Chapter 1
Friday, 1 November, 2024
We were able to disappear during the forced Covid "evacuations" which began in September of this year, but it required some planning and a lot of will power. If you didn't answer the phone or the door AND your cell phone didn't move or respond for three days, FEMA assumed you were dead from Covid Variant 37 (80% - 90% fatal for all age groups) and just marked the house, trailer, apartment or whatever with pink "Quarantined - Covid V37" tape and - because of the assumed deaths - also a wrap of yellow "Crime Scene - Do Not Enter" tape. They told the power co-op put your house on their list of meters to be pulled (remotely shut down for the "smart" meters) to ensure that power production, which was limited by the die-offs of electrical workers, would not go to powering houses with only dead bodies in them.
If FEMA thought the residents had been dead more than three days, they wrote the place off as not worth trying to salvage as they didn't have enough HazMat suits to "waste" them on places which were not obvious "hoarders": i.e., records from the previous 18 months showed that they might have kept an average of more than one week's groceries. If you answered the phone or the door, they "evacuated" you to a FEMA camp (jails, college dormitories and large tents are such great places to "isolate" people from infectious diseases) and they "nationalized" all your supplies - from toilet paper to tomatoes to toothpaste to Toyotas. Although the card they left at the "evacuated" houses mentioned phone access being available at the camps for the "evacuees" to notify family and that a "highly visible neon yellow 'Notice of Relocation' would be posted at your home so family and friends could locate you", we saw none of those notices on the houses we later salvaged.
We stayed in the basement, most of the time in the storage area under the screened porch. The porch floor is concrete poured over a corrugated steel support so we were hidden from thermal searches (FLIR) when they scanned the area via helicopter. We had more than two weeks of no-heat-needed food in there with us, including a few self-heating MREs, assorted from-the-can foods (Did you know that mini ravioli or sliced peaches are easier to get down straight from the can than pinto beans?), 40 gallons of stored water and a toilet seat on a five gallon bucket (plus plenty of bags) in that storage area so we were able to stay invisible long enough for FEMA to move on to other areas. Having battery powered VHF/UHF capable scanning radios (Baofeng UV-5R, spare batteries and solar power available for recharging), we were able to monitor the FEMA teams when they were within a few miles of us which also meant we knew when the next flyover would occur. An example:
'Entry team on US278, this is Chopper 2. What is your size and exact location so the FLIR can ignore you?'
'Six people. Northeast corner of Glore Road and 278.'
It seems that someone did NOT understand that you only have secure communications if the people you're hunting can't listen in. When the chopper announced they were returning to base to refuel, we'd take the "potty" bags out into the basement after they had cooled. Then wait an hour to ensure the chopper wasn't making a fake "return to base" and only then take the bags out to the holes we'd dug under the deck of the nearest house. Any report of a "bad" smell coming from an evacuated house usually meant rotting food (or bodies) that an entry team had missed, so it received no official attention. The owner had been too drunk to do anything other than follow orders when the FEMA team hit that house and her significant other was 600 miles away on a business trip - and he has not been heard from - so that house is effectively abandoned.
We're suburban, not rural, in an unincorporated area of the county but the area is populated with nice single family homes. In the 1970's, a builder thought this would be the next area of growth for upper-middle-class and better homes so he built about thirty houses with attached two-car garages, most with full basements and one or two masonry fireplaces and all with underground utilities (power, water, and natural gas lines run down one side of what is now our property, and telephone, cable TV and, more recently, fiber internet distribution boxes are all located above-ground on corners of our property). When we bought a house here thirty years later (and for 2/3 the price of a similar house in the nearest town), the blueprints were on a shelf in one closet of the master-on-main bedroom. Unfortunately, the original purchasers did it on the cheap and didn't get the pocket door between the master bedroom and the bath or the inside-the-garage ash cleanout for the fireplace in the family room (the cost of both wouldn't have added $1/month to the original 30 year mortgage payment).
