Heat Your Body, Not Your House

The recent brutally cold weather event across much of the U.S. has been a wake up call for lots of people.

The first is to conserve your own body heat. Keep yourself covered up, especially your head, because you lose so much heat through your scalp. And don’t wait until you feel cold before adding clothing. Conserve the warmth you already have — don’t wait until you lose that warmth and they try to recapture it. 

The second important key is to add warmth to the inside of your body. Eat hot meals as often as possible. Drink warm liquids as often as possible. Avoid alcohol because it actually speeds the cooling of the body core. But make sure to drink plenty of water because dehydration comes easily in cold weather when you don’t naturally feel thirsty, and dehydration speeds hypothermia.

I’m seeing all kinds of suggestions about how to heat your house when the power goes down during cold weather. Some of them are okay, some are downright dangerous.

One thing I want to mention is that you should never try to heat your house with any device that has an unvented fuel combustion system. The very worst scenario is using a barbecue grill or hibachi with briquettes to try to heat your house. It’s nothing less than a recipe for death by carbon monoxide poisoning.

So here’s what I want you to think about. In order for you to survive, it isn’t necessary to heat your whole house. All that’s necessary is that you personally stay warm enough.

Here are two important keys to survival in a cold environment:

• The first is to conserve your own body heat. Keep yourself covered up, especially your head, because you lose so much heat through your scalp. And don’t wait until you feel cold before adding clothing. Conserve the warmth you already have — don’t wait until you lose that warmth and they try to recapture it. 

You can lose body warmth by four methods.

1) Radiation. Your body radiates warmth, so if you can capture that warmth and keep it from drifting away into the atmosphere, it helps keep you warm. This is where the reflective side of an emergency blanket comes into play. That material reflects back toward you the very heat that your body is radiating away. Wrapping up in an emergency blanket does wonders for conserving your body warmth.

2) Convection. This is the movement of air around your body — basically it's wind, or even a slight breeze. To avoid losing body warmth by convection, keep yourself protected from exposure to the wind. That means staying inside a shelter, or a vehicle — anywhere that shields you from the wind.

3) Conduction. You transfer body warmth to cold objects by conduction whenever you touch something cold. It sucks the warmth right out of your body, so don’t sit or lie down on anything that is cold. And don't allow anything colder than 98.6 degrees F to touch your bare skin.

4) Evaporation. If you become wet, it will be almost impossible to stay warm. The moisture evaporating from your skin or clothing will act like an air conditioner, literally drawing the warmth from your body and dissipating it into the air. Staying dry is the most important step in staying warm.

• The second important key is to add warmth to the inside of your body. Eat hot meals as often as possible. Drink warm liquids as often as possible. Avoid alcohol because it actually speeds the cooling of the body core. But make sure to drink plenty of water because dehydration comes easily in cold weather when you don’t naturally feel thirsty, and dehydration speeds hypothermia.

If you conserve your body warmth, and add warmth to the inside of your body, you can survive the cold weather without having to worry about keeping your entire house warm. 

Stranded and Snowbound In A Vehicle

What do you do if you end up stranded in a vehicle that is trapped by snow?

First, try the cell phone or CB radio, if you have one. The earlier you can make contact with the outside world, the faster you’re going to get rescued. Do whatever you can to make your vehicle visible to other drivers, and to let them know you’re in trouble. Turn on the emergency flashers. Tie a colorful bit of cloth to the radio antenna. But don’t stand outside waving your arms and screaming into the wind — you’ll only put your own survival at risk.

Stay in the vehicle and take steps to prevent cold weather injuries like hypothermia and frostbite. Stay dry, do everything you can to prevent heat loss from your body. Dress warmly. Crawl in a sleeping bag. Cover your head. Drink plenty of water, and stoke up the inner fires by eating high-energy foods. Do mild exercise to warm your body.

Running the vehicle engine to operate the heater is tempting, but futile, and potentially dangerous. The futility is because it takes a long time for an idling engine to warm up enough to provide heat through the vehicle's heater system, and as soon as you turn off the engine, the interior gets cold almost immediately because of the lack of insulation. The danger part of it is due to the potential for carbon monoxide poisoning from the engine exhaust. If you’re stranded for very long you’re going to run out of gas anyway, so work on other ways to stay warm.

Every once in a while, crack the window open a little, so you don’t breathe down all the oxygen and end up suffering from oxygen depletion.

Here’s a basic list of items you should carry in your vehicle when traveling during winter weather.

