SPEAR lesson 13 Shelter 1.2 Rule of 3, Heat Transfer and Shelter Selection

Lesson 13  Shelter 1.2 

Rule of 3, Heat Transfer, Shelter Selection

For survival you have a lot of options.

1. You can simply stay in your house
2. You can build a primitive shelter from sticks and branches
3. You can tunnel into the snow and make a cave
4. You can set up a tent or tarp
5. You can stay in a vehicle
6. You can find any other abandoned structure
7. Or you can take the shelter of someone else.

With all these options, and many more I didn't list, you have to identify what makes one shelter better than another.  If you have to build a shelter what do you have to know to make it work the first time.  This lead us into the rule of threes:

• You can live three weeks without food
• You can live three days without water
• You can live three hours exposed to the elements 
• You can live three minutes without air.

Most survivalist know this list and use it to prioritize the actions in an emergency.  Preppers use a similar formula in how they prepare for the unknown.  If you can go three weeks without food then that gets knocked off the top of the "to do" list.  Water is a little more pressing but if you are without shelter and the temperature is getting down below freezing you better put shelter on the top of that list.  The three minutes without air will come in later.

The number one reason for shelter is to protect our core body temperature.  If it goes up or down more than a couple of degrees we are facing death.  So the first thing to consider for a shelter is whether or not it will retain heat.  This brings me to the next list which is basic heat transfer:

• Conduction- This form of heat transfer comes when things are touching.  Think of electrical wire. You electricity is conducted through wires but it doesn't work if the wires aren't touching
• Convection- This is simply hot air.  Or heat that is transferred by the air.  It can transfer to your body or away from it.  To remember this think about a convection oven.  It is different from a regular oven by that is has a fan that blows the hot air around.
• Radiation-  This heat is best illustrated by a magnifying glass as it concentrates the radiant energy of the sun.  Another good example is when you are sitting in front of a fire and you can feel it heating your face.  It is the radiant heat that is doing this not the convected air.

Your shelter needs to hold in convection that comes from your body or from a fire that you build.  A solar blanket can be used to reflect back the radiation from the fire.  And by building your shelter off the ground you can avoid the loss of your body heat through conduction to the ground.

Insulation that is in our homes uses this same principle of stopping heat loss.  It creates lots of small air pockets that eliminates convection and due to the poor conduction rate of the trapped air it takes a long time for heat to transfer through it.  You winter clothes are designed to do the same thing.  If you find yourself stuck out without shelter you can fill the clothes that you do have with anything you can find that will produce those small pockets of air.  You can use crumpled up paper, dry grass, strips of cardboard or whatever you may be able to find.

The last item of heat transfer that you need to understand is evaporation.  When you want to turn water into steam you have to add heat.  When you want to turn water into ice you need to remove heat.  Anytime you change the state of an element the price you have to pay is paid in heat.  If you lick the back of your hand and blow across it you can feel it get cooler.  The saliva is evaporating and taking your heat with it.  When we sweat we do so for this very purpose.  The sweat that we generate evaporates to keep our core temperature down when it is hot or we are exerting ourselves.  If it is really cold outside that sweat will freeze and take much more heat than your body designed.

          The other thing that happens when we sweat and it it cold our clothes get wet.  The reason this is bad goes back to conduction.  Remember all those little air pockets in our clothes, well they are now filled with water.  Water transfers heat ten times more effectively than air does.  If you get wet and it is cold you need to get out of those wet clothes and into dry ones as soon as possible.  If you don't have dry clothes you need to build a fire and dry your clothes if front of the fire.  Don't wear them when you are drying them.  The steam could burn you but it is better to take your chances with the cold air then it is to let the cold water suck the heat out of you.

Oh yeah.  The three minutes without air.  Don't make a shelter so tight and closed up that you don't let in any fresh air.  If you sleep in the cab of a vehicle and there are a couple of people with you the air will only last a couple of hours with the windows all closed up.  Make sure that you have a fresh source of air to keep from falling off into that sleep that you don't wake up from.

