The cold, hard facts

I live in an intensely populated area. I got the idea from this post from stealth survival where he was mentioning his town’s population. My town has over 35,000 people in it. That is 35,000 hungry mouths to feed in the case of a disaster. That’s also 34,999 nitwits trying to take my food.

To give an outline of my dire situation here, let me go over how many neighbors I have.

Boston 4.5M
Providence, RI 1.6M
Hardford, CT 1.2 M
Springfield 680k
Brockton 94k
Fall River 91k
Lowell 100k
Worcester 175k
Nashua, NH 87k
Manchester, NH 107k

So within 50 miles or so from my house I have 8.6+ million souls. If Katrina had slammed into Providence, RI instead of New Orleans there would have been an additional 1.1 MILLION people displaced. (NO had a population of about 500k.) That’s a lot of debit cards and trailers to get up here. Do you think for one pico-second that FEMA could handle that level of evacuation, support etc.? Yeah I didn’t think so.

The numbers are sobering. I cannot leave Mass because of my career, and my family. All I got is my Mum and brother, so I cannot tuck tail and haul butt to the west. Well not anytime soon, anyways.

I tried to figure out how many law enforcement officers are on the payrolls for the area, but evidently that number is not easily available to your average citizen. I did some social engineering and found out that a good average number is 1 uniformed police officer per 1000 people.

In any military engagement a ration of attacker to defender of 3:1 is considered an excellent attack. That’s for standing armies in open ground. For urban combat i.e. MOUT operations ( Mobile Operations in Urban Terrain) The ratio needs to be a lot higher. I do not have an exact ratio, but 10:1 seems right to me. In my area of suburbia, cops outnumbered 1000:1 would be toast.

But what about the national guard? There are 8000 soldiers in the Massachusetts National Guard. About half of them are away in some sandbox in the Middle East. Assuming all those soldiers and airmen are home on leave, which brings the number of those promoting law and order to 16,600. We just doubled the odds for law enforcement to 500:1!

Not all of the citizens are knuckleheads. Providence crime statistics gives us about 10,000 crimes for 175,000 people for 2007. That is 1.8 violent crimes per 1000 people per year. The question would be how many would turn to violent crime in a disaster. That is the $64,000 question. The number would be on a sliding scale relative to the severity of the situation, and what type of situation it is. In a blizzard the criminals can’t get around so the spike in crime is rather small. In an early-season hurricane, however, I expect a huge spike in crime.

This is why I’m torn on bugging out and bugging in. No fort can withstand an extended siege, so bugging out is a good idea. Even the smallest, most remote towns of Mass have a population of 10,000. Even if by some miracle I manage to get to the ass end of Massachusetts, I have 10, 000 neighbors. So bugging in makes a lot of sense.

Basically I need to keep my options open. I need to blend in with my neighbors, and keep under the criminal’s radar. I am working on an all-around plan, which has phases of preparedness. I’ll outline my plan in a series of posts once I’ve done some more thought on the subject.

It’s been nearly 6 weeks where the FUCK is my LTC? AAAARRRGGHHHH!