Living in your apartment, you might think you’ve got the shelter aspect of survival sewed up. Maybe you do, but maybe not. Let’s begin by looking at what ‘shelter’ means to us. Then we can see if you’re apartment is still providing this and how to provide for it if something is missing.
Prior to humans learning to reliably create and use fire, shelter would have been just a place to stay out of the wind, rain, or snow. Given that your apartment has not suffered any damage, it fits that criteria, and does it well enough. However, once we learned the secret of fire, we began to heat our shelters, and to cook in them. In a major catastrophe, it is likely that the heat will cease to function, as well as the electricity. Any modern home, especially apartments become far less functional as shelters when that happens. Still, it doesn’t mean you can’t make it work.
Here in Manitoba, there are perhaps seven months of the year that you can stay warm without a heat source of some sort. In a house, you have the option of putting in alternate heating methods such as a wood stove as a back up. In your apartment, you don’t have that luxury, at least not prior to a collapse. Please don’t even think about dragging your barbecue inside and heating your place that way. The apartment might get warm, but your body will inevitably get colder after death from carbon monoxide poisoning.
There are options such as propane space heaters which are relatively cheap and quite a bit safer, but these still have the possibility of depleting the air in a tightly sealed apartment, although the better ones have oxygen sensors that will shut the unit off in that case. Overall, though, any fuel burning heater will pose some inherent danger. And there remains the problem of storing sufficient propane. The same problem goes for running a small generator to power an electric heater.
The problem of heat in an apartment is not an easy one to resolve. Over the longer term, I believe the best option would to be to obtain or build a wood burning stove of some kind that would be vented to the outside. Wilderness stores sell small stoves meant to be used in canvas tents that might be a good option, or you can build your own (see picture). Obviously, you will need to vent it to the outside, and storing the stove and other parts may be a major problem. Fuel can be scavenged from a variety of sources, and it takes a surprisingly small amount of wood to heat a small space. The downside is that you may draw attention t yourself, and that a poorly made stove badly installed may cause a fatal fire.
Otherwise, there are measures you can take to make your situation somewhat better. Make the area you live in as small as possible by sealing off as much of the apartment as you can with plastic sheeting and duct tape or other materials. Seal a layer of plastic over the windows as well, and seal openings such as bathroom and kitchen fan vents if not in use. Make use of passive solar if you can, especially in a south facing apartment. Get as much sun as possible during the day, but make sure drapes and blinds are closed at night to slow heat loss. Restrict your trips in and out of the apartment to as few as possible to avoid losing warm air.
If you own a tent, you might consider pitching it inside your apartment and sleeping in it to conserve even more warmth. If you don’t own a tent, hark back to your childhood and make a blanket fort. If you are able to boil water, a small hot water bottle taken to bed with you can make the difference between a miserable night and a comfortable one. And of course, there is always cuddling in with a friend. It may seem silly, but you and your significant other, or even the whole family sharing a nest of blankets will make it warmer for all.
There is no easy answer to staying warm in an apartment, but if the polar explorers of the last two centuries were able to stay alive without the modern materials we enjoy, there is no reason you can’t. Some pre-buying of appropriate bedding, equipment and clothing may be necessary, but if you are serious about making it in your apartment, it can be done.
While heating may be difficult, cooking is a little easier to arrange. Many apartment dwellers have a barbecue on their balcony, which will do in a pinch but I feel that the average gas barbeque is a poor choice for emergency cooking, due to its inefficiency. A far better use of the 20 pound propane tank on your barbecue would be to obtain a camp stove that is designed for one pound propane bottles. Not only can you use the one pound bottles which are small and easy to store, but by using an inexpensive hose and adaptor, you can use the 20 pound tank as well. The bigger tank should let you cook for many, many days.
Of course, if you’ve installed a wood stove, cooking will take place on that, but if not, there are other options. The best of these is the twig stove made from a coffee can. There are plans for various types of these ‘hobo’ stoves on the net, but remember that you need to be careful. Ventilation due to smoke and carbon monoxide make this a design best used on the balcony, and as always, an open flame demands respect. Still, you get much heat from very little fuel, so it may be the cooker of choice once other fuels are gone. As always, remember that cooking on your balcony will likely give you away to outsiders.
A last but limited option is a solar cooker. While it is using a free, unlimited heat source, it may not be effectie at all in colder weather. As with all things preparedness, you'll need to try it to see if it is a viable option, at least part of the time.
Overall, I believe that staying warm and cooking are the biggest challenges for the apartment survivalist. You need to give this area more thought than almost any other aspect of apartment survival, with the possible exception of security. If at all possible, try out whatever strategies you come up with before you need them. Find an abandoned building, a shack, anything without heat and power, and try to stay warm and cook using what you’ve come up with.
You need to know now what will work then.
Originally posted April 17, 2011 @ MPN
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