Continue on to Lesson 14

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SPEAR Lesson 15 Fire 1.2 Fire Purpose and Safety

Why is fire so important? 

SPEAR Lesson 15 Fire 1.2 Fire Purpose and Safety

          In wilderness survival the most popular lesson that you will find probably has to be fire starting.  This is mostly because it is an easy lesson to do and it films well. But here in the SPEAR course we need to look at this lesson a little deeper to find out why we need to know this at all.  

          Fire was undoubtedly a game changing skill for primitive man.  It allowed them to cook their food, heat their bodies and keep away predators.  In the pioneering days of the US they used fire to do much of the same things with just better equipment and skill.  Fires were used to smoke meat and fish to prolong their shelf life and the fires that warmed them were put into small wood stoves that allowed them to use it as a stove to cook on as well.

          Today the very same things apply.  The improvement from the prehistoric times to the pioneering times continued into today. We have made improvements to the way that we start fire and how we use fire as well as how to keep the fire under control.  For survival training though we have to pretend that none of these advancements were ever invented.  You need to be able to use fire in its most basic form so you don't get too comfortable with modern items that you may not have when you need them.

          Lets take a brief look at some potential hazards you might face where fire would save your life:

1.  You are out hunting and you twist an ankle making walking impossible.  The temperature is dropping into the single digits tonight and you are already feeling the chill.  Without a fire to get through the night morning will probably never come.
2. The power has gone out and you have to cook the food in your freezer before it is all spoiled.  Without fire to cook the food  you might need to eat uncooked meat leading to food poisoning or just lose it all.
3. You are lost in the woods and need to find your way out.  You have enough food in your back pack to last for two more days but your canteen in gone.  You find a small stream where you can fill up your canteen but you don't know if the water is contaminated with bacteria or parasites.  Without a filter or disinfectant tabs the only way to treat the water is to boil it.  If you were to choose to drink the water you could start to show symptoms in as little as 24 hours. This would make moving very difficult and escape almost impossible.  More than likely you would become dehydrated and within days would perish.

Fire is an essential skill that everyone should know and one that SPEAR students will master.  To have the ability to make fire and cook food will make the difference between life and death in a long term crisis.  

          Fire making is important but fire is a dangerous element that can cause serious damage.  When you use fire or practice with fire you need to make very sure that the fire is out when you are done.  Forest fires will ruin your training area and potentially do far worse than that.  Make sure that you put enough water on your fire that it stops steaming.  This may take several trips to the creek for water but it is a great rule to live by.

          In a long term disaster the fire departments might not even be still in operation.  If you are careless around your house it may burn to the ground from the smallest of fires without proper equipment to put it out.  

          The final item on this lesson is one that you won't find in many of the other fire lessons or classes out there.  The energy of fire.  I am not referring about steam power or anything like that.  Fire itself has energy, fire is energy.  The kind of energy that you can feel deeper than your body.  

         The energy, or chi, of fire is what makes you relax and just stare at it for hours.  It helps your brain settle and focus.  It helps your soul heal.  Small campfires are the first lesson of magic in this course.  The next time that you build a fire take some time and just sit and enjoy it.  Feel it, not just in your skin, but in you spirit.  Feel it connect with your spirit and see where it goes.

          This magic is very helpful to calm a scared group.  Before you explore your options start a nice fire and let people connect.

Please share your comments on fire magic below then go out and make some magic or your own. 


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SPEAR Lesson 11 Water 1.2 Water Safety

