How To Fortify Your House Against Attack In A Grid Down Scenario

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Jul 20, 2017 Nick Oetken

In the event of a grid down scenario, your home can become the target of looters, raiders, and angry mobs.

That’s why it’s important for the safety of your family and the protection of your survival stockpiles that you make the necessary defensive fortifications for your house well before a disaster strikes, so that it is prepared to outlast anything.

Not only does setting up defensive fortifications on your house make it more resistant to attack, but it will make any potential burglars or raiders less likely to attack it too. Here are some measures you can take to turn your house into a fortress:

FORTIFYING THE DOORS

The first way is to replace all wooden external doors with steel or metal doors.

The first part of your house that needs to be fortified is the doors, or more appropriately, they likely need to be replaced! The reason we are going to work on fortifying the doors first is because they are the most obvious entry point of the house.

If you think that the normal wooden doors and door locks you have now will keep out an intruder in a grid down scenario, you seriously need to rethink your security planning. Anyone can beat a door lock with a rifle stock or rock and then open the door.

It really is that easy. But even if they don’t bend the door locks apart, they can still hack their way through the wooden door with an axe or a sledgehammer.

There are two ways that you can fortify your doors. The first way is to replace all wooden doors of your house with steel or metal doors, or at least the doors on the outside of the home. This greatly minimizes if not eliminates the chances of an intruder breaking their way through.

Then, replace all door locks in your home (including the doors in the inside of your home) with heavy duty door locks. These kinds of locks have a stronger lock that cannot be so easily bent and will better resist an intruder.

FORTIFYING THE WINDOWS

While the doors are the most obvious entry point into your home, the second most obvious entry point would be the windows. If the burglars or raiders can’t break through your home via the doors first, they’ll go for the windows next. Or who knows, maybe they will go for the windows first anyway.

As with your doors, you will want to replace all of your windows (assuming they are glass windows) with a more durable material. T

here are a few different options you have here, but Plexiglas works the best. It looks the closest to normal glass but it’s also incredibly strong. It can be broken down with repetitive beating, but it will take a lot longer to break it apart than normal glass does.

You can also consider installing steel bars in your window, or if you want your house to look more normal (which is perfectly understandable), you can instead board it up with wood or sandbags when the grid goes down.

WOODEN BOARDS AND SANDBAGS

Sand bags piled up against protective plywood.

Wooden boards can be used to board up your windows and keep intruders out. But while wooden boards can keep an intruder physically out of your house, they are weak when it comes to something else, and that is absorbing bullets.

If your house finds itself in the middle of a war zone with bullets flying everywhere, your wooden boards will provide you with literally no form of protection whatsoever. Fortunately, you have another solution that is very adept at absorbing bullets, and that solution is sandbags.

Store dozens or hundreds of burlap sacks separate from the sand in your buckets, and then fill up each of the sacks when the grid goes down. You can then stack up the sandbags at the windows or at other strategic locations around your house. A thick layer of sandbags will prove to be extremely effective at shielding you from bullets.

SCARING INTRUDERS

Make it clear to would-be intruders that your home is protected.

By this point, your doors and windows have been fortified and you also have wooden boards and sandbags on standby that you can use to keep intruders out and block bullets.

You may think that your home is pretty well fortified at this point, and while there’s no doubt that it’s more well protected than it was previously, you’re still missing one more defensive measure.

That defensive measure is warning intruders to stay away from your home and property in the first place. The above preparations are intended to protect your home in the event that you are attacked. But warning signs are intended to prevent an attack from ever occurring on your home in the first place.

You have a variety of ways to warn intruders to stay away. The first way is to have a guard dog that can alert you to an intruder and that is intimidating enough to keep even the toughest of people away.

Even if you don’t have an actual guard dog, having a dog house set up or a sign that indicates a guard dog is on patrol will make an intruder think twice at the very least.

Create obstacles that make your property or community difficult to access, like setting up barbed wire fences.

Have more warning indicators such as graffiti or signs indicating any attackers will be shot, barbed wire fences set up on the perimeter around your home, and rifles and shotguns visible through the windows.

The defense of your home and property has to be one of the biggest priorities in a grid down scenario. The above preparations could mean the difference between life and death for you and your family.

Better yet, maintain good relations with your neighbors so that multiple families throughout your neighborhood can work together to set up a coordinated defense in the event of a grid down. This is the best defense you would have against mobs and furthermore it allows families to exchange resources and keep one another protected.