As the FEMA ground patrols and the fly-over FLIR scans decreased in frequency, we began to use a little more of the house. We had already emptied the freezer as the grocery store shelves became empty, so there was enough solar power to manage the fridge when grid power began to be rationed in July - starting with eight hours ON, four hours OFF, then four hours ON, eight hours OFF and then progressing rapidly to two hours ON, six hours OFF, then two hours ON, ten hours OFF and then to only two hours ON each day - certainly not adequate for most fridges. I'd diverted some Styrofoam "garage door" insulation to the fridge and it was OK for our use with the two on, ten off power but only two hours a day of power meant the internal temperature of the fridge got above 50F every day so the lifetime of foods in the fridge was only comparable to a springhouse of 200 years ago - better than nothing, but the freezer section was not frozen, although its 41F was a slightly better place for milk and meat - and much shorter freshness than people of the 21st century expect from refrigeration.
That didn't last long as grid power was gone the next week - for the entire area our power co-op served, not just our owner-reported-as-deceased meter. How did I know? All the streetlights were off. Before power went away completely, we'd starting using the 4.4 cubic foot counter height fridge with the garage door insulation moved to it and running that fridge from solar power. I had once described the size of the solar system as "cabin in the woods with a small fridge" and that has proven true - but we do have a working fridge that now runs a little over two hours a day (per the KillAWatt meter I checked it with).
When there'd been no FEMA patrols for two weeks, we began exploring the houses near us. I used a full-face respirator with organic vapor cartridges to mostly block the scents of rotting food and dead pets; the house with the 100 gallon aquarium was bad even with the respirator.
Were those trips worth the exposure and the effort needed to get the scent off my body and out of my clothes - washing clothes in a Number 2 washtub with a dasher from lehmans.com - when I got back home? Most of the time. I had my bag of entry tools, from a thin, flexible strip of steel for slipping a knob lock to a battery powered drill with carbide tipped bits for drilling out the cylinders of dead bolts to a three foot crowbar. If possible, I wanted to gain entry without damaging the weather-tightness of the houses - we might need a place for storage of found supplies or possibly a shelter for chickens or the like if we found those. Where needed, I broke out a small window to gain access to the house and then patched it with some Plexiglas from scrap storm windows - it's still as weather tight as the original and we found spare keys inside most of the houses.
Several houses had either seasoned firewood or some of the commercial "fire logs" (one house had two cases of the highly compressed sawdust "logs" which actually burn like wood - versus the cheaper and much more common sawdust and wax versions), so that's some limited heat for the winter. Most had a gas grill so at least a partial five gallon tank of LP - two houses had a spare tank that was full. LP tanks can fuel the gas grill, the gas logs in the fireplace (they can burn natural gas or LP - if you parallel two or more 20lb LP tanks - and are completely battery-powered - remote and the main gas valve) or the Coleman stove - and there's an abandoned house near us in which most of that can be stored. Gasoline cans for lawnmowers - mostly one gallon cans which were less than half full (now combined in larger containers and treated with Pri-G), one gasoline-powered generator (1600 watt inverter gen from Harbor Freight but the price was right), lots of solar landscape lighting (some of those now living in windows which get a bit of sun each day, others - batteries removed - stored in boxes for future needs), several vehicles with a half tank or more of gasoline so the gas was siphoned (or the tank holed and drained). We also found a diesel 4WD pickup with an almost full tank - treated the fuel with Pri-D and moved the truck much closer to us. I had plenty of Pri-G to treat the 180 gallons of gasoline we'd found so I went looking for some metal barrels. There are now four 55 gallon barrels of treated gasoline behind the house with the covered pool. The barrels are hidden by the wood privacy fence there and I have both hand and battery-powered pumps for moving fuel. That covered pool means we have several thousand gallons of water which needs serious filtering to make it potable but we have the filters - just need to divert some downspouts at that house to keep the pool filled: those downspouts are one more item for the "To Do" list.
Found a very few battery-powered fans, mostly of the USB rechargeable variety but any airflow may help with cooling and heating. Found one 10,000BTU kerosene heater and one 22,000BTU, each with an almost full five gallon can of 1-K kerosene. Did those people give up on kerosene heat because they did NOT understand that kerosene heat stinks if you don't light and extinguish the wick outside? We also found a 120,000BTU torpedo kerosene construction site heater and a bed-mounted tank of kerosene (maybe 50 gallons?) in the old Dodge pickup in that garage - not sure where we'd be using that heater when it needs AC power for the fan and the igniter but it's been inventoried and moved to the nearest house and the kerosene has been treated with Pri-D (the proper quantity is listed on the Pri-D bottle).
