When city planners are constructing communities, the last thing they’re thinking of is its defense against enemy combatants.
In fact, if anything, the way that normal neighborhoods are set up, most homes would make you a sitting duck if a battle broke out on your block.
As with any castle, the better fortified your fortress is as you’re staring at the marauders outside the gates, the better your chance of survival.
So how would you go about fortifying your home – especially with all of us worrying about looters and home invaders during the COVID-19 quarantines and lockdowns?
A while back I spoke with my survival expert Pat Henry about the idea of fortifying a home, and here is a summary of what he had to say to me about it.
3 Tips For Fortifying Your Property!
You yourself may not have given any thought to how to defend your home and your community when it suddenly becomes a war zone, but as we’ve recently seen during times of widespread civil unrest, rioting and looting, any emergency that plunges your town into a state of social chaos could bring violence literally right to your door and onto your streets.
When the police are overwhelmed and 911 operators give up on even trying to answer the phone, it’s left to you, and hopefully a well-trained survival team, to defend your home.
Let’s say you’re lucky enough to be on a dead-end street.
You could use cars to stop people from coming down your street.
But you’re not going to be able to close off the entire perimeter of your front yard.
There’s just too much space there.
Most of us don’t live on dead ends, either.
But no matter how open your property is, there are choke points you can take advantage of.
That brings us to our first tip…
1. Creating And Exploiting Choke Points
Look for choke points that can minimize the space and reduce someone’s ability to get through.
You can also make those choke points.
- You can drop a tree, for example.
- Take advantage of fences in the area, too.
- Anything that you can dump dirt, sand, or gavel into, like a trashcan, can form a barrier that makes it harder for an enemy to get through and may provide cover.
In a serious crisis, you could use appliances, like washing machines, freezers, and so on, filled with dirt.
That kind of mass will stop a vehicle.
It won’t stop a tank, but it will stop most passenger cards on the road… and it will slow down just about anyone.
2. Mind Your Windows And Doors
Your home is, obviously, your last line of defense.
We see it in zombie movies and things like that, with arms coming through the windows.
You’ve got to plan ahead of time to seal off your windows and doors from a serious invasion.
Sure, someone could take a sledgehammer and start beating in the walls, but if they’re doing that, you’re not going to stop them anyway.
You can purchase a film from 3M that you can apply to your windows to turn them, effectively, into a sheet of plastic like safety glass.
They’ll take much more abuse before they give in, although they’re not bulletproof.
- Plywood can also be fit over your windows, although it cuts your visibility and makes your fortifications more obvious.
- Boards with nails run through them can be put under your windows to provide a deterrent.
- The doors themselves can be reinforced, or you could replace the entire door with a steel unit.
All of these tactics are intended to buy you time.
They’re to give you more room to sneak around and get out to escape.
3. Sandbags
One thing that you could lay in a supply off, as long as you’ve got a yard to fill them from, is sandbags.
People usually have these on hand for flooding, but they can be used to make a great barricade if you have time to fill them.
It’s time-consuming to build a wall of sandbags, but creating a mound you can duck behind for cover is another otion.
You don’t even need to have a ton of dirt available.
Obviously, you’d be filling these with dirt, not sand, in most cases.
These work because a dirt mound is a great way to absorb the energy of bullets.
If you have enough dirt, you can make some fairly serious earthworks defenses.
Even just a little can help provide needed cover.
So what are YOU doing to prepare your home for an invasion like this?
The time to start fortifying is NOW, more than ever before.
