May is Volcano Preparedness Month in WA State

The Washington governor declared May as Volcano Preparedness Month.

On Friday, May 17, the city of Puyallup will conduct a lahar evacuation exercise with the Puyallup School District, Washington Emergency Management Division and other community partners. More than 9,000 students and staff from 15 public and private schools located in the Puyallup valley lahar hazard area will practice their emergency evacuation routes.

On Saturday, May 18, the 39th anniversary of the catastrophic 1980 eruption, scientists and preparedness experts from U.S. Geological Survey Cascades Volcano Observatory and Washington Emergency Management Division will be on site from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. at Mount St. Helens to talk about the eruption and why it’s important to be 2 Weeks Ready for all hazards. There is also a book signing for “A Hero on Mount St. Helens,” written by Melanie Holmes about the life of volcanologist David. A. Johnston, who lost his life when Mount St. Helens erupted. The Johnston Ridge Observatory is named for the volcanologist.

…Washington state’s Emergency Management Division website contains a section about the state’s volcanoes and volcano preparedness measures. Educational materials for children, families and communities are found in the publications section. Follow the agency’s Twitter feed, and Facebook page for breaking news and information. The Washington Geological Survey (a division of the Washington state Department of Natural Resources) has developed a volcano-specific webpage. Check out its Geologic Information Portal to learn about the hazards where you live, work and play.

LiDAR shows the lava flow potential from Mount Adams, courtesy of Washington Department of Natural Resources.

Preparing for future eruptions

The USGS–CVO, the PNSN, and the National Science Foundation-funded EarthScope Plate Boundary Observatory work to improve eruption forecasting and warning capabilities for Cascade volcanoes as part of the National Volcanic Early Warning System.

An update to the threat assessment for all of the country’s volcanoes was released last fall.

A new fact sheet about living with volcanoes is also now available.

MyNorthwest: Volcano Experts Weigh In on Effects of Possible Mt. Ranier Eruption

Doom and Bloom: New Tourniquet Additions to TCCC Guidelines

The Altons at Doom and Bloom Medical have posted an article about some new tourniquets which have been approved by the Committee on Tactical Combat Casualty Care.

SAM-XT Tourniquet newly added to TCCC list

Tourniquets to control bleeding has been in use for centuries, sometimes praised and sometimes reviled as a tool of the devil. Painful lessons learned in Iraq and Afghanistan, however, lead us to believe that they save lives that would otherwise be lost to hemorrhage. In civilian life, the rapid and effective use of a tourniquet by those at the scene gives valuable time for emergency medical personnel to arrive. In survival settings, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know having tourniquets in your medical kit is not a bad idea.

For years, the Committee on Tactical Combat Casualty Care (CoTCCC) has approved a small number of commercially available tourniquets, which I’m sure many of you have in your medical kits: They include the combat application tourniquet or CAT and the special operation forces tourniquet SOF-T.

Both Gen 6 and Gen 7 CAT Tourniquets are acceptable

These are the tourniquets you’ll find in our medical kits. We also add the non-TCCC SWAT tourniquet as a secondary tourniquet in many of them, mostly due to its versatility to also function as a pressure dressing and splint stabilizer.

Now, the TCCC committee has widened the range of options acceptable for the effective control of bleeding. One of their additions is the SAM-XT (pictured at top of page), produced by the venerable Dr. Sam Scheinberg of SAM medical. SAM is well-known for producing malleable splints useful for a number of orthopedic injuries, and now their tourniquet is considered acceptable for even military use…

Click here to read the rest of the article at Doom and Bloom.

AmPart: Directional Antennas for the Small Unit, Part I and II

NC Scout at American Partisan has started a series of articles on antenna theory called Directional Antennas for the Small Unit. If you’re just getting started in radio communication, or you’ve been using it for a while but haven’t spent much time getting to know your antennas, this is a good start.

One of the biggest misconceptions behind communications security revolves around misunderstanding not just the role of the equipment but also how it functions. A big part of that is the basics of antenna theory. For most radio seems to be a plug and play kinda deal- it either works, or it doesn’t. Antennas are a type of voodoo magic and the solution to security is electronic encryption. Except it isn’t, and doesn’t do anything except mask what you’re saying, but not the fact you’re saying it. Guerrillas must rely on not being detected- and no matter how high tech you think you are, it’ll not solve a tradecraft issue.

