EMAP Emergency Preparedness Training

EMAP Emergency Preparedness Training prep·per (prĕp′ər) n.One who prepares for possible dangers such as natural disasters, societal I said let me do an analysis of the area.

I grew up with my grandmother who lived through the Great Depression telling of her trials and tribulations. She was a simple woman from Kentucky and taught me a lot about life. I guess you could say in the early 1980's I started being a prepper. Learning about off grid life and started out in the school of hard knocks. This grew with my real life training and education in military and Law Enforce

ment. In 2005 I decided it was time to move to a simpler way of life and as Horace Greeley said "Go West". I have been serving people since 2014 with Emergency Preparedness and Management. The training and education all started when I meet a well known rancher/personality in Ridgway Colorado. He had been told about my background and asked me "If SHTF how long do you think it would be before someone comes wanting one of my cattle?". I did a full SITREP of the area. Just as if you were invading a country of the people, places, resources and so much more. He the asked me to teach his people and that was the start. So from teak-wood fences to groups and personal training I went. The information we provide is based off real life experience in Law Enforcement, Military (97B), Multiple trainings to serve and protect YOU the public.

06/20/2026

We test the myth that a Mylar bag will provide EMP protection and act as a Faraday Cage. For more detailed information check out our page for the Geek data.

Faraday Myths BustedToday we posted a short video on the Mylar bag as a Faraday Bag on youtube.https://youtu.be/_9qzy3cp...
06/20/2026

Faraday Myths Busted
Today we posted a short video on the Mylar bag as a Faraday Bag on youtube.
https://youtu.be/_9qzy3cp9uo
Most standard Mylar bags are not inherently conductive. Most are made from biaxially oriented polyethylene terephthalate (BoPET) polyester film, which is an excellent electrical insulator. HOWEVER, many Mylar bags are metallized meaning they have a thin layer of aluminum vapor-deposited or laminated onto the polyester surface.

This aluminum layer is what gives Mylar bags their shiny appearance and their ability to block light, oxygen, and moisture. While the aluminum layer is conductive, it is very thin and not continuous in all areas, so the bag as a whole does not act as a continuous Faraday cage.

Your bag must be at least IEEEE 299 2006 certified to be effective. IEEE 299-2006 is a standard for measuring the effectiveness of electromagnetic shielding enclosures across a wide frequency range.

We have seen many so called Mil-spec bags that are not! Buyer be ware. We recommend The Dri-Shield 3400 Series Moisture Barrier Bag (formally a 3M product)
https://staticcontrol.descoindustries.com/SCSCatalog/ESD-Bags/Moisture-Barrier-Bags/Foil-High-Barrier/Dri-Shield-3400-Series/

06/10/2026

I want to address the importance of being part of a group and getting one started.

Over the years, I’ve come to appreciate just how crucial it is to be prepared for emergencies, whether they’re natural disasters or unexpected events. You never know when a storm might hit or if you could find yourself in a situation where help isn’t immediately available. When a community knows how to respond, the impact of these situations can be significantly lessened.

Think about it; when disaster strikes, how comforting would it be to know that your neighbors are trained and ready to lend a hand? Having a group of people who understand the basics of emergency response can create a sense of safety and unity in the neighborhood.

Preparedness isn’t just an individual concern; it’s a collective responsibility. It fosters stronger relationships and builds trust, making it easier to face tough times together. I truly believe that every neighborhood should have a preparedness group to get everyone on the same page.

If you want more information on starting a group message us.

06/06/2026

Part Four:
Young Preppers need old school preppers

Water without Pumps: How They Got It and Made It Safe
Most Americans turn on a tap and water appears. Our grandparents got water from wells, springs, rainwater cisterns, and creeks. Every single drop required physical effort to acquire, and most of it required some kind of treatment before it was safe to drink.

