Well, didn't do very much today because I was in transit, but here's what I did this week.
During this past week I detoured from my summer trip cross country plans because of some hard/long thinking about the Community Survival discussion thread I'd been participating in through the previous week (and which I'll get back to hopefully tomorrow).
I first went down to Tulsa, OK where I checked out an old L19/O1 Birddog. It had recently been refurbished three years ago and had all its maintenance records up to date and it passed FAA inspection with flying colors. It was a repossession and I was able to buy it from the lien holder for 12K after I had a CFI give me a check ride. That done, the tanks were topped off and I flew down to my main retreat.
I landed at the retreat and was met by my "foreman", an old friend of mine who runs the ranch and is the general overseer for operations of the ranch, the retreat, and all of the facilities. I had him fly up from the ranch in Arizona to go over some new plans for modifications.
This week I met with the county emergency management officer as well as the county sheriff to discuss area disaster plans and training. Over the years my teams have used the site for pre-deployment training excercises and have trained the local LEO folks as well. As I'm getting older and not as spry as I once was, I've been considering making this area a larger scale training facility to supplement income for some added preps and additions to the site. An Indian reservation borders close to my property so I also met with their CLEO and a tribal representative to hash out a mutual support agreement and land usage for patrol training.
When all was done I had an agreement for county and tribal support for the additional state and federal permits and licensing to expand the training facility operations. The sheriff's equivalent of a SWAT team would be able to use the training area six times per year for free and all of his department will get a reduced training rate. The same for the tribal police, though they don't have a tactical team.
I ordered two used Unimog U500's in decent condition and ATF Dingo kits for them. When modified each truck will be leased to the county and tribal council for emergency services use and either entity is able to sign out the Bird Dog for search & rescue, drug interdiction or other official use with a pay as you go leasing arrangement signed. In regards to the Dingo upgrades from Textron, I was able to order four kits. One each for the two leased out vehicles and two for the facility for training purposes.
Art, my foreman, and I went over ideas I had sketched out for additional protected vehicle and fuel storage for the site. Also discussed was adding extra bunk areas inside the silo shelter to accommodate up to three full teams if we're going to have a fully operational CONUS based training center. Current plans are for up to one team if they're nearby should an SHTF event happen. The new model will assure that one team is nearly always on site and two other teams rotating in or out at any given time. For stateside cycles they can perform as instructors in addition to regular training.
I'll be adding a lot of additional food preps to the site based on the Community Survival thread, but I'm still not certain of how to go about the distribution. One thing we discussed was more community involvement pre-SHTF, so that's what I'm attempting. I'll be fleshing out further ideas in the other thread over the next several weeks.
Ulfric