The reality is that we’ll be working with equipment that is common and off the shelf- no matter how much we want those microwave NSA-encrypted troposcatter radios made of unobtanium, a big part of local networking is done via plain old VHF and UHF amateur and commercial gear that’s common. Guerrilla communications have to be harder to detect. And at the strategic level when building an underground network, you have to understand how to plan. Even with the cheap equipment most of you likely have, incorporating a level of planning into your local communications will yield a much higher level of security and success. Knowing and understanding directional antennas becomes a key part of that planning, and as we cover in the Advanced RTO Course, there’s several options that each get the job done.

Directional Antennas such as this Yagi seen here offer security by ‘beaming’ our transmission in the direction its pointed.

Directional antennas accomplish two goals for us. First, generally speaking, if you’re not in the direction of the transmission you’re not going to hear the traffic. Because of this it offers a big advantage in the security department. If two directional antennas are transmitting toward one another, they’ll be able to communicate with the only people hearing the full conversation being in the middle of the two people. The second advantage is that instead of all our energy going in all directional at once, as with an omnidirectional antenna, a directional antenna sends the same amount of radiated energy in one direction- greatly increasing our range and signal strength in that direction, so we won’t need nearly as much power to accomplish to reliably communicate over a distance you might not have thought otherwise possible…

Click here to read the entire article at American Partisan.

Click here to read Part II at American Partisan.

AYWTGS: 10 Natural Mosquito Repellents for Your Yard

A Year Without the Grocery Store blog has a nice article up on ten plants that you can grow in your yard to repel mosquitoes.

Excerpt from 10 Natural Mosquito Repellents for Your Yard.

I get a great deal of joy from being outside. One of my most fond memories of my late high school years was sitting outside on the porch swing with my mother rocking together and sitting and talking for hours two to three evenings a week. Our time outside wasn’t often interrupted or hampered by mosquitos. Where we live now, one of our neighbors has an unused below-ground pool which has been partially drained. Despite the fact that we have a porch swing now, I don’t like sitting outside on it even if I’m being chased by a single mosquito. So we are starting to put a plan in place to deal with the mosquitos so that I can once again enjoy our yard and our porch swing.

In my research for what we’re going to plant in our yard, I’ve come across ten plants that are mosquito repellents either by just the presence of the plant or by crushing the leaves and rubbing them on exposed skin. Check these natural mosquito repellents out!

1.) Lavender

Lavender is such a beautiful plant, but its benefits don’t stop there! It is also a natural mosquito repellent. Grow it in your yard or put it in pots around the around areas that you gather outside. Lavender is also known to repel flies and moths – another bonus.

According to American Meadows, lavender grows best in full sun and well-drained soil. It doesn’t like rich soil, so don’t bother adding fertilizer to it.

Another upside to growing lavender is that you can steep the petals in hot water to create a tea that can be calming.

2.) Lemon Thyme

…

Click here to read the entire article.

AmPart: Illegal Immigrant: a Powerful 4th Generation Warrior

Bryce Sharper at American Partisan has an article up, positing that illegal immigrants from Latin America have become a weapon of powerful elites – The Latin American Illegal Immigrant: a powerful 4th Generation Warrior.

When viewed through the lens of 4GW, the illegal immigrant is one of the most powerful warriors on earth though he does not use much overt violence. His primary weapon is weakness, which is the biggest weapon a 4th Generation warrior can have because it gathers him numerous allies from our decadent culture without him having to do any work at all. This is a seeming contradiction: he is weak but powerful. His weakness is socioeconomic. His country is poor and he wants to come to America “for a better life.” He smiles meekly at the American jefes who hire him. He shows up on time and will work dirty and dangerous jobs without complaining. His poor wife is constantly pushing around another nino in the baby carriage. Sure, he commits some crime here and there, but it’s managed by local police. His other weakness is that he is a Person of Color which means he’s a member of The Oppressed in the cultural Marxist worldview. He supposedly doesn’t speak English well enough to understand police and therefore isn’t expected to follow our laws so he is punished lightly. Because these weaknesses, he is not considered a threat by anyone of importance so nothing is done about him. Quite the contrary, he is a great asset to rich, powerful, and upwardly-mobile liberals and pseudoconservatives who need him.

Americans overwhelmingly want the borders closed and the illegals kicked out. By “overwhelmingly,” I mean the bottom 3/5ths of wage earners whose pay hasn’t risen in 20-30 years along with upwardly-mobile small business owning legal immigrants and conservative upper-middle class and rich Americans…

Click here to read the entire article.