Most of the houses had very little in "staples" - flour; corn meal; sugar; salt; canned meats, veggies and fruit; dried beans; rice; etc. - but we collected what we found. Didn't find many cookbooks - or any other paper books, for that matter - but found some phones and a few tablets. Most of the tablets had some reading material - if only romances - but all of that is new reading material for the better half.
I have a small network router running and have power for cameras watching North, East, South and West. The otherwise useless phones and tablets can be used to check or monitor those cameras. The higher resolution and very-good-in-low-light Wyze cameras will have to be loaded with RTSP firmware (Real Time Streaming Protocol - have the file on my laptop and that project is on the "To Do" list) to be useful now that wyze.com has closed down for lack of power and the secure, passworded camera-to-wyse.com-to-your-device link no longer works. With just two of us here, we need that electronic monitoring for 24/7 security - there's no guarantee that FEMA won't get hungry and return to glean the previously raped reaped areas...
"Jack, motion alert on the East side."
"I'm on it, Sarah."
I haven't seen a deer in the area for more than 15 years! You know the human population is way down if there's a deer in the road. Wonder how soon it'll be cold enough to butcher an animal? Where's that "Old Farmer's Almanac"? Seems we have several: 2016, 2018, 2020, 2022, bingo! Now to see what they think the second week of November will be like...
'Highs near 38F, lows near 28F.' Good enough when we'll have plenty of cold water if I filter 55 gallons and let a filled barrel sit outside overnight. Before I get a deer, I need to finish the smokehouse so we can smoke that meat. Smoked meat won't last through the summer but right now we're more concerned about food for the winter. Need some venison "ham", sausage and jerky. We'll likely be raising a lot of beans and similar crops for protein in the warm months unless we find some chickens to provide us with eggs and eventually meat. I have plywood, vinyl siding, roofing and shelving from the home center for the smokehouse and a large dehydrator, plus two trailers of supplies for a food garden - including assorted fencing and a big enough tiller for perhaps an acre of garden. That "acre" will be multiple smaller plots wherever there's a large enough flat space with good sun, but that also decreases the likelihood of some plant disease or pest destroying all of a specific crop.
We've found no chickens, rabbits or other "backyard" animals in our searches - guess the area is just too "citified". While I have some traps, I'm not yet interested in tree rats or chipmunks.
---
Friday, 1 November, 2024
We were able to disappear during the forced Covid "evacuations" which began in September of this year, but it required some planning and a lot of will power. If you didn't answer the phone or the door AND your cell phone didn't move or respond for three days, FEMA assumed you were dead from Covid Variant 37 (80% - 90% fatal for all age groups) and just marked the house, trailer, apartment or whatever with pink "Quarantined - Covid V37" tape and - because of the assumed deaths - also a wrap of yellow "Crime Scene - Do Not Enter" tape. They told the power co-op put your house on their list of meters to be pulled (remotely shut down for the "smart" meters) to ensure that power production, which was limited by the die-offs of electrical workers, would not go to powering houses with only dead bodies in them.
If FEMA thought the residents had been dead more than three days, they wrote the place off as not worth trying to salvage as they didn't have enough HazMat suits to "waste" them on places which were not obvious "hoarders": i.e., records from the previous 18 months showed that they might have kept an average of more than one week's groceries. If you answered the phone or the door, they "evacuated" you to a FEMA camp (jails, college dormitories and large tents are such great places to "isolate" people from infectious diseases) and they "nationalized" all your supplies - from toilet paper to tomatoes to toothpaste to Toyotas. Although the card they left at the "evacuated" houses mentioned phone access being available at the camps for the "evacuees" to notify family and that a "highly visible neon yellow 'Notice of Relocation' would be posted at your home so family and friends could locate you", we saw none of those notices on the houses we later salvaged.
We stayed in the basement, most of the time in the storage area under the screened porch. The porch floor is concrete poured over a corrugated steel support so we were hidden from thermal searches (FLIR) when they scanned the area via helicopter. We had more than two weeks of no-heat-needed food in there with us, including a few self-heating MREs, assorted from-the-can foods (Did you know that mini ravioli or sliced peaches are easier to get down straight from the can than pinto beans?), 40 gallons of stored water and a toilet seat on a five gallon bucket (plus plenty of bags) in that storage area so we were able to stay invisible long enough for FEMA to move on to other areas. Having battery powered VHF/UHF capable scanning radios (Baofeng UV-5R, spare batteries and solar power available for recharging), we were able to monitor the FEMA teams when they were within a few miles of us which also meant we knew when the next flyover would occur. An example:
'Entry team on US278, this is Chopper 2. What is your size and exact location so the FLIR can ignore you?'