The most common rural water source in the 1930s was the dug well. Not the drilled wells we have today. Hand-dug wells, often by the homeowner or with neighborhood help, that ran 15 to 40 feet deep down to the water table. The water came up in a bucket on a rope, hauled hand-over-hand. Later, hand pumps were installed to make the work easier. Either way, you went outside, in any weather, multiple times a day, to bring water inside.

Rainwater Cistern Most Preppers Have Never Considered:
In areas without good well access, families relied on rainwater catchment. Not a barrel under a downspout. A real cistern. Often a concrete-lined underground tank holding several thousand gallons, fed by guttering from the roof of the house and outbuildings. The cistern provided water for everything but drinking. For drinking, you usually went to a spring or well, since cistern water carried more contamination risk.

I lived in an old farm house in the late 1970's that had cistern in the basement. It was fed by the roof and at one time was pumped into the kitchen by a hand pump mounted on the sink. That cistern had been changed over to provide water for laundry use only but it was there. It was filled by rain alone. And gravity feed to the washer's cold, no electricity ever touched it.

I have built my own version using three IBC totes, about 300 gallons each, fed by my roofs. Giving me about a use able capacity around 800 gallons. The cost was under $150 for the totes and another $50 in miscellaneous materials. It’s not a permanent solution like original cisterns, but the principle is identical. Rain falls. You catch it. You use it. The grid is irrelevant.

Making Water Safe Without a Filter:
Here’s where modern preppers spend a fortune that our grandparents didn’t have. The shelves are full of water filter systems running $300 to $400 and up. They’re great. I have one. But our grandparents made water safe with three things. Boiling. Settling. Slow sand filtration.

Boiling at a rolling boil for one minute kills essentially every pathogen that will hurt you. Five minutes if you’re paranoid. It doesn’t remove chemicals, but in a pre-industrial rural setting, chemical contamination wasn’t the main risk. Biological contamination was.

Settling is the simplest trick. Cloudy water sits in a container for several hours. The sediment falls to the bottom. You pour the clear water off the top. Now you have water clear enough to boil efficiently.

Slow sand filtration is the surprise. Layered sand and gravel in a bucket, water poured in the top, clean water out the bottom, biological film on the surface doing the heavy lifting. This was the standard municipal treatment method before chlorination. It still works. It takes no electricity. It requires no filters to replace. Once the biological layer establishes itself, it gets better with use, not worse.

I’m saying solely depending on a filter that requires a replacement cartridge is a strategy with a clock on it. I am using a ITEHIL RO system and have two years of filters on hand. With the knowledge of how to build a sand filter from scratch is a skill with no clock.

06/02/2026

Part Three:
Young Preppers need old school preppers

The Wood Stove:
The Most Important Appliance Nobody Owns
That would be the wood-burning cook stove; not a wood stove! That single appliance did the work of about six modern ones, with no electricity, no gas, and the fuel you could literally pick up off the ground.

Think about what a wood cook stove actually does. It cooks your food. It boils your water. It heats your house. It bakes your bread. It dries your laundry hanging nearby. It heats the iron you use to press clothes. It warms the bricks you put in your bed at night. It runs all day, every day, in winter. It runs as needed in summer.

My great grandparents had a cast iron range that they used in their home in Kentucky. That same stove served them for decades and through lots of hard times. My grandmother told me her mother could judge oven temperature just by sticking her hand inside for three seconds.

The Modern Equivalent
For most modern preppers the contemporary version of “backup cooking” is usually a butane or propane camp stove and a few cylinders. Some will suggest a small wood stove rated for outdoor use only. These will work for a few days; however they don’t replace the central heating function. They don’t bake bread and they won’t last for decades. The other problem they fail to cover is the fuel is finite.

Real cast iron wood cook stove are still available, both new and salvaged. New ones run anywhere from $3,000 to $7,000 for a good one. Salvaged restored stoves can be had for less. Installation should be done by a certified company to insure proper chimney and clearances and code compliance. If you do this and get a wood cook stove it solves multiple problems permanently.

