on hand per day just for drinking for your family. Write this number and “Ounces of Drinking Water Per Day” in the notebook. If you have pets you will need to add them to your family list for water. Divide this number by 128 and the result is the number of gallons that you will need on hand just for drinking by the family every day.
Now that you know how many gallons of water you will need per day for you and your family’s drinking needs you are on your way to understanding how much water you will need per day total. Let us take a look at another consideration.
Nearly everything that we cook will need some amount of water for its preparation. Some long storage food items have enough water stored with them to cook with (canned veggies and meats), while other food items require you to add a considerable amount to them to re-hydrate them. Consider everything that you cook and determine how much water you add to your cooking projects for the family per day. If you have pets you will need to add them to your family list for water (remember to calculate the same way for your pets as your family members). Write this information in ounces in the notebook next to your drinking water number that you wrote down earlier.
So now you have drinking and cooking requirements for your family for the day. One of the things that you have taken for granted until you don’t have it anymore is cleaning water. Not just dishes but also clothes and yourself. This is very important to avoid disease and sickness while you are living through this disaster / crisis. The last thing you want is to be truly miserable and no use to anybody during this time. So how are we going to determine how much water we will need for this? Thankfully someone has already done this for us, all we have to do is multiply the number of people by 5 gallons and this will be what is needed to maintain each person’s hygiene. If you have pets you will need to add them to your family list for water (yes 5 gallons for each pet). Write this number near the others you have written down. Don’t forget that this number is gallons.
Let’s review for a minute what we have so far. We have drinking water, cooking water, and cleaning water. So we can drink, eat, and be clean and merry, for a little while anyway. Now what needs to be done is convert everything to ounces. 5 X 128 = 640 ounces are what one person cleaning water supplies would be for one day. So depending on how many people you have in your family this could be a very significant amount of water. Once you have this total write it down and circle it. This will be what you will need to acquire everyday for a disaster in your area. Once you have all this added up divide the answer by 128 ounces and you will get the number of gallons of water you will need to have on hand everyday. That’s a bunch of water is it not?
Create a plan that you could provide this amount of water for your family everyday for a week. You may use Notepad, Word, or Word Pad. Once this is done, attach it to an email and send it to me. If you have any questions of course you have my email so ask them.
Part of any detail in a disaster situation is the allocation of time for maintaining the critical supply of water. In many terrorist organizations these are prime targets. Thus...,
Write a detailed Procedure that anyone could look at and follow to gather enough water for the week. Include the number of hours it would take to accomplish this task and how you would provide over-watch for those gathering the water.
Write a detailed Procedure that anyone could look at and follow to protect your water supply from vandalism / attack / contamination….
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Now you see a small part of what it takes to provide for a family and / or a team. Now it is time to see more of the picture. So far we have dealt with Water. You can now add food to the tower.
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FOOD
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WATER
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Still much to be done. Here we go...
As important as water is to the individual and team, it is imperative that we provide some form of nourishment outside of hydration in order to accomplish our objectives (goals). So here is your task.
You are to make a list of everything that you and the family eat on a daily basis. Make a list of everything that it would take (ingredients) to replicate this over a period of one week. That is to set aside enough food material to last one week for the family.
Determine how much space this would take up and how much it would weigh. How would you move it?
Part of any nutrition program is maintaining the proper fat - muscle ratio. Some fat is good, but too much is bad. Write a detailed procedure that anyone could follow whether you are there or not that would meet the nutritional needs of you and your family using the preferred cuisine that you are used to. You will need to find a height-weight body mass chart and add 10% to the number that is described on it. The FDA site is a good place to start.
If you have team-mates and family members that are over 20% of the weight described in the chart then you will need to slowly, repeat SLOWLY, begin to reduce the amount of weight they are carrying on their body frame. Write a detailed procedure of how you would accomplish this using their preferred cuisine. I know that it entails a calorie chart, and how much to reduce intake by. It also entails getting them moving around for specified periods of time.
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While not the toughest section out there clothing is a tough topic. Often when disaster strikes it becomes a disaster because it is more damaging than we thought it would be. Our clothes become our shelter. With some planning and practice, relying on your clothes for shelter from the elements will become more comfortable.
Take inventory of all the clothes that you wear. Write down what they are made of and the quantity for the following…
Socks
thermals
t-shirts
pants
shorts
footwear
long sleeved shirts
jackets
coats
windbreakers
Get up early one morning this week and put on your primary layer. If possible step outside stand for five minutes and go back inside. Once inside again look at your list and put on what you would believe would be your second layer. Return outside and stand again for five minutes. Return inside and determine if you should put on a third layer. If so then put on the third layer and stand for five minutes. The goal with this exercise is to make you aware of what you are wearing and why. Be sure that if you get too hot that you can remove these layers without embarrassing yourself or those around you.
Consider that when preparing for a disaster that it is best to have 3 days of clothes on hand where you may grab them quickly. Organize and pack away three days of clothes along with three days of food and water in one pack for one person.
The greatest danger involving clothing is exposure to the elements. Write a narrative that anyone could follow with or without your presence to describe what they would need to survive three days in your area at this time of year.
Memorize this phrase……
“When we are out running drills, we must remember, cotton kills. Polyester is much better, but wool is the pace setter.”
Cotton soaks up moisture; therefore it is cooler in the summer as an outer layer. Polyester is warmer because it doesn’t soak up moisture, however it will retain odor for some reason. Wool on the other hand will not soak up moisture and will not retain odor after being washed.
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So, you have your basic food, water, and shelter needs identified and squared away, now what? Well, congratulations that is a huge step. Now let’s get you on to being the social critter that humans are supposed to be. Let’s communicate.
