1800 homes in our development, with only 2 main exits and one small side street exit. Just getting out to go to work can be a PITA if you leave at the wrong time. Forget it in an emergency. I live near the main exit, so we'd probably make it. Other streets in back are barely wide enough for a single car when people park on the street.

We go camping a lot, and are good with gear, but bug out capable food would be the issue. Plus with 4 kids, we would be better off hunkering down and hope nobody starts a fire.

I live on a 20 acre hilltop farm 2 miles from a 300 pop town, that is 8 miles from another 300 pop town, so I will more than likely stay home (bug in), as I have done through all the direct hit bad hurricanes over the last 25 years.  However, I live an hour from the small city of Baton Rouge, 2 hours from New Orleans, 20 miles from one nuclear power plant and 70 miles from another nuke plant, so I have explored the options of having to leave if necessary.  My planned responses to hurricanes, nuke plant release, urban warfare, food disruptions, pandemic isolation, Yellowstone Caldera, etc. are all different even though there may be many common parts.  Spending money on the common components makes the most sense, and is my major focus for financial preps.

Whether planning to stay or leave, you need to keep all your options open in case Plan A and Plan B are both compromised at some point.  Being flexible and adaptable will be key to survival.  I hope to die of old age at home, but plan to do everything I can to keep my family alive as long as possible.

1800 homes with 3 exits? That’s insane!

I have the burden of 12 homes with one exit. It does get a bit icy in winter on a 9% (average) grade. That’s always fun.

Bugging out isn’t an option anymore unless you have a plane.  Check points will be set up all over the place by many different groups.  Stay in place is the only option and join the local group friendly to your ideology.  You still run the risk of getting offed if you have too many nice things that someone else may want.  Guns, girls, vehicles.

This wouldn't happen for days or weeks at best. If a major disaster happened I personally would have several days of battening down the hatches before I even considered being part of some organized effort to close roads. Every single person will be doing the same in rural America. I could see our county eventually getting its shit together but it wouldn't be an immediate response. I think you would see riots and looting on a large scale in the cities but I don't think there will be fixed ambushes on the roads and around here we wouldn't tolerate that for one second, I imagine most feel the same in the rural areas.

I agree.  Even in rural NY where I live the local folks would not stand for it. The majority have at least tome type of gun with a box or two of ammo at a minimum.  The houses are pretty spread out in my AO most can't see their neighbor.  I would wager that at least every other house has at least a hunting rifle, or a shotgun.  There are also several small hobby farms in the area.  Most are good people.

It would be a several day walk from any decent population, but if cars are still running, and gas is flowing it might be a different story.

I have an idea of where you are, based on your description. That's a pretty ideal location, at least in our immediate area. It seems most people would either go east or west if they fled the state. We'd love to get a place near Lake Rosemound given its remote nature, although it's close to a major highway. But that would not be for a few years, and who knows what's going happen next month, let alone next year.

Back in the day when the Old School ‘preppers’ were ensconced in their retreats writing their survival books (e.g., Mel Tappen, Ragnar Benson, et al), the rule-of-thumb for distancing your bug-out location from any large urban center was to be at least 2 gas-tank fill-ups away, and preferably 3.

Today, outside of Alaska, I doubt there’s any ‘rural’ area left in the lower 48 that’s 2 or 3 gas-tanks away from being reached by armed bad-guys fleeing the internecine chaos of a collapsing big city.

Eh’ it’s not all bad. I am 5-6 hours from any major city even here in Virginia. The biggest cities near would be Knoxville and Asheville both about 2 hours and neither are on the larger size when talking of cities. They certainly have criminals and probably a gang element but it is on the smaller side of things.

What we do have however is plenty of people living solely on the governments teet and that would indeed be a problem.

Speaking of bugging out...The Elmo Fire may cause me to have to within the next week. They are calling this fire "human caused" as it started right next to a highway in dry brush. Likely a cigarette butt or sparks from dragging trailer chains.

6 days later it's a 20,616ac blaze, the biggest currently in Montana. High winds and constant dry conditions are causing it to move and shift fronts constantly.

ETA: This goes to show that no matter who you are, where you are, how well set up you may think you are or anything else, something completely out of your control can throw a monkey wrench into your life. At present I give us about a 10% chance of having to evacuate if the fire shifts this way, but that's 10% higher than it looked two days ago. This fire is going to burn until snows come. It's just a  matter of which direction and how fast it travels at this point. Wind shifts early to mid next week are likely to send smoke my way. Most of it will probably pass over us but I can't be sure of it. Embers wouldn't travel that far out from the fire but its possible to have hot embers fall into my immediate area if the fire continues to grow, especially after the wind shift next week.

This has my attention, but we're not thinking evacuation yet. Still, I unloaded 3000# of red fir firewood in my trailer and fixed the couple of maintenance issues I needed to address on it.

https://missoulian.com/news/local/updated-homes-burn-as-elmo-2-fire-bears-down-on-lake-mary-ronan/article_8194fd6f-92fd-55bd-b3a5-e4d2e680ef01.html

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Dude, I don’t know where you are in Virginia but you’re certainly not more than 2 gas-tanks away from a gang of armed thuggies leaving Washington D.C. in a few SUVs each carrying a couple of filled gerry-cans of gas.

You’re not as remote as you think you are.

Never said I was. But it’s 6 hours hauling ass straight down the interstate and then an hour wandering through the countryside.  That is where I am in Virginia. 7 hours from DC.

Literally no one can escape someone with multiple Jerry cans coming specifically to your home.