'Six people. Northeast corner of Glore Road and 278.'
It seems that someone did NOT understand that you only have secure communications if the people you're hunting can't listen in. When the chopper announced they were returning to base to refuel, we'd take the "potty" bags out into the basement after they had cooled. Then wait an hour to ensure the chopper wasn't making a fake "return to base" and only then take the bags out to the holes we'd dug under the deck of the nearest house. Any report of a "bad" smell coming from an evacuated house usually meant rotting food (or bodies) that an entry team had missed, so it received no official attention. The owner had been too drunk to do anything other than follow orders when the FEMA team hit that house and her significant other was 600 miles away on a business trip - and he has not been heard from - so that house is effectively abandoned.
We're suburban, not rural, in an unincorporated area of the county but the area is populated with nice single family homes. In the 1970's, a builder thought this would be the next area of growth for upper-middle-class and better homes so he built about thirty houses with attached two-car garages, most with full basements and one or two masonry fireplaces and all with underground utilities (power, water, and natural gas lines run down one side of what is now our property, and telephone, cable TV and, more recently, fiber internet distribution boxes are all located above-ground on corners of our property). When we bought a house here thirty years later (and for 2/3 the price of a similar house in the nearest town), the blueprints were on a shelf in one closet of the master-on-main bedroom. Unfortunately, the original purchasers did it on the cheap and didn't get the pocket door between the master bedroom and the bath or the inside-the-garage ash cleanout for the fireplace in the family room (the cost of both wouldn't have added $1/month to the original 30 year mortgage payment).
As the FEMA ground patrols and the fly-over FLIR scans decreased in frequency, we began to use a little more of the house. We had already emptied the freezer as the grocery store shelves became empty, so there was enough solar power to manage the fridge when grid power began to be rationed in July - starting with eight hours ON, four hours OFF, then four hours ON, eight hours OFF and then progressing rapidly to two hours ON, six hours OFF, then two hours ON, ten hours OFF and then to only two hours ON each day - certainly not adequate for most fridges. I'd diverted some Styrofoam "garage door" insulation to the fridge and it was OK for our use with the two on, ten off power but only two hours a day of power meant the internal temperature of the fridge got above 50F every day so the lifetime of foods in the fridge was only comparable to a springhouse of 200 years ago - better than nothing, but the freezer section was not frozen, although its 41F was a slightly better place for milk and meat - and much shorter freshness than people of the 21st century expect from refrigeration.
That didn't last long as grid power was gone the next week - for the entire area our power co-op served, not just our owner-reported-as-deceased meter. How did I know? All the streetlights were off. Before power went away completely, we'd starting using the 4.4 cubic foot counter height fridge with the garage door insulation moved to it and running that fridge from solar power. I had once described the size of the solar system as "cabin in the woods with a small fridge" and that has proven true - but we do have a working fridge that now runs a little over two hours a day (per the KillAWatt meter I checked it with).
When there'd been no FEMA patrols for two weeks, we began exploring the houses near us. I used a full-face respirator with organic vapor cartridges to mostly block the scents of rotting food and dead pets; the house with the 100 gallon aquarium was bad even with the respirator.
Were those trips worth the exposure and the effort needed to get the scent off my body and out of my clothes - washing clothes in a Number 2 washtub with a dasher from lehmans.com - when I got back home? Most of the time. I had my bag of entry tools, from a thin, flexible strip of steel for slipping a knob lock to a battery powered drill with carbide tipped bits for drilling out the cylinders of dead bolts to a three foot crowbar. If possible, I wanted to gain entry without damaging the weather-tightness of the houses - we might need a place for storage of found supplies or possibly a shelter for chickens or the like if we found those. Where needed, I broke out a small window to gain access to the house and then patched it with some Plexiglas from scrap storm windows - it's still as weather tight as the original and we found spare keys inside most of the houses.