• Cell phone and a phone battery charger that will work through your vehicle’s cigarette lighter, so you don’t end up with a dead phone battery when you’re trying to call for help.
• GPS — by using the GPS and cell phone, you might be able to contact authorities and tell them exactly where you are stranded.
• Even better is a SPOT Satellite Messenger (www.findmespot.com) or a personal locator beacon (PLB). With one press of a button, you summon emergency rescue teams to your GPS coordinates.
• Sleeping bags or blankets for everyone in the vehicle. Add a reflective emergency blanket for each person, because the reflective mylar will help preserve body heat that otherwise would be lost.
• Chemical hand warmers. When activated, these provide several hours of warmth. These are one-time-use items, but the good news is that they’re inexpensive to buy.
• A thermos bottle full of hot water, hot coffee, hot tea, or hot soup for each person in the vehicle. Prepare this just before leaving the house to drive through winter weather conditions.
• Water to drink. Dehydration contributes to hypothermia, so make sure everyone has water to drink.
• High energy food bars, to help stoke the inner fire.
• A windshield ice scraper and brush, so you can remove snow from the hood and emergency flashers of the vehicle and make it more visible to rescuers.

So if you find yourself stranded and snowbound in your vehicle, try to make contact with the outside world. Then do your best to stay dry, stay warm, stay hydrated and fed. Then stay put, the rescue will come.

Water Purification

Drinking contaminated water is a serious threat to survival.

If you get sick from drinking bad water, you can end up with vomiting and diarrhea, which speed dehydration. So it’s good to understand a variety of ways to make water safe to drink.

The traditional methods of water purification include the use of chemicals such as chlorine or iodine, passing the water through a filter system, or boiling. But there’s another way to remove organic pathogens from water without using any of those methods.

It’s pasteurization. We all know that milk is pasteurized to kill off biological contaminants, but very few people have heard of pasteurizing water to purify it.

Pasteurization is simply the raising of the temperature of the liquid until it is hot enough to kill the biological contaminants such as bacteria, virus, worms and cysts like giardia and cryptosporidium.
The natural assumption is that that’s why boiling is used as a purification method. Well, yes. That’s true. But the surprising fact is that you don’t actually have to bring water to a boil in order to defeat all the bad critters in the water. Pasteurization does not require boiling the water. In fact, you can kill off all the biological bad guys by bringing the water temperature up to a mere 150 degrees Fahrenheit (65 degrees Celsius) and holding it there for 6 minutes. That’s a lot easier than boiling at 212 degrees Fahrenheit (100 degrees Celsius).

Worms and stuff like giardia and cryptosporidium are killed at 131 degrees F (55 Celsius). Bacteria die at 140 degrees F (60 degrees Celsius). And the hepatitis A virus expires at 149 degrees F (65 degrees Celsius). In fact, when milk is pasteurized, the temperature is only 160 degrees F (71 degrees Celsius) and it’s held at that temperature for only 15 seconds.

The benefit of using pasteurization rather than boiling is that it requires less fuel, and a secondary benefit might be that the process is faster so you can process more water in a shorter amount of time.

The obvious benefit of boiling is that you can know when the temperature is high enough, because you see the water bubbling. That’s not the case with pasteurization. In order to know that you have brought the water to a high enough temperature, you need some method of measuring the temperature. A cooking thermometer works well. Or you can use a WAPI, which stands for Water Pasteurization Indicator. This is a transparent high-temperature plastic tube with a blob of wax inside. You place the WAPI in the water and watch for the wax to melt, which it does at 150 degrees F. The WAPI can be reused hundreds of times, by letting the wax cool and solidify so it’s ready for next time. Water Pasteurization Indicators cost less than $10 online from many sources.

One thing to know, however, is that neither boiling nor pasteurization eliminates non-biological contaminants from water. Heavy metals, chemicals and such require filtration to get rid of them. But pasteurization is a faster and more fuel efficient method of water purification to get rid of all the organic contaminants.

So there you go, now you have one more technique you can add to your survival strategies.

Frostbite

It’s cold outside, and that can be dangerous.

Flesh that is exposed to extreme cold will freeze, and the result is what we call frostbite. Depending upon conditions, this can sometimes happen very quickly — like in a matter of minutes. For example, you grasp a frozen bit of metal with a bare hand, or worse yet, you splash some intensely cold gasoline (which won’t freeze until far below zero) on your hands or feet while refueling a vehicle — that can cause instant severe frostbite injury.