GrayZone: American in Denial – Interview on Russiagate Delusion

The Grayzone has video and a transcript of Aaron Maté interviewing Dr. Gabor Maté – a physician and mental health expert – on how so many people were caught up in the delusion of a conspiracy with Russia, following Trump’s election.

Excerpt:

AARON MATÉ: So we’ve just been through this two-year ordeal with Russiagate. It’s in a new phase now with Robert Mueller rejecting the outcome that so many were expecting, that there would be a Trump-Russia conspiracy. Your sense of how this whole thing has gone?

GABOR MATÉ: What’s interesting is that in the aftermath of the Mueller thunderbolt of no proof of collusion, there were articles about how people are disappointed about this finding.

Now, disappointment means that you’re expecting something and you wanted something to happen, and it didn’t happen. So that means that some people wanted Mueller to find evidence of collusion, which means that emotionally they were invested in it. It wasn’t just that they wanted to know the truth. They actually wanted the truth to look a certain way. And wherever we want the truth to look a certain way, there’s some reason that has to do with their own emotional needs and not just with the concern for reality.

And in politics in general, we think that people make decisions on intellectual grounds based on facts and beliefs. Very often, actually, people’s dynamics are driven by emotional forces that they’re not even aware of in themselves. And I, really, as I observed this whole Russiagate phenomenon from the beginning, it really seemed to me that there was a lot of emotionality in it that had little to do with the actual facts of the case.

There is no question that for a lot of people in this country, the election of Trump was a traumatic event. Now, when a trauma reaction happens, which is to say you’re hurt and you’re pained and you’re confused and you’re scared and you’re bewildered, there’s basically two things you can do about it. One is you can own that I’m pained and I’m hurt and I’m bewildered and I’m really scared. And then try and look at what happened to bring me to that situation.

Or you can instead of dealing with those emotions come up with some kind of explanation that makes me feel better about them. So that I’ve got this pain. I’ve got this bewilderment. I’ve got this fear. So what I’m looking at, what does it say about American society that a man like this could even run for office, let alone be elected?

What does it say about American society that so many people are actually enrolled in believing that this man could be any kind of a savior? What does that say about the divisions and the conflicts and the contradictions and the genuine problems in this culture? And how do we address those issues?

You can look at that. Or you can say there must be a devil somewhere behind all this, and that devil is a foreign power, and his name is Putin, and his country is Russia. Now you’ve got a simple explanation that doesn’t invite you or necessitate that you explore your own pain and your own fear and your own trauma.

So I really believe that really this Russiagate narrative was, on the part of a lot of people, a sign of genuine upset at something genuinely upsetting. But rather than dealing with the upset, it was an easier way to in a sense draw off the energy of it in to some kind of a believable and comforting narrative. It’s much more comforting to believe that some enemy is doing this to us than to look at what does it say about us as a society…

Read the transcript here.

(H/t ZeroHedge)

Forward Observer: May Update on the “Second American Civil War”

Sam Culper at Forward Observer has another article update on our Second American Civil War. Forward Observer provides daily, weekly, and monthly intelligence updates to its members on matters of national concern.

For a couple years now, I’ve described “low intensity conflict” as the doctrine which best represents post-Obama America.

I believe very few things said about the current “civil war” but here’s what I know to be true of our current domestic conflict:

1. It’s “low intensity.” Low intensity conflict (LIC) is the doctrine of war below the threshold of conventional war (tanks, troops, planes) but above routine, peaceful competition. Anything over 1,000 deaths a year from political violence would be classified as a civil war. That’s certainly a much higher intensity than what we’re seeing now. LIC is characterized by political, economic, diplomatic, and information warfare, along with low-level politically- or ideologically-driven violence. See here for additional examples.

Another characteristic of low intensity conflict, as we’ve seen throughout history, is a relatively small percentage of the population engaged in violence. It may only be one percent of an entire country ‘at war’ while another 5-15 percent support the violence, and 75+ percent of citizens are just trying to live their lives.

Those who disagree sometimes reply, “Go to your grocery store. Go to the bank. No one is at war with each other. Everything is fine. You’re making too much of this.”

This is not 1861 where up to 10 percent of the country is fighting each other on battlefields, and the effects of conventional war are widespread and devastating.

In LIC, historically, it’s only a small fraction of a country doing the fighting, and most people live among the disruption to go on about their business…

2. We’re in a “hot peace.” I certainly would not characterize America in 2016-2019 as being at “peace,” other than the absolute absence of outright war. The cultural cold war has turned hot; albeit at a very low level. If you ignore this, then you ignore reality…

3. It’s very likely to worsen. The tectonic shifts in American culture have caused periods of political violence before. The Civil Rights movement, the race riots and unrest between 1968 and the 1970s, and abortion clinic bombings are a few key examples, but even those ‘conflicts’ eventually died down. Oftentimes, conflict is generational. One generation goes away, and future generations develop their own problems.