Several houses had either seasoned firewood or some of the commercial "fire logs" (one house had two cases of the highly compressed sawdust "logs" which actually burn like wood - versus the cheaper and much more common sawdust and wax versions), so that's some limited heat for the winter. Most had a gas grill so at least a partial five gallon tank of LP - two houses had a spare tank that was full. LP tanks can fuel the gas grill, the gas logs in the fireplace (they can burn natural gas or LP - if you parallel two or more 20lb LP tanks - and are completely battery-powered - remote and the main gas valve) or the Coleman stove - and there's an abandoned house near us in which most of that can be stored. Gasoline cans for lawnmowers - mostly one gallon cans which were less than half full (now combined in larger containers and treated with Pri-G), one gasoline-powered generator (1600 watt inverter gen from Harbor Freight but the price was right), lots of solar landscape lighting (some of those now living in windows which get a bit of sun each day, others - batteries removed - stored in boxes for future needs), several vehicles with a half tank or more of gasoline so the gas was siphoned (or the tank holed and drained). We also found a diesel 4WD pickup with an almost full tank - treated the fuel with Pri-D and moved the truck much closer to us. I had plenty of Pri-G to treat the 180 gallons of gasoline we'd found so I went looking for some metal barrels. There are now four 55 gallon barrels of treated gasoline behind the house with the covered pool. The barrels are hidden by the wood privacy fence there and I have both hand and battery-powered pumps for moving fuel. That covered pool means we have several thousand gallons of water which needs serious filtering to make it potable but we have the filters - just need to divert some downspouts at that house to keep the pool filled: those downspouts are one more item for the "To Do" list.
Found a very few battery-powered fans, mostly of the USB rechargeable variety but any airflow may help with cooling and heating. Found one 10,000BTU kerosene heater and one 22,000BTU, each with an almost full five gallon can of 1-K kerosene. Did those people give up on kerosene heat because they did NOT understand that kerosene heat stinks if you don't light and extinguish the wick outside? We also found a 120,000BTU torpedo kerosene construction site heater and a bed-mounted tank of kerosene (maybe 50 gallons?) in the old Dodge pickup in that garage - not sure where we'd be using that heater when it needs AC power for the fan and the igniter but it's been inventoried and moved to the nearest house and the kerosene has been treated with Pri-D (the proper quantity is listed on the Pri-D bottle).
Most of the houses had very little in "staples" - flour; corn meal; sugar; salt; canned meats, veggies and fruit; dried beans; rice; etc. - but we collected what we found. Didn't find many cookbooks - or any other paper books, for that matter - but found some phones and a few tablets. Most of the tablets had some reading material - if only romances - but all of that is new reading material for the better half.
I have a small network router running and have power for cameras watching North, East, South and West. The otherwise useless phones and tablets can be used to check or monitor those cameras. The higher resolution and very-good-in-low-light Wyze cameras will have to be loaded with RTSP firmware (Real Time Streaming Protocol - have the file on my laptop and that project is on the "To Do" list) to be useful now that wyze.com has closed down for lack of power and the secure, passworded camera-to-wyse.com-to-your-device link no longer works. With just two of us here, we need that electronic monitoring for 24/7 security - there's no guarantee that FEMA won't get hungry and return to glean the previously raped reaped areas...
"Jack, motion alert on the East side."
"I'm on it, Sarah."
I haven't seen a deer in the area for more than 15 years! You know the human population is way down if there's a deer in the road. Wonder how soon it'll be cold enough to butcher an animal? Where's that "Old Farmer's Almanac"? Seems we have several: 2016, 2018, 2020, 2022, bingo! Now to see what they think the second week of November will be like...
'Highs near 38F, lows near 28F.' Good enough when we'll have plenty of cold water if I filter 55 gallons and let a filled barrel sit outside overnight. Before I get a deer, I need to finish the smokehouse so we can smoke that meat. Smoked meat won't last through the summer but right now we're more concerned about food for the winter. Need some venison "ham", sausage and jerky. We'll likely be raising a lot of beans and similar crops for protein in the warm months unless we find some chickens to provide us with eggs and eventually meat. I have plywood, vinyl siding, roofing and shelving from the home center for the smokehouse and a large dehydrator, plus two trailers of supplies for a food garden - including assorted fencing and a big enough tiller for perhaps an acre of garden. That "acre" will be multiple smaller plots wherever there's a large enough flat space with good sun, but that also decreases the likelihood of some plant disease or pest destroying all of a specific crop.
We've found no chickens, rabbits or other "backyard" animals in our searches - guess the area is just too "citified". While I have some traps, I'm not yet interested in tree rats or chipmunks.
---