Core Training
Lesson 11 of 25

Water 1.2 Water Safety

Now that we have established the importance of water and how your body will suffer without it we have to discuss where to get it.  You can't just drink from wherever you want.  This is obvious for most people but to make this as basic as possible so that everyone is on the same page from this point forward it must be included.  Pure water is not the best thing for us.  Pure meaning distilled water or water that has almost all impurities removed.  The minerals that are in the water for the most part are good for our bodies if not required.  A clear fresh spring would probably be the top of the water gathering list.
          Water that comes from lakes and streams can be used but it needs to be filtered, treated or boiled to make it safe.  The reason for this is that the water you may be contaminated with bacteria and parasites that will make you sick.  Filtering the water through a high filtration filter that is designed for it will take them out of the water while boiling it will kill them.  The third option is to treat the water with a chemical like chlorine or iodine.  These kill the contaminates but leave them in the water.  This is how most of our municipal drinking water is treated.
          The water from our home plumbing is safe as long as the source of the water isn't contaminated.  If you have town or city water that is pumped in from the street it is probably going to be safe unless there has been a major disaster that has left the water treatment facility abandoned.  If you find yourself in a long term crisis and are waiting it out at home you need to evaluate your water situation and make decisions early.  Filling as many containers as possible in the beginning is a smart choice.  You never know how long the water will stay on.  Most water systems rely on gravity to provide the water pressure to get the water up to the upper floors of buildings and houses that are located on the top of hills etc...  The water is pumped from the source, either a reservoir or a well into large water towers that hold the water.  After a crisis the water will stay in that tank until it runs out.
          If you have well water at your house chances are good that you have clean drinking water that has been pumped up from the water table a couple of hundred of feet below ground.  Almost all contaminates get filtered out from the soil leaving the water safe to drink.  Although sometimes your well housing itself can get contaminated from water coming down the pipe from the top.  It is best to have it tested yearly or simply pour some bleach down the pipe every year and let it kill everything,  A gallon of bleach in the pipe will kill anything in the pipe but can be dangerous to plastic pipes so dilute it with water before you dump it in.  Let is sit for an hour and flush the pipes by running the water to pump the bleach out.  Usually when the smell of bleach is gone it is safe to use but run it another ten minutes to be safe.

          The well has one great Achilles heal and that is that it requires electricity to run the pump to get the water out.  It is possible to have another well put in with a hand crank or to have a hand pump added to your existing pump.  The easiest way to ensure that the water keeps flowing is to have a backup electric system like solar and batteries or a propane generator that you can use to run the pump to fill containers.  It doesn't make sense to have your generator running all the time just for the convenience of running water when you can store water and save your fuel.

          Water storage is the next part of the lesson.  If you don't have the capacity to store water at home you need to consider that a top priority.  Water containers don't need to be anything fancy they just have to be clean and safe to store water.  You can use old milk or soda bottles that have been washed out to save costs.  I would use my bathtub to store water only as a last resort or just for cleaning purposes.  Remember we are trying to keep bacteria out of our bodies.

          Urban water collection offers it own set of challenges.  The chemicals that could be in water that is found could be not only bad for you but could be deadly.  With how important water is, if you find yourself running low when a crisis outlasts your storage you need to find ways of gathering rain water or you need to find your way to a place where the water can be free of chemical contaminates.  If you are completely opposed to leaving your home or neighborhood then you should use that information when doing your emergency planning and practice water collection now to be ready later.

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Martial arts Survival Frame of Mind

          Having the proper frame of mind in a crisis is easily the most important factor to getting through it.  Someone with a depressed mental attitude won't have the strength, mentally, to dig deep and push through the hard times to survive.   For the most part your mental attitude is defined by your character itself as well as your environment but there is work that you can do to improve it.

         In general survival the best thing you can do is simply practice.  By putting yourself in mock situations you will feel far less panicked when it really happens.  For example, to spend time hiking and camping would make being lost in the woods less stressful than it would to someone who doesn't spend much time in the woods. In the martial arts the same method applies.  The more time you spend sparring makes actual confrontations easier to handle.  As your skill improves your self esteem and confidence also improve.   This leads to having a Black belt attitude.
        
         Black belt attitude permeates into every part of  life.  If defines your character and makes critical decisions easier to make.  A strong belief in who you are and what you are capable of will go a long way in staving off the "I quit" attitude.  

         SPEAR craft involves every part of life and allows for much more practice than simply mock survival situations.  When you practice you feel more confident and less apt to panic in an emergency.  So practice often.  Small portions of training everyday will define your character and when you feel this new status or title you will be far more effective.