For current generations, I believe conditions are more likely to worsen before they get better because the culture war now includes more fronts that foment the anger and resentment that cause political violence…

4. We could have just two to three years before we see routine, sustained political violence. For as long as I’ve been writing about LIC, I’ve warned of the effects of the next recession and financial crisis on the political and cultural climate. (I now believe that the next recession and financial crisis have an above average chance of happening simultaneously.) Class and race warfare, I believe, will worsen as we move through this period of economic and financial uncertainty.

High youth unemployment is a universal indicator of civil unrest and violence. What I’m seeing in America’s future are social bases charged by race, class, and/or politics, who also lack economic opportunity and the hope of a better life that comes with it…

Click here to read the entire article at Forward Observer.

Dan Newhouse Listening Session – Dams, May 13, 2019

From the office of Rep. Dan Newhouse:

Listening Session: “The Future of Our Dams”

Rep. Newhouse speaks to stakeholders and the public about legislation he introduced in the 115th Congress to preserve the Snake River dams.

I am hosting a public listening session to discuss the dams on the Columbia and Snake Rivers, their effects on Central Washington and the Pacific Northwest, and recent legislative actions affecting the river system. I will be joined by a panel of experts, and you are invited to share your thoughts and ask questions about the dams, hydropower, salmon mitigation, and other related topics.

Date: Monday, May 13
Time: 5:30PM – 7:00PM PST
Location: Richland Federal Building Auditorium, 825 Jadwin Avenue, Richland, WA

Click here for more details.

This event is intended for constituents of the 4th Congressional District. Seating is limited, and constituents will be given priority seating. Check-in for the event will begin at 5:00PM. To facilitate the check-in process, constituents are strongly encouraged to pre-register for the event online. Pre-registration is not required and does not guarantee admission; it is solely to speed the check-in process for the evening of the event.

Please note: The Richland Federal Building requires photo ID for entrance. No food or drink is allowed in the auditorium.

Brushbeater: True Random Numbers How-To

NC Scout has posted an article at his Brushbeater blog from one of his readers about how to generate true random numbers (as opposed to pseudo-random numbers and non-random numbers) for one time pad (OTP) encryption – R-Pi OTP/DRYAD True Hardware RNG How-To. It is lengthy and technical, but does a pretty good job of walking you through setting it up on a Raspberry Pi computer.

There are only three ways that I know of to generate a truly random One Time Pad – for the “regular guy”: 1) The old-fashioned way with a set of dice (preferably 10-sided) and paper/pencil; 2) purchase one of AmRRON’s ADL-1 units from AmRRON.com (https://amrron.com/2018/03/18/amrron-dark-labs-otp); 3) The following method outlined in this how-to. Maybe there are others. I wanted to come up with a way for anybody to put one together with easily available components. So here it is. You shouldn’t need to procure any unobtainium to build it. (It was valid in May 2018 when I first put this together. It should be fine as Raspbian Stretch is still the current distribution.)

The script will print either numerical or alphabetic OTPs. Besides the standard OTP generating scripts, also included is a script for generating a DRYAD-type table (it does not have the formatting options of the OTP script) and a special, limited-use/audience OTP script for split keys and variants at the end of this how-to.

This how-to also includes a procedure for building an SD card from scratch purely for the production of secure OTPs. Prior to that is some helpful info for those who are interested. If you wanted to build a good OTP generator, then this is for you…

Click here to read the entire article at Brushbeater.

TACDA Memberships Are Now Free

The American Civil Defense Association (TACDA) has changed to a free membership model. Membership gives access to the archive of the Journal of Civil Defense as well as to e-journal access to new issues of the bi-annual publication. If you wish, you can still pay to receive hard copies of the journal in the mail. The mission of The American Civil Defense Association is to empower and equip individuals, families and communities through educational means, to be prepared for emergencies and disasters. By giving life-time memberships, they believe they are better able to achieve this goal. I have found TACDA to be a good source of information and think it is worth more than the free membership to get access to their journal.

AmPart: Caching with PVC

NC Scout at American Partisan has a short article up on Caching with PVC. You may be caching things at a favorite camping spot, remote cabin, bug out location, practicing geocaching, or for another reason. Here’s how to keep it safe and find it again when you need it.