Communication is a very important ability in any endeavor. It is by far one of the least explored areas of logistics in nearly any logistics challenge. Before going on too much farther I would like you to write down the answers to the following questions.
If the power went out and so did your land based and wireless based phone (It happens regularly here) how would you communicate your needs to the outside world?
If an individual asks you how you would meet the logistical needs of a small community without federal influence, what would you tell them? I mean exactly word for word.
How long could you maintain the above situations?
Most everyone here is better prepared than the individual mentioned above. It is amazing to sit down with someone that I have never met and begin laying this out for them. Their eyes get wide, and their mouths drop, and the first thing they say is a vulgar expletive and walk off.
Most everyone here has a family. Yell at someone. That’s correct, I want you to yell at someone in your family and watch their reaction to you. Write down their behavior towards you for a few days. The best time to do this is right when they get up in the morning. It doesn’t matter what you yell, just yell it, and then start watching their behavior. Don’t spoil it by telling them ahead of time. Don’t get vulgar or demeaning with it either. I yelled “It’s raining outside” while I was looking out the window. It was raining; I felt my wife needed to know that at 0130 before she went to work at 0215 central.
After a few days has past and you have your handy dandy notebook or computer in hand to record your observations completed do this. In a calm level voice say something similar to what you said earlier about the same time. Again it was something about the weather. Record the behavior from this vocalization for a few days.
Here is the toughest thing. Now whisper something to someone. Again I used the weather as my prop. Record this behavior for a few days.
Here is the second toughest thing. Say nothing before breakfast for three days straight! Now record the reaction of that.
Folks, words alone don’t make up our communication techniques. Hand signals, voice, and even body language and the lack there of are just the beginning. Nearly all of these can be deceptive in one way or another. That is where the next assignment comes from. Do something for someone. Does not matter to whom it is directed; keep it legal. The most powerful and accurate way to communicate something is not to vocalize it, just do something physical with the other person in mind.
One of the most basic things I had to recognize as a Recruiter and Trainer was that people want answers. These answers must not be demeaning, complicated, and above all else, realistic. One of the tenets of resistance to participating in AVDRT exercises is that, I have to work. No work, no bills being paid. No bills being paid no luxury.
A luxury is something that makes our life more comfortable than it would be without it. So if we had to choose between power and food, most of us would choose food. Power is the luxury. Often when we are asked what our motivation is, we start in on our rambling about government not doing this or that. We miss a terrific opportunity in doing this. It is the opportunity to show others we don’t have to have others do this stuff for us. We can do it ourselves! And save a load of dough a year!
Communication is a tenet to what I do. I train, learn, and act to demonstrate my commitment to lessening the burden that others have to carry. If I have my own power source then I don’t have to worry about power outages. Conversely I don’t have to worry about paying a power plant to provide that power for me. I put another $200 into my usable income every month.
You thought that this was going to be a radio section did you not? I thought so. Just remember, if we take initiative and simply start showing people the life we would like for them to have, we very well might not have to say a whole lot except, “Nice to meet you, Welcome!”
The last part of this section is this. When you are angry over something, or if you are angry over something now, write down what you would say. Exactly word for word, don’t slow down to think about it, just let it go. Fold it up and put it in a pocket for a day or three. Take it out and re-read it. Take out all the adjectives that are in it. Take out all the expletives that are in it. Fold that up and carry it around for a while. Take it out and compare the two.
In words, spoken and not, which would you rather be subjected to? Remember, sometimes words are not the best messengers. Actions do speak louder, and there is no misunderstanding of them.
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Networking...
The previous lessons will help hold this one up. By now you have noticed that each layer has a WRITTEN procedure to go with it. One of the important reasons for this is so that as folks come and go that there is a standardized means of training them. Once everyone has reached or not reached a set goal the next step is not dependant on one individual. It also makes it easy to determine if someone is giving preference to another. Those that do the work should get to advance and those that do not should not until they complete their assigned tasks.
The Logistics Tower is a dynamic physical symbol. Like any physical entity the higher off the base you go the more leverage is applied to that base which in turn makes it very unstable. In order to correct for this it becomes necessary to widen the base. This can be done in several ways by either widening your own base or adding additional members.
Assignment A.
Grab your writing instrument and something to record on and write down the names of everyone you would trust to protect you and your family. I know it will be a short list. This is the material you will use to widen your logistical tower base. Each of these individuals must be at the same level as you. If they are higher then you need to do what it takes to get to their level. Once everyone is one the same level then it will be easier to accomplish more sophisticated tasks.
Assignment B.
This next list is a prospect list. This list should include everyone around you at work, school, church, and yes internet sites in other locations. Once you determine their intentions you can add them to the list in Assignment A or the list in the next assignment.
Assignment C.
This list is the list that contains all the names and information on those that you do not want to interact with and the reasons. This comes in handy when you meet other group leaders and you see someone in their group that could pose a danger to them.
Assignment D.
This particular list is different from the other three. This list is the list of individuals that you get information from that are not associated with your group. These individuals are just there to feed you information. They should never be lead to believe you are a group member or leader. They should just have contact with you.
Now your tower should look like this...
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Networking
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Communication
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Shelter
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Food
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Water
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End Notes:
Remember that the Logistics Tower is a symbol of your preparedness level. Therefore Stress on that tower is any situation which places you in a position that you must use the tower and not be able to replace what you have used in the tower. Too much stress and the tower will fall apart and you have to build another one.
Consider also that as time progresses that your needs will change. Therefore your tower must also change. Time stops for no man.
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Logistics is simple. Anyone that attempts to tell you otherwise is a bragart and not to be trusted. Logistics is best represented by a tower. A tower is built from the ground up and everything above the foundation depends on everything below it. It is through combining towers that great things are done. We must first learn the basics. This will make us good. If you want to be GREAT then you must master the basics.
