Gimme shelter

So let’s talk a little about shelter. I believe that most preppers are a bit complacent about it, believing they can rough something up in a hurry if the need arises. In Manitoba, lack of shelter can kill you far quicker than a lack of food or water, perhaps in as little as an hour or so in the right season.

Ok, for a start, if you have a home now, is it weather-worthy after a crisis? What do you need to do to keep it secure and livable if the grid is down? Most importantly, what is your alternative heat source, off grid? If it is not a wood stove, you’re likely in big trouble here in Manitoba come winter, as most of us simply can’t afford to store an alternate fuel like heating oil, nor have an extra furnace sitting in the basement. Like gas and most of the other fuels refined from oil, it will eventually go bad, unlike wood. I suppose if you had to, you could look at burning coal, wood pellets, or something like that, but you need either a big supply laid in, or easy access to a source.
Now, what if your home is destroyed? It can happen for a variety of reasons, manmade and natural. Or the ‘loss’ might even be your decision to relocate to a safer place, so plan for alternate accommodation. The cheapest and fastest shelter possible is a good three or four-season tent and the gear to go with it (sleeping pads and bags, etc.). Cooking can be a wood fire, but heating your tent with it is pretty difficult. Tents, while great temporary shelters, are not a long-term solution in my opinion. They have too little space, too little insulation, and no way (usually) to heat them. One exception to this is the old miner’s/trapper’s tents made of heavy canvas and intended for use with a small wood stove.

I suppose you could consider the traditional First Nations dwellings as upgrades of the basic tent idea, but they are not really superior to the trapper’s tent, in my opinion. The only other tent I can think of that might be winter-worthy in the Canadian Prairies is the Mongolian yurt, but like the traditional teepees, the usual materials for them are unlikely to be ready at hand for quick construction.

Without a tent, you had better be able to construct expedient shelters from available material. There are a number of styles you can use, from simple debris shelters to fairly elaborate lean-tos (almost a half hut, actually) that will provide temporary shelter. These are good as far as they go, but are stopgap measures and unsuitable for long term habitation.

Whether a tent or expedient shelter, you won’t last long in the conditions the prairies can dish out without constructing something more substantial. The next step up is building with sod to create a ‘soddie’; or digging down or into the earth to create a dugout type shelter, or using wattle and daub to construct a hut similar to one that might have existed in the Middle Ages. Or you can use a combination of these techniques.

An interesting variation/combination is the burdei, used by the early Ukrainian settlers in Western Canada as temporary housing, although larger, more elaborate versions were used in Europe as permanent dwellings. It was created by digging out the sod, excavating a dugout approximately 1 meter deep and 2 wide by 4 meters long. Then a frame of logs would be erected, over which the saved sod would be laid to create a roof.

For heating and cooking you might have to make do with a fire pit in the middle of the floor and a hole in the roof for venting the smoke, but you’ll be reasonably snug. More time and materials makes you a fireplace and a chimney, but this might be beyond the expertise of some.

If you live somewhere where the material is easily available, you might even consider a corban or some variation of it. Examples of these beehive shaped monastic huts (see picture above) can still be found standing in the British Isles and parts of North America hundreds of years after they were built. With dry stone walls up to 1.5 meters thick, they required plentiful time and material and a certain expertise in constructing the roof. If a survivor decides to build a hut in this style, he might be well advised to consider thatching rather than the traditional stone roof. No one knows how many monks might have gotten closer to their god through faulty roof construction.

At this point, we’re talking pretty much permanent dwellings and the dugout, soddie, burdei, corban and other construction methods mentioned can be used to create comfortable long term dwellings. The next step up is the log cabin, but the building techniques require a bit more skill. Great if you have the ability, logs, tools and time, but this is asking a lot of the skills of the average refugee or survivor.

A word is in order about the scale of the shelters and dwellings I’ve mentioned. These are not large. In fact, for heating purposes, the smaller it is the better. A typical hut made of sod or wattle and daub might be only 100 square feet, of even less. Living in that amount of space might be a strange notion for those of us living in our McMansions of thousands of square feet. If you don’t think that it is possible, check out the replica ‘soddie’ at the Manitoba Museum. It’s amazing how little space you really need to survive.

Furnishing your habitation can be accomplished with a little effort, and tables, chairs, beds and so on can be made from available materials.

So far I’ve assumed you are without resources other than natural materials. Realistically, this is unlikely. There will be everything from abandoned cars to complete houses available as shelters, and even in an area that is largely been turned to rubble, there are generally structures that can be repaired, or at the very least, materials that can be salvaged for building. So think now what you would build, and how you would build it. What tools would you need? What skills? And always the most important question in Manitoba, how will I heat it?

How comfortably you live during and after a crisis is dependant on you. If you are adaptable and resourceful, life need not be “nasty, brutish, and short”. As survival expert Ray Mears put it: “If you’re roughing it, you’re doing something wrong”. What he didn’t say was that you need to acquire and practice your skills now, and not when you actually need them to survive.

That means ensuring your present home will be viable in a loss of power situation. It means learning the skills to maintain your present home, and learning skills to build a new one if need be. So get out there, take a course, do some DIY around the house, build a lean-to, a soddie, or a log cabin. Make a fireplace out of clay and river cobbles. Get ready now.

Originally posted November 10, 2010 @ MPN