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Real Life Experiences

  • 10-11-2011 11:22am
    #1
    krissovo
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 2,645 ✭✭✭


    Has anyone had any "survival" experiences that they would like to share.

    I have a couple, mostly from my military days but this one is from last year. Not strictly a life and death situation for me but its an interesting experience.

    I was working in Germany last December for a few weeks between Frankfurt and Munich. I usually took the train between the offices but on the 2nd week I had to hire a car due to my working hours and to get to a meeting on time the following day. I knew the weather was supposed to snow a few inches so I cleared it with my boss to hire a 4x4 SUV.

    About 1hr into my journey down the autobahn the snow started and for the next 30 mins traffic slowed down but moved well enough. All of a sudden we hit a white out, traffic stopped completely and within 15 minutes there was over 12 inches snow. 30 minutes later the snow was around 3ft in places and -17 outside so we were well and truly stuck.

    After being stuck for an hour and realizing we were going nowhere fast I moved into survival mode. Luckily I had 3/4 full fuel tank so around 10 hours of heat from the car. I also had my survival tin and emergency pouch with me so the first thing I did was fire up my stove and put a cup of water on to boil for a nice cup of tea. Once I had my tea I used the last of my emergency fuel to get a warm meal inside me which I had a packet of dried pasta in my emergency pouch.

    About 30 minutes later people from car behind me came up to me, they had under a 1/4 tank of fuel and also one of the occupants was quite elderly and starting to show signs of distress. I used the last of my fuel from my emergency pouch so I could not make them a brew so I instructed them to forage anything that will burn from the surrounding cars and also from the forest that was next to the autobahn. After 10 mins or so I had a old blanket, a small pile of branches from the wood and so I set to work on getting a fire going. Using my fire kit from my pouch which was a fire stone and some kindling we had a fire going in 15 minutes and the water boiling soon after that for a well deserved brew.

    Before long we had quite a gathering around the fire, foragers went off and gathered more firewood. Tins of soup, goulash and coffee soon turned up from peoples shopping in their cars. We were cooking food straight from the cans, boiling water in them after they were eaten and before long our little stretch of autobahn was fed with a warm meal and hot drink made from snow.

    We were stranded for a total of 17 hours and while I was in no real danger I made myself and others more comfortable. I probably saved a few people from hypothermia and took satisfaction from that. I also learned a few valuable lessons, I needed a cooking system and food where I could get more than one hot meal and brew. The pasta dish I had took 15 mins of boiling so my new setup is microwave rice, tuna and a small sachet of curry powder. Cooks in 5 mins so gives me an additional brew.


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