I’m not saying run out and buy one tomorrow. I’m saying to think about whether your current setup has any path to cooking and heating that doesn’t depend on the grid or on stored fuel that will eventually run out. Wood, if you have access to any wooded land or a community connection is renewable in real time. Propane is not.

The Skill That Comes With the Stove
After several seasons of regular use you will be able to keep the firebox even, judge the oven by feel, and run multiple pots on different parts of the cooktop at different temperatures by sliding them around. The hotter the burner over the firebox, the slower simmer on the far side. It becomes second nature. It takes practice, not just weekend practice; but real practice. Fires going out burning food and gathering wood all take learning how to or how to do it right.

This is the broader lesson. Every piece of low-tech equipment our grandparents used required a related skill that took years to develop. The hand pump required knowing how to prime it and seal the leathers. The kerosene lamp required trimming wicks and cleaning chimneys. The skills came packaged with the tool. Modern preppers skip the skills and just buy the tool. That doesn’t work.

Wood stove bonus round
Most 1930s rural homes had a single heat source. A wood stove in the kitchen, maybe a parlor stove in the front room. The bedrooms upstairs were unheated, or heated only by rising warm air through a grate in the floor. People wore more clothes inside. They piled wool blankets on the beds. They warmed the bed with a hot brick or a heated stone wrapped in flannel before climbing in.

The closed-door strategy was the key to life. You heated the room you were in. Doors stayed shut between rooms. The kitchen stayed warm because the cook stove ran all day. Everyone gravitated to that room in winter. Bedrooms were for sleeping under heavy blankets. That was the entire heating plan.

Today modern preppers over look this this. They try to figure out how to heat the entire house if the grid goes down. That’s the wrong. What needs to be asked is, how do I keep my family warm in one room, indefinitely, with renewable fuel? That answer is much simpler. A small wood stove (vented), a stack of seasoned firewood, warm blankets, and the discipline to shut doors.

Emergency management programs say to have plastic to close off areas not used to conserve heat. This is the same thing our ancestors did. My grand mother hung a blanket over her add on room in the winter and placed heavy rugs on the bottom to keep the cold out.

05/31/2026

UPDATES:
We are having to reproduce the ITEHIL RO water purifier test video due to cameraman error. For the June assembly we are covering Faraday Cages and EMP information. There are many youtube videos out there and many are just click bait to get views. In a continuing effort to serve our community we are preparing to dive deeper into the Popcorn Tin and Microwave Faraday Cage debate.

Our goal will be to debunk the myths and provide accurate information as to allow you to make educated choices.

Prepper sites and survival blogs often promote microwaves as cheap fallback Faraday cages, which suits an audience seeking low cost solutions, while physics forums and technical writeups stress limitations and nuance; both angles are truthful but serve different implicit goals—either practical reassurance or technical rigor—so readers should weigh the promotional tone of preparedness sites against experimental reports and physics explanations.

As you know we do not sell products and have no monetary gain from our research. Our goal is to help other to be better prepared and lessen the burden to others.

05/18/2026

READ THE MANUAL! Before you make videos

05/18/2026

Young Preppers need old school preppers
I owe my grandmother a note of thanks. Growing up she told me of how things were during the Depression. As I reflected a few years back I realized that a lot of modern day preppers are planning to fail. Today nobody knows how to do anything anymore.

My grandmother talked about being a young mother with a small child living in rural Kentucky when the depression hit. They survived because they knew things modern people have forgotten. A whole way of living that built resilience into every single day; not survival tricks, not expensive gear but knowledge.

Perhaps you have heard of The Foxfire books. In the late 1960's, Eliot Wigginton and his students created the magazine "Foxfire" in an effort to record and preserve the traditional folk culture of the Southern Appalachians. They were turned into a book compilation of Foxfire material which includes log cabin building, hog dressing, snake lore, mountain crafts and food, and "other affairs of plain living.". All filled with skills one might need to possess to start over.