ETA: That is seven hours today, in good times.

While yes you can get just about anywhere within 2 gas tanks and jerry cans, there are still some areas that are surprisingly hard to get to once you get away from the interstate.  
There’s a nice shooting range 16 miles from me as the crow flies.  But it’s literally an hour drive with no traffic.  
The mountain ranges in the Appalachia run sw to ne.  So do the roads.  If you want to go se to nw it can be a fun ride on a motorcycle but a pain in the ass in a truck.

Having spent some time in NOVA, while I agree, time and distance can be hard to calculate. Add the chaos of a crisis, likely little fuel available without getting in a long gas line; how many roads locked down with traffice? What about some smaller town simply shutting off through-traffice? A nice snow/ice storm? Maybe a severe thunderstorm? What if a primary bridge is down?

If anything is certain, if you're bugging out at the beginning or during a crisis, so are many others. That 6-8 miles or so to work with no traffic is less than 10 minutes from where I was renting a room; worst traffic conditions and it took me 45 minutes

All the challenges we identify and plan for just to "bug home" are the same challenges many will face trying to bugout.

If the crisis or SHTF scenario is extremely bad, but not well communicated, my assessment is about 87% of the local populations in dense suburban/urban/metro areas are going to just go home and sit, waiting for rescue or relief for first 72 hours or three days; it's modern human nature...wait for the government to help you or take care of you. By the time they realize no one is coming, roads are likely blocked with traffic, fuel will be hard to get (how many actually maintain a full tank of gas?), food running out, down to zero potable water, and threat levels are extremely high...how far are they going to make it?

Sure, a healthy male, under ideal weather conditions, in a very permissive environment can do 15-20 miles in a day on foot. Now, how many will be healthy, plenty food and water, and aren't worried about a violent, non-permissive, even contested environment with a route that isn't a straight-line distance?

Unless ground zero is a visible nuke or similar event, urban/metro areas will not have some apocalyptic mass exodus like coastal cities during a pending hurricane. They will delay, many will die, and if they can travel even 10 miles away, I would be surprised, at least for that 87% of the population.

ROCK6

It seems you started this thread to say that bugging out plans are silly….yet you now find yourself, through no fault of your own, thinking you may need to.

That’s how most “bug outs” happen. It really depends on where you are and what the local threats are. Massive forest fires typically aren’t much of a threat in the east….they are a huge threat in the west thought. You don’t have to worry about bugging out from a hurricane….but someone in New Orleans DOES need to think about it.

In the end, we all need to do an assessment of our area and identify the risks and then decide how to mitigate the risks. Some people will have a greater need for a bug out plan than others depending on where they choose to live and what THEIR threats are.

It really does make me curious about the real logistics behind the invasion caravans to our southern border.  How much help did they have walking 1000 miles.  Could they do it if there was really a global shtf? Would they ALL try?

This is where my head is at as well. We always want to paint some picture of massive amounts of people all exiting the cities at once, but it never happens that way other than in massive events as you describe. Look at Argentina or Venezuela as they were falling apart, people stayed right where they were even in hideous conditions of violence and hunger. Think of the pics of people eating from dumpsters. I think humans have an instinct to hole up in familiar places in times of stress.

Now I am certainly not saying that there can't and aren't raiding parties going out from the cities because we have read accounts of that as well. But this is a huge country and folks aren't going to be raiding many hours away when there are millions of homes and farms within an hour. But as I said earlier we will, or already do, have our own issues with the FSA in rural communities.

Thanks for supplying an analogy that reinforces the point in my post above …

Those migrants walked hundreds, if not thousands, of miles with little food or water and no weapons (at least judging from the news vids every day showing B.P. agents taking large groups of these folks into custody after crossing).

Add to that the fact that these groups were also escorted to our border from wherever by viscous, sadistic, rapey, well-armed cartel thugs, and you can easily see how a similar migration or exodus of the desperate from Big City shitholes would occur after any realistic, wide-spread SHTF-event, like an extended Grid-Down incident.

Why would they stay there amid deteriorating living conditions and 24-hr violence worse than the ‘hoods of Chicago on hot summer weekends? … or how bad Baltimore became in the months following that Police v. Freddie Gray incident? A 500% escalation in homocides.

But the eventual exodus would not only be on foot (some maybe), but more likely in stolen vehicles, groups of armed ‘bangers piled into SUVs loaded with scrounged gas cans  full of fuel. Stupid they’re not; as savage as any cartel thugs?  - for sure.

And they’ll be looking to loot, shoot and scoot, even if it’s only happen-stance that your A.O. is the place they visit first after a 6- or 7-hr ride out of the urban shithole.

Now tell us again, … how remote is your bug-out retreat?

You keep harping on this but I don't think anyone is arguing that they are untouchable, that is impossible in todays world. But to imply being multiple hours from a major city is no different than being in the suburbs is silly.

ETA: and you can not in any reasonable way discount the increased risks that thugs themselves will encounter when they leave the city. If we are taking the gloves off then that works both ways.

I'm not not going anywhere.  I'm going down with the fort.

There are literally 4 major traffic ways out of the center of Phoenix.  Once you get out a little farther there are another 3.  Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but in the end you can go to Globe, Tucson, I-10 west, I-17 North, or to Wickenburg which leads to Kingman.

That would be about 1,000,000 cars on each highway leaving Phoenix, Maricopa County.

I have no other place to go anyway.  Once summer hits, power is out, it's 120 degrees, we are all toast.