PVC is one of those things no survivalist or prospective guerrilla should be without. It’s one of the most versatile items you can have around a retreat, being used for everything and anything including hydroponics, water routing and storage, shelter frames and even in one case from a student in the RTO Course, a ladder rack on his truck. It was really cool- and really well done. But one of the most common uses I have for PVC tubing is making caches for anything from weapons, ammunition and communications support items to basic sustainment items like extra knives, fire making tools, ponchos and tarps or medical items. There’s a right way and a wrong way to do it though, and it’s not as simple is stuffing things in a tube.

One of the big advantages of using PVC is its simplicity. With a larger diameter pipe, a rounded end cap and a screw-in cleanout cap you’ve got a basic water resistant tube that can virtually disappear anywhere. You can find the smaller sizes at any Lowe’s, Home Depot, or ACE Hardware, but the larger diameters you’ll need to hit up the local plumbing supply store.

But with that said, caching with PVC in the long term is a little more complicated than it looks. Storage of anything for extended periods requires some care and a little more work than just stuffing things in a tube. And while we’re talking about DIY canisters, I follow the same rules for any cache container.

Waterproofing

Caches do us no good if they can’t seal out the elements….

Click here to read the entire article at American Partisan.

Related:

Survivopedia: Survival Caching

Skilled Survival: How to Build, Plan and Bury a Survival Cache

TC 31-29 Special Forces Caching Techniques

Survival School: Alternative to Buried Survival Caches

Greywolf Survival: How to Plan Where to Place Survival Caches

SHTFPlan: How to Hide and Recover Your Survival Cache

Colion Noir: Would We Be More Safe Without the Second Amendment?

In this video are some common sense statements by Colion Noir. Because many acts of self-defense go unreported, there are no government statistics on self-defense uses of firearms. That said researchers have found that firearms are used in self-defense anywhere between 300,000 and 2,000,000 times a year in the USA. The next time someone mentions “the health cost of gun crime victims” as a reason you shouldn’t be allowed to own a firearm, you can ask them how much more the cost would be of adding a million crime victims.

Doom and Bloom: Kissing Bugs and Chagas Disease

The Altons at Doom and Bloom Medical have up an article on Kissing Bugs and Chagas Disease. While I was aware of Chagas Disease and its insect spreader from my wife’s time living in Bolivia, I was unaware that the beetle and disease were now present in the US. People can live with Chagas for many years and only start having problems from it later in life.

Kissing Bugs transmit Chagas Disease

Recently, my good friend Jack Spirko of the Survival Podcast asked me to produce a special report on Kissing Bugs. No, not kissing bugs, as in how to kiss bugs; I mean THE kissing bug, an invasive species from south of the border that is now found as far north as Pennsylvania and Illinois.

The insect in question is Triatoma sanguisuga. It’s called the kissing bug because it tends to bite human and animal victims around the mouth, although sometimes it might target the eyes or other mucous membranes.

Romana’s sign in Chagas Disease

It’s bad enough to have to deal with the redness, itching, and swelling that goes along with insect bites, but there’s more: When the kissing bug sucks your blood, it defecates (poops) on your skin. irritated victims tend to rub the poop into the bite wound while scratching the itchy areas. In kids, a swollen eyelid on one side, also called “Romana’s sign”, is a possible sign of infection.

Even worse, In the excrement lives a parasite called Trypanosoma cruzi that lodges itself in heart, intestine, and elsewhere and causes something called Chagas disease. Most people only experience minor symptoms. But a percentage of victims may develop:

Diarrhea and vomiting

Enlargement of the liver or spleen

An increased chance of having a stroke

An enlarged heart

Irregular heartbeats that can be fatal

Heart damage in Chagas Disease

Chagas disease is not transmitted from person-to-person or through casual contact with infected people or animals. It can be spread, however, by infected blood products or from mother to baby during pregnancy. Rarely, an extreme allergic reaction known as anaphylaxis can occur…

Click here to continue reading at Doom and Bloom Medical.

King 5: Prepare to Be on Your Own in a Major PNW Disaster

King 5 News actually had a pretty good article back in December about preparing for a disaster. They did a decent job of listing supplies in order to prepare, other than the expected failure to mention anything about self defense (they do mention having a knife at least). But they cover water pretty well, making plans, preparing for pets, footwear, medication, and using cash so it’s still one of the better mainstream articles I have seen on preparing for a major earthquake. They do fail to say that if you’re living in an outlying area, you may be on your own for well over two weeks, but it’s at least a little implied when they mention responders passing you by to get to more populated areas.