Slower frostbite sneaks up on you over a span of time when your skin is exposed to the cold, like if you’re wandering around with no gloves on. But you can also suffer frostbite even when there’s no exposed flesh. This happens when circulation is restricted to your hands and feet due to boots and gloves that are too tight. And that’s what I want to talk about today.

Here’s a question — which do you think is better in extreme cold, gloves or mittens? Here’s another one — in extreme cold weather, is it always better to wear more socks?

For the answer to these two questions, let’s see what leads to frostbite. The body is constantly trying to keep itself alive during cold weather. The highest priority is to maintain the body’s core temperature. From the core, warm blood is pumped to the extremities, like your hands and feet, to keep your fingers and toes safe from the cold. But eventually if the blood returning from those extremities comes back to the core too cold, the body decides that in order to preserve the core temperature, it will have to stop sending warm blood out to the hands and feet. With less warm blood going to the extremities, those parts can freeze even if they are fully covered by boots and gloves.

So, from the standpoint of avoiding frostbite in the fingers and toes, we need to make sure we give those extremities the best chance for survival. Now let’s go back to the question about gloves vs. mittens. Gloves isolate each finger separate from the others. Without the shared warmth of the other fingers, each one gets cold faster. When the warm blood arrives from the core, it becomes chilled and that triggers the body’s response to not send as much warm blood. And that can lead to frostbite. So wearing mittens instead of gloves can give your fingers a better chance of survival.

The same concept applies to boots and socks. If you do something that restricts circulation to your feet and toes, they become cold, and then the body stops sending so much warm blood to those extremities. So, you have to be careful about adding more socks, if that’s going to make the boots too tight and restrict circulation to your feet. Notice that serious cold-weather boots like Sorels are loose on your feet, to keep from restricting circulation. But it’s not just the boots, you don’t want to wear socks that are too tight either. Leave some wiggle room for your toes.

It’s possible to suffer frostbite even if every part of your body is covered so it’s not directly exposed to the cold. But if you wear the right kind of clothing, you can minimize the danger. I admit that mittens and big clunky boots may not be as fashionable as cute gloves and decorator footwear, but then neither is losing fingers and toes very fashionable.

And in my book, being smart trumps being in style any day.

Carbon Monoxide Poisoning

Millions of Americans are stricken to some degree by a silent killer every year. What I’m talking about is carbon monoxide, a common by-product of the combustion process.

Carbon monoxide is a poisonous gas that strikes without warning. It’s virtually undetectable by human senses. You can’t smell it, you can’t see it, you can’t taste it. It accumulates in enclosed spaces, often while the victims are asleep and a stove or heater is still burning. But you can become a victim while you’re wide awake. That’s because, as carbon monoxide accumulates in your body, it prevents the hemoglobin in blood from delivering oxygen to the cells. Shortage of oxygen to the cells gradually weakens the body and eventually results in unconsciousness. By the time the victim realizes there is a problem, he or she may be too weak to open a door or window, or move outside to fresh air. And as the process continues to deny oxygen to the cells, the victim dies.

Symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning range from a slight headache to nausea, weakness, vomiting, drowsiness and heart palpitations. Eventually the victim may fall into a coma and die. Those with pre-existing respiratory or cardiac conditions are at greatest risk.

Statistics indicate that between 5000 and 10,000 people die annually as a result of carbon monoxide poisoning. Nearly 200,000 experience non-fatal CO-induced heart attacks, and about 25-million victims undergo some level of illness that is actually caused by CO poisoning, but misdiagnosed as flu, motion sickness, or food poisoning.

To help prevent excessive exposure to this lethal gas, a quality carbon monoxide detector is an important piece of safety equipment. Monitors should be placed about midway between the floor and ceiling, where it will most effectively detect the presence of the dangerous gas as it circulates freely in the air.

Carbon monoxide poisoning can originate in many places. At home it might be a faulty furnace or fireplace. When traveling or camping, it might be leaky vehicle exhaust system, poorly operating camp appliances, or the exhaust from a portable power generator.

During cold winter weather, some folks are tempted to heat their homes by using a barbecue or hibachi indoors, but this is exceedingly dangerous. The only combustion appliances that should be used indoors are those that are designed for indoor operation and are properly vented. A gas furnace is a good example. And even then, you should have the furnace tested by technicians to make sure the combustion process isn’t spewing out carbon monoxide.