Most of what gets sold as preparedness today is focused on expensive gear. What our grandparents did was the opposite. It was skill-focused, cheap, and unbreakable. They didn’t prepare for hard times; they simply lived in a way that made hard times survivable.

I’m not saying throw away your cell phone and churn your own butter. What I am saying is that the people who survived the worst economic collapse in American history did it without the things modern preppers fixate on. No solar panels. No water filters that cost three hundred dollars. No tactical gear. No bug-out bags. They had something better. They had knowledge that lived in their hands and heads.

Lets look at the Great Depression
The 1930s were brutal; unemployment was 25% nationally. In some cities, it was closer to 50%. Around 9,000 banks failed between 1930 and 1933. Roughly nine million savings accounts vanished overnight. The Dust Bowl displaced 2.5 million people across the Great Plains. Soup kitchens stretched for blocks in major cities. People who had money and lost it committed su***de because they could not cope with being broke. Children went to school in shoes stuffed with newspaper because the soles were gone.

That’s the hard truth not a folksy adventure. It was a decade long emergency that broke a lot of people and shaped the rest for the rest of their lives. The reason their methods matter is because they worked under those conditions. Not under TickTok or YouTube conditions. Not under weekend warrior suburban-blackout-weekend conditions. They worked under real, sustained, soul-grinding pressure.

Back in 1930 ninety percent of American farms had no electricity and only ten percent of rural homes had power. Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal contained The Rural Electrification Act of 1936 provided federal loans for the installation of electrical distribution systems to serve rural areas. However many rural areas didn't get reliable grid power until after World War II. Fewer and fewer people have lived without the power grid. They didn't think of themselves as off grid; they didn't have words for it. It was just life as they knew it and did what they had to do to get through it.

Their lives were built around the assumption that no outsiders were coming to help. No emergency services outside of the Marshall, Sheriff or volunteer fire department could be called on. There was no FEMA!

Today modern preppers tend to think older people are a burden or risk in an emergency. Instead they rely on buying gear and gadgets to replace the grid until it returns. Our ancestors built lives that never needed the grid. The difference if enormous in one is a temporary fix and the other is solid foundation to build on.

05/10/2026

Barter Items: The Post-Collapse Economy
Money has value because we collectively agree it does. When supply chains collapse and stores close, that agreement weakens. Barter economies emerge naturally in their place.

I’m not suggesting you prepare primarily for barter—your supplies should first meet your own needs. But understanding what becomes valuable in crisis economies helps you prioritize what to store and recognizes opportunities when they arise.

High-Value Barter Categories
Consumables that are hard to produce: Salt has been currency throughout human history for good reason. You cannot make it easily, and you cannot live long without it. Soap, candles, matches, batteries—the things that get used up and can’t be replaced.

Vices: History consistently shows that people will trade necessities for alcohol, to***co, and caffeine during crises. Whether you consider this rational or not, it’s predictable. Mini bottles of liquor, packs of ci******es, instant coffee—these store well and trade high.

Ammunition: Controversial but true. In every modern societal breakdown I’ve studied, ammunition becomes currency among those who have fi****ms. Standard calibers (9mm, .22LR, 12 gauge) trade most readily. Store what you’ll use first, but recognize surplus has exchange value. (My take is if you trade it it can be used against you so be sure who you deal with)

Medical supplies: Pain relievers, antibiotic ointments, bandages, children’s medications—anyone with dependents will trade significantly for these when pharmacies are closed.

Seeds: For extended collapses, heirloom seeds that can be saved and replanted become enormously valuable. A $3 packet of tomato seeds today could trade for substantial goods when growing your own food becomes necessary.

What becomes priceless: Items that are simultaneously useful to you and valuable to others. Diversified small quantities beat specialized large quantities for barter flexibility. Don’t become known as “the guy with all the alcohol”—that makes you a target, not a trading partner.

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