Saturday, December 17, 2016

Winter Driving by Peter Kummerfeldt




Winter is here.  Cold, wind, snow, and ice make winter travel challenging at best and dangerous at worst.  Oftentimes, vehicles get stuck in these conditions forcing the occupants to spend an unexpected night or two out in dangerous weather.  Fortunately, this need not be a life-threatening experience.

Give yourself the Best Odds for Survival before traveling
1.          Assemble an emergency kit (see below) based on your personal needs, the season, and the geographic location.  If you become stranded, this kit becomes your lifeline until you are rescued.
2.          Tell someone your destination and approximate arrival time.  This way, if you are overdue, someone starts looking for you, thus shortening the time of the ordeal.
3.          Dress to survive, not just to arrive!  When the engine turns off, the temperature inside the car nears outside temperatures.  In other words, if it is -5°F outside, it will be close to -5°F inside. 
4.          Never set out in stormy conditions without a full tank of gas, a good battery, proper tires, a heater and exhaust system in good working condition, good anti-freeze, and a good dose of common sense. 

After getting stuck, 
1.          Stay calm and don't panic!  Many panic and wander onto an icy road only to be struck by an out-of-control vehicle.
2.          Stay with the vehicle and emergency kit.  First, being windproof and waterproof, your vehicle makes a good shelter.  Secondly, because of its size, the vehicle likely will be found before you.  Digging yourself out or walking for help oftentimes proves fatal.  Let the rescuers find you!
3.          Move emergency equipment and other useful gear into the passenger compartment.
  
Next, make the vehicle into a shelter.  While the car protects from wind and wetness, you must warm the interior.
1.          Put on your warmest clothes (socks, hat, gloves, long underwear, and additional insulation layers) and wrap yourself in blankets - or get inside a sleeping bag - before becoming cold.
2.          Sit sideways on the seat or place cushions on the foot wells.  Otherwise, your feet get cold.
3.          Place insulation (foam, cardboard, extra clothing) over windows, so your head stays off the cold window when you lean back.
4.     Using plastic, a space blanket, or a tarp and duct tape, partition off the back of the vehicle from the front, so you only warm the part of the vehicle you occupy.
5.     Before starting your vehicle, ensure snow- and damage-free exhaust.  Then, run the engine for ten minutes each hour or five minutes each half hour.  With the car running, turn the radio on for news and weather.  Do not go to sleep with the engine running. (See carbon monoxide warning below.)
6.     To create heat without running the car, you can use long-burning candles, small stoves, and Isopropyl alcohol/toilet paper improvised heaters.  (See carbon monoxide warning below.)
7.     (Carbon monoxide warning)  If running the car or using fire for heat, ventilate the vehicle by opening a downwind window approximately one inch.  Carbon monoxide presents a very real threat to your safety.  Its deadly effects sneak up without warning.  Carbon monoxide poisoning from vehicle exhausts causes almost 60% of unintentional deaths in the United States annually.
8.        Produce internal heat via metabolism by eating carbohydrate- and fat-rich foods.  Your emergency kits need to include quantities of high-calorie, non-perishable food items (for example, trail mix and carbohydrate food bars).
9.     Stay hydrated.  Your blood circulates heat from the core to extremities such as fingers, toes, ears, and nose.  Dehydration reduces the amount of warm blood circulating throughout the body, thus increasing the chance of cold injuries such as frostbite.  (Don’t eat snow!  It takes body heat to convert snow to liquid.  Instead, use a heat source to melt snow for drinking water.)
10.   Don’t smoke.  The nicotine in cigarettes reduces blood flow to the skin and extremities, increasing the possibility of frostbite.
11.   Don’t drink alcohol.  It affects judgment.  Bad judgment decreases your chances of survival.
12.   Lastly, if getting out of the vehicle in a blizzard, put on snow goggles (if you have them) and tie a lifeline to yourself and the door handle before moving away from the vehicle's proximity.  In white-out conditions, visibility reduces to as low as 12 inches. 

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Vehicle Emergency Kit

      Blankets or sleeping bags
      Book to read
      Booster cables
      Cat litter
      Cell phone with charger
      Chemical hand warmers
      Cordage (50')
      Duct tape
      Emergency candles
      Fire Kit:  cotton balls and Vaseline, metal match, matches, and fatwood
      First-aid kit
      Flagging tape
      Flashlight and spare batteries
      Food (three dehydrated meals plus additional calorie-dense foods)
      Gloves
      Knife and saw
      Lightsticks
      Metal cup
      Multi-purpose tool
      Personal medications
      Portable radio with spare batteries
      Road flares
      Shovel (folding or breakdown)
      Ski goggles
      Small stove
      98.6 Shelters for all family members
      Toilet paper and wipes
      Tools to include jack & spare tire
      Tow strap
      Two empty cans (one for melting snow & the other for sanitary purposes)
      Water (4 quarts minimum)
      Windshield scraper and brush
      Winter clothing
      Winter footwear


     Peter Kummerfeldt has walked the talk in the wilderness survival field for decades. Peter grew up in Kenya, East Africa and came to America in 1965 and joined the U.S. Air Force. He is a graduate of the Air Force Survival Instructor Training School and has served as an instructor at the Basic Survival School, Spokane, Washington; the Arctic Survival School, Fairbanks, Alaska, and the Jungle Survival School, Republic of the Philippines.

For twelve years, Peter was the Survival Training Director at the United States Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs, Colorado. He retired from the Air Force in 1995 after 30 years of service.
 
In 1992, concerned with the number of accidents that were occurring in the outdoors annually and the number of tourists traveling overseas who were involved in unpleasant and sometimes life-threatening incidents Peter created OutdoorSafe, Inc.

He is the author of Surviving a Wilderness Emergency and has addressed over 20,000 people as the featured speaker at numerous seminars, conferences and national conventions.

Friday, December 16, 2016

Water Balance




We need water to live.  In fact, 65% of our weight originates from nothing but water.  

Water makes up the largest component of blood.  Water carries the heat necessary for thermoregulation; water removes wastes from the body; water lubricates organs and joints; and water provides the necessary environment for all the body's chemical reactions.  Therefore, to function properly, the body needs to continuously maintain proper water levels.  Survivors accomplish this by focusing on replacing their water losses with similar water gains to maintain balance.

Under normal conditions, an average person loses approximately 1.5 liters of water per day (for our discussion, quarts and liters fill up approximately the same volume).  Specifically, our bodies lose about 0.5 liters through the skin, about 0.5 liters through the lungs, and about 0.5 through urine every day.  Conversely, our body usually gains around 0.5 liters from the metabolism of food leaving us with a normal drinking requirement of about 1.0 liter of water per day.



Environmental conditions, level of activity, diet, or illness can affect the water balance in our body.  Hot environments pull water from our body via sweat.  Add in exercise, and we can lose up to two liters of water per hour.  Additionally, very cold dry environments pull as much as 2 liters of water per day from our bodies simply through breathing.  Protein-rich foods extract water from the body as well.  Urea, a toxic by-product of protein metabolism, requires additional urine production in order to be expelled from the body.  Illnesses causing vomiting or diarrhea speed up water losses, threatening the balance even more.  Any of these factors easily tip us into a water deficit (or dehydration) unless we replenish the lost water immediately.   
   
Under normal circumstances, we simply replenish the water by drinking more.  Problems arise, however, if the water deficit occurs when a natural disaster, emergency, or accident at sea prevents ready access to safe drinkable water.  Therefore, it is critical to plan and prepare for our water needs before a crisis hits.