This stuff is a sneaky killer that takes down a lot of people every year. Make sure you aren’t one of the victims. Have your appliances checked, and use a carbon monoxide alarm.

Keep Bears Out of Camp

Did you know there are about a half-million bears in the Lower 48?

Surveys taken from 35 states indicate that the population of black bears is either stable or increasing. Small populations of grizzly bears live in some parts of the country. And, not surprisingly, the kind of places bear populations thrive happen to be the same kind of places people tend to go camping.

Nobody wants to have a bear wander into camp and tear everything apart while looking for a quick meal. That is, after all, what the bear is hunting for — food. And to a bear, garbage is the same as food.

So that leads us to a few rules for keeping bears out of our campsite.

• Don't leave food lying around camp, because it will attract bears. That goes not only for human food, but for pet food and livestock feed as well. 

• Store double-wrapped and tightly sealed food in your vehicle trunk. if the vehicle is not available, place food in a backpack or other container and suspend it from a tree limb at least 10 feet above the ground and 4 feet away from the trunk. 

• Be strict about maintaining your tent and sleeping bag as Zero-Food-Zones. That means you never take food (not even midnight snacks) into your tent. And never sleep in the clothes you wore while cooking. 

• Keep a clean camp, to eliminate odors that attract small animals like raccoons, which in turn attract big animals like bears. Don't cook smelly or greasy foods, such as bacon. Maintain the cooking and food storage area at least 100 yards from your campsite (preferable downwind). If you barbecue dinner, wash the grill immediately after use. For that matter, wash all the dishes immediately after use. 

• Store garbage, fish parts and meat waste in double-sealed plastic bags that are placed in bear-proof trash containers 9where available), or containers with tight-fitting lids. Keep the containers well away from camp, and suspended from a bear wire or tree limb. 

• Pack everything out in double plastic bags. Do not bury or burn garbage — bears will be attracted to the residual odor.

Dress For Survival

Your clothing is your first line of defense against the elements in the outdoors, or even in an urban survival situation. So here are the rules about dressing for survival.

• Dress long. That means long sleeves and long pants. No matter what time of year it is, in a survival situation, the last thing you want is to expose yourself to harm. Exposed skin can be harmed by sunburn, bug bites, scratches and scrapes, and contact with toxic properties of some plants (poison ivy, poison oak, poison sumac). Those injuries can easily lead to infection. Obviously, bare skin leaves you vulnerable to the cold, wet and wind, all of which lead to hypothermia.

• Choose the right fabrics. Cotton feels soft and comfy but it absorbs moisture and holds it against the skin, which promotes hypothermia. Wool or synthetics are a better choice, because they are less absorbent and they wick dampness away from the skin, keeping you dry and helping retain a proper body temperature.

• Dress in layers. Think of your clothing as a system, not just an item. Ideally, you have an undergarment that wicks moisture away, allowing skin to remain dry and comfortable. The next layer is insulation that is meant to trap and hold air at body temperature. The outer layer is a shell, designed to turn the wind and repel precipitation while allowing body moisture to pass through from the inside and escape to the atmosphere. By using the layer system, you can make adjustments as conditions change. You don’t have to wear everything at once. If you don’t need it, take it off, tie it around your waist or stuff in a pack until needed. There are pros and cons to pullover tops vs. clothing with buttons or zippers. Pullovers retain maximum warmth, but don’t open for ventilation. Buttons and zippers can break or foul, but offer ventilation options.

• Wear a brimmed hat. Keeping your head, neck, ears and face covered with shade is an advantage when the sun is strong. On a cold, rainy day, you don’t want water running down the back of your neck. So, a brimmed hat is excellent in all conditions. An alternative to a full-brimmed hat is to tuck a handkerchief up under the back of a ball cap and let it drape (Legionnaire style) over your neck and ears to protect against the sun, wind and rain.

• Sturdy shoes or boots. You need honest to goodness trail shoes or boots that offer protection against stone bruises, twisted ankles, and such. Sandals are fine for the beach, but not for the trail. Going barefoot, even around camp, is just asking for an injury. 

• Pockets are good. Cargo pants and shirts with pockets are especially versatile. In pockets, I carry fire-starting equipment, a folding knife, a signal mirror and whistle, a map and compass, some food, a lightweight poncho.

• Never discard any article of clothing, even if you don't think you need it. Down the line, you might find that item useful for something other than its original intended purpose.

Pay attention to how you dress for survival in the outdoors. Your clothing is your first line of defense against the elements, so think of it as your portable shelter.