Physical Security
Be prepared.
Introduction
Though I am writing this prior to the 2022 mid-term elections in the United States, this really is applicable in all places and times. You never know what the future can bring and often disastrous situations come without warning.
You are always seeing in the news people caught by surprise in dire situations subject to violence or lacking security and living in fear without adequate food and water.
When the situation arises, you might not want to get out of the house to go to the hardware store to purchase something or the locksmith won’t leave his house to fix a lock at your house. There might be a lot of damage and repairs needed in the community and you won’t be able to get a person to come fix things at your house.
Also, by the time it is really obvious that things need to be done everybody will be calling the locksmith, the repair person, and buying out supplies at the hardware store and you won’t be able to do what you need to do to enhance your physical security.
Finally, it takes time to fix things and add things for security. You need to locate a good repair person, then schedule them to come do the modification or repair, and then it needs to be done, and hopefully there isn’t a complication.
All these things will also improve your place’s security against burglary so it makes sense to do it now. It is somewhat oriented to fortifying your house, but I think some of the items apply to apartments and some items can be adopted. So, of the things are general in scope.
Physical Security –
This section will be updated as more things are thought of.
These are some items in no particular order of importance, though I will try to have the more important items in the beginning, I am not going to spend time trying to rank them.
1. Repair: Are all the locks and latches for the doors and windows in the house in repair? If not get them repaired.
2. Gun: A shotgun specifically so you don’t have to be good in aiming. It needs to be in a secure place. You will need to know gun safety and you will need to know how to load it and shoot it.
3. Mace: Make sure you have mace. This is really useful since if they are in the house and you spray mace in a room, they will be evacuating even if you don’t hit them with the spray. Makes sure it is current.
4. Plan: Some threatening individuals are pounding on the door what is your plan? When this happens, you can’t be having a little panic attack. You can’t be having people in your household having panic attacks. You don’t want to lose time trying to figure out what to do when it is hard to mentally focus and also having to manage people who are having little excited dramas. These are the situations to think about.
a. They are pounding on your door, do you go upstairs, run out the back door, jump off the balcony, get your gun, move heavy furniture in front of the door?
b. You hear reports of a civil disturbance in the morning, how do you determine it is safe to go to work?
c. You are at work and hear reports of a civil disturbance in your neighborhood, at what point do you go home or perhaps decide not to go home?
d. If for a week it is unsafe to go grocery shopping for food, will you be hungry?
e. If there is a power outage, will you be able to eat?
f. When might you flee your home versus staying locked up inside?
g. What is you plan to leave the house in a hurry? What do you take with you?
h. What do you do with the pets?
i. Who might be allowed to stay overnight on an emergency basis?
5. Getaway Car:
a. Make sure you have at least a half-tank of gasoline in your car.
b. Kit with food, dried fruit, candy bars, crackers, bottled water, radio. There might be shortages of gasoline and you might be in a situation where you had to leave the house in a hurry or couldn’t go home.
c. The car needs to be in good repair and the tires good.
6. Doors:
a. Two dead-bolt locks for your door: Heavy duty door locks.
b. No hollow doors: They should be heavy solid wood, but preferably steel.
c. Door frame: A lot of doors have double locks, but the door frame is just pine with a few nails holding it in place. When they bust down your door, the deadbolts won’t fail, the door frame will just come loose. Make sure your door frame is securely attached. Wood screws, more nails that are deep, perhaps some bracing.
d. No big windows in the door: You can have a small window, but those doors with the large decorative windows are no really no security. Even for the small windows at the top of the door, some type of bracing would be nice and a decorative way to do it probably can be worked out.
e. Decorative security iron door: You don’t want a security door that looks like a prison door. You want decorative metal door or just expanded metal. If you paint the expanded metal door a flat color like brown, it becomes somewhat invisible. The security iron door needs to be bolted into the brick or stone or frame of the house. Expanded metal isn’t super expensive either.
f. First, second, and third or more floors: All these security measures apply to all the doors on all the floors.
g. Peep holes: I think almost all doors have peep holes, but if your exterior door doesn’t have it, now would be a good time to get a door with one.
h. Extra strong doors: To an unoccupied part of the basement or other unoccupied part of the house.
