Looting is often a direct result of a widespread disaster or other SHTF situations.
This is especially true of areas that have been evacuated because the unattended homes are ripe targets for the more criminally minded of society.
Unfortunately, there is not a lot you can do to prevent looting when you are not in your home, but if you plan to bug-in, you need to be ready to deal with the potential of widespread looting in your area.
Hide Valuables And Supplies
The best way to prevent something from being stolen is to ensure a thief never finds it. There are countless ways to hide your valuables, and you can DIY many of these options if you have some basic carpentry or construction skills. The type of storage you use will ultimately depend on the size of the items you need to conceal.
Smaller things like coins, cash, or jewelry can be hidden in false drawer bottoms, behind pictures, in false compartments in furniture, or hollowed-out books.
Larger items such as weapons, survival gear, or food and water stores can be concealed inside walls, under floorboards, or in hidden rooms.
Related: 5 Survival Tools And Gear You Should Avoid When SHTF
Creating hidden rooms is as easy as building a wall with a secret entrance in a crawlspace or basement. Even inside rooms within your house, you can make a false wall behind which you can store whatever valuables you want to protect.
Don’t Disclose The Extent Of Your Preps
I have said in many previous articles that exercising good operational security (OPSEC) is vital to all preppers. Too often, people brag about what they have, which means that other people become aware of how good a target their home will be.
Ideally, no one should know you’re a prepper, but this is often difficult to pull off. Close friends and family will undoubtedly become aware of your prepping tendencies and some of the gear and supplies you are stocking up on.
Even though some people will know you are a prepper and have food, water, and other supplies, no one should know your stockpiles’ true extent.
Also, don’t brag about big purchases of high-end items online, and limit the number of photos and videos you post. If you decide to post anything revealing inside your home, ensure they do not reveal anything that may interest future looters.
Set Traps And Alarms
Installing cameras around your home is a great way to monitor what is happening on your property, but you shouldn’t stop there. It is not difficult to figure out where the blind spots in the coverage of surveillance cameras are, so you should definitely have the ability to know when someone is moving through these areas.
Setting out alarms triggered by trip wires, pressure sensors, or even motion sensors will allow you to clandestinely monitor all the areas around your home and be alerted to looters before they get close.
Discover here how to build automatic backyard traps and alarms against looters and intruders, in order to protect yourself and your family from looters and dangerous intruders.
However, it is important to remember that setting traps for intruders is often illegal in many areas, and doing so can open you up to possible criminal charges.
Secure The Perimeter Of Your Home
To secure your home’s envelope, install the highest quality doors and locks you can afford and upgrade the door frame and hinges at the same time.
Security film can be installed on windows to make them resistant to breaking. You can also add security bars or shutters on your windows, making breaking through difficult.
You may not want bars and shutter on your home outside an SHTF situation, but they can be purchased to be installed when needed.
Even if you have the best door fame and locks, you should have a way to barricade each entrance door to your home.
Installing a heavy bar or piece of timber across each door is a good option as long as the brackets are secured with the heaviest and strongest hardware directly into the studs around the door frame.
The weak point for entry into your home is the garage door. You cannot do much to prevent someone from taking it down by backing a vehicle into it or smashing it with a sledgehammer or axe.
Your best defense is to secure the doorway from the garage to the house rather than the main garage door.
? This “Quick Fix” Is More Effective In Keeping Out Looters Than A Solid Steel Door
Form a Neighborhood Prepper Group
Joining forces with like-minded families in your neighborhood is a great way to get many sets of eyes on your home and mutual support if your home becomes surrounded by a mob of looters.
They can also provide a place to escape if you become overrun and are forced to evacuate.
It is important to remember that these need to be families with the same prepping mindset and ones in whom you can place a significant amount of trust.
Be Ready To Fight
Long before you are faced with an armed mob looking to loot your home, you should have already identified all the positions you will fight from and have a plan to defend these positions.
In addition, there are ways to provide ballistic protection, such as sandbags, metal plates, or ballistic panels, and you need to have some form of protection from small arms fire at each fighting position.
Likely, you will not have enough people in your home to cover all the windows and doors. In this case, you’ll need to have a plan for barricading these points, so they do not have to be manned by a person.
Along with being ready to fight people, you must also be prepared to fight fires. One tactic that a group of looters may use is to set fire to your home to force you to evacuate.
To combat this, you need to have enough fire extinguishers to outfit each room in your home. If someone throws a Molotov cocktail through a window, you must be able to extinguish the resulting fire as rapidly as possible.
If a group of looters really want to get into your home, they will eventually succeed. You can only make the task so difficult that most will abandon the effort in favor of weaker targets.
Fortunately, many of the preparations you would undertake to secure your home against looters will also aid in securing your home against the common criminals that may try to break in before SHTF.
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