Prepare to be on your own in a major Pacific Northwest disaster

You’re on your own.

If a 9.0 earthquake or a tsunami wipes out homes, roads, bridges, communication, and other infrastructure in the Pacific Northwest, keep that thought in mind. You have to assume no one is coming to help you, and you may not be able to get anywhere to find help, at least for a few days.

It’s not because responders don’t want to help. It’s because, as disaster preparation experts agree, they aren’t ready to jump with a region-wide response when something that big happens.

It’s a sobering thought, and that’s why you need to be ready — now — to be on your own.

“You’re either ready, or you’re not ready (when it strikes). There’s no ‘getting ready’ from that standpoint,” emergency response expert Eric Holdeman said…

If you call 911 because you broke your leg in the quake, guess what. Everyone else is calling 911, too. First responders won’t be able to respond to all of you. They will likely first go to places where there is the highest concentration of people so they can do the most good at once, Holdeman said. That will be schools or nursing homes. If your house is on fire, firefighters may pass you by to get to another, larger disaster scene…

There are some simple things you can start doing now to prepare, and you don’t have to do it all at once.

Prepare for three days?

Nope. Try two weeks…

Thankfully, people are finally understanding that three days of supplies are simply not enough for major disasters. Unfortunately, two weeks is short, too. As we’ve covered before, emergency management officials know that two weeks isn’t enough, but they think they need to slowly introduce you to the idea or you’ll reject it out of hand.

Preparedness and Sustainability Festival, May 18, Blanchard, ID

Blanchard Community Center – site of the 2019 INW Preparedness and Sustainability Festival

From INWPrep.com:

Preparedness and Sustainability Festival! May 18, 2019

Location: Blanchard Community Center, 685 Rusho Rd, off Rt 41, Blanchard, ID

Saturday, May 18th, 2019 at 10am – 4pm

FREE ADMISSION – FREE LECTURES!

PREPAREDNESS AND Sustainability Festival! Saturday, May 18, 10-4, Blanchard Community Center off Rt. 41. Come show, teach, demo, sell or swap any legal new or used items. Install safety ties through firearm receivers. Indoor 10×10 $20 tabled spaces or outdoor $5 tailgate spaces. Solar demos, communications, first aid, gardening, gun safety & more. Click calendar listing at www.inwPrepFest.com to reserve space. 208.GUN.5115.

Food, snacks and drinks will be available on site from 11AM until 3PM.

FREE LECTURES:

LECTURE HALL: Educational lecturers are welcome to apply for a speaking slot (on the hour, 10-3, for up to 45 minutes duration). Priority is given to topics relating to preparedness, homesteading, sustainability, etc.

10am:

11am: A Beginner’s Intro to HAM Radio! Randy KB6YAV –

12pm: BACKYARD COMPOSTING – Jim & Pat McGinty;Learn how to create your own “black gold” compost from yard and garden wastes.Â Simple tools, simple techniques, great stuff – your garden will respond with more and better food.

1pm: Safely Choosing a Handgun – Russ Spriggs. Veteran, NRA Instructor and Range Safety Officer, www.PistolProf.com. ; Lecture and demonstration. Learn the ins and outs of most major types of pistols and revolvers, how to make your preferences, and safely handle. This class is free as a public service. If you need a Certificate for Concealed Carry Training, a $20 charge will apply.

2pm: Creating an Efficient & Resilient Prepared Property – Brian Domke, RLA, LEED AP; www.StrategicLandscapeDesign.com; An overview of design methods and key items to consider when planning a prepared property. The presentation will outline the design process to develop a comprehensive plan for a prepared property. Information will also be offered on a few specific systems and approaches that can be used when designing your prepared property to account for the fundamental aspects of water access, food production, energy generation and integrated security.

3pm: I-FAK: Your Medical Force Multiplier – “Doc” Dave Hensley, R.N. His thirty years of Pre hospital EMS, volunteer fire, ICU, ER/Air ambulance/ Trauma, CCU, CVICU (open heart surgery), recovery room and OR care sets the background for the importance of your own Individual First Aid Kit, and what should be in it. This is not only for your use, but for another to use on you in an emergency!

QUESTIONS? Email Russ.Spriggs(at)EarthLink.net with “PREPFEST” in subject line.

Click here for more info.

Blanchard, Idaho is approximately a one hour drive northeast of Spokane, WA. It’s always beautiful in Blanchard, Idaho!