7. Windows:
a. They all should have locking latches.
b. Sliding glass doors need to have a pole that drops in and fits into the sliding track that prevents the door from being opened when unattended.
c. Preferably you have storm windows.
d. Tempered glass in windows to resist breaking.
e. Vertical pole of wood that prevents lower half of window from being raised when window is unattended.
f. Security glass for those windows not used for viewing the outdoors. Don’t let people see in.
g. Basement windows: Decorative iron mini-doors over them. This is for things where the house is on a slope and there are windows on a side of the basement and you don’t actually live on the floor.
h. Drapes or Blinds: You need to be able to have drapes or blinds so people can’t see in for 1st and 2nd floor windows as well as basement windows that don’t have security glass.
8. Electricity: You will want to be able to watch the news and also call in case of emergency.
a. Backup battery packs for your cellphone.
b. Universal Power Supplies. About 4 to 6 of them in the largest size. You will need a couple for your TV location, and a couple for your office. This way you can watch on TV or on the internet for a couple hours to see what is happening. They can also be used to charge up a cell phone. A unit would be good for any medical equipment you use, like a CPAP.
c. Batteries: Batteries for flashlights and other emergency lights. Perhaps to keep a radio running.
d. Emergency Power Generator: This would be good to bridge extended outages.
9. Lighting: On all four sides of your house you will need good LED lighting. In a period of civil disorder, you don’t want to have to worry about bulbs burning out so make sure it is LED. Make sure they have photosensors so they turn on automatically when it gets dark.
10. Fire extinguisher: Make sure you have one that is current at least. I think one per floor of your house would be good, so you aren’t running to the 2nd floor to bring the fire extinguisher to the basement. Probably with the first news story of a house being set aflame there will be rush to the hardware store to get them and they will run out. Plus it might be you really don’t want to leave the house.
11. Medicine: If you are taking medicine, how much do you have on hand?
12. Pets: Do you have a pet carrier? How much pet food is on hand? If you had to travel, how will you transport the pet and petfood? Setting the pet free is a death sentence by starvation for pets.
13. Evacuation: If you had to leave for a week or two weeks or longer, where would you go, how would you live? Are you going to sleep in the car? Visit friends or relatives? Camp some place? Do you have cash on hand?
I am sure there is something I should include here but I overlooked. Or there is something specific to you to be considered. Do you have someone in a wheel chair at your house? What emergency contingencies need to be considered.
Excitable People – Those that Can’t be Told
There are some people that just don’t know how to behave in an emergency. In some situations you will need to be focused on deciding what to do next, or focused on assessing a developing situation and these excitable individuals will either be acting out some drama or worse running off to do something stupid. You don’t need the distraction.
It might be critical that everyone be quiet and keep the lights off and they are busy shrieking and letting everyone know they are alarmed.
There are others that can’t be told. They need to turn off the TV or the lights and they want to do it in just a few minutes. Or they want to go outside to see what is happening when the group has plans to hide in the house upstairs or in the basement.
You will need to be firm in making it clear what your expectations are and do what is necessary to have done what needs to be done. Someone is making a lot of noise needs to be reprimanded and if not complying their face can be pushed into a pillow. The person not turning of the lights needs to have the lights turned off for him. The person wanting to rush out of the house needs to be physically restrained.
After the crisis you need to review bad behavior in a strongly worded way.
Conclusion
Hopefully this entire post is unnecessary in 2023 or later. However, I am 70 years old and in my city they shutdown the schools today (11/8/2022) for security during the elections. A lot of the polling places are in school gymnasiums.
In all my years I have never experienced partisanship this intense.
Having written this post, it can be re-shared if some new situation develops in the future. Feel free to copy what you wish to copy to share it with others.
Again, a lot of the things on this list you need to do anyways to prevent burglary and for other reasons. For example, you should have some fire extinguishers anyways.
