The bug-out bag is a vital piece of kit, and a core concept, of prepping. The BOB is going to be the first piece of gear that you reach for when things get really bad, and even if it isn’t time to hit the road quite yet when disaster strikes you’ll want to have it by the door so you are ready to go.
The bug-out bag is a sort of lifeboat for preppers, and there is nothing you would rather have with you when you are forced to flee a nasty situation.
The bug-out bag is seen as mandatory for anyone who lives in a rural or remote area, but is sometimes underemphasized for those of us living in the urban jungle.
As it turns out, the challenges and travails inherent with surviving or bugging out from an urban environment are no less demanding of being properly prepared than those endemic to less developed areas. They call it the urban jungle for a reason!
Like any other environment, there are unique and specific requirements to be met and obstacles to be overcome in an urban environment, and this will affect both your choice of BOB as well as your loadout.
Adapting to these requirements will give you a leg up over everyone else, whereas ignoring or failing to meet them is only going to hinder you.
In this article, we will be bringing you the best bug-out bags and bug-out bag concepts for urban preppers that are the culmination of exhaustive research and years of experience.
The Quirks of Surviving in Urban Areas
When it comes to survival necessities, you’ll find that the importance of any given resource does not change no matter what environment you are in, but the priority might.
This is as true for urban environments as it is for the Arctic Circle, the high desert, or any place else. Failing to take this into account could see you ill-prepared indeed at the moment of truth.
You could create an enormous list or hierarchy of human needs, but speaking strictly about survival you can boil them down to the “Big 5” of air, shelter, water, food, and security.
No matter where you go, no matter what the situation and what caused it you must have those five things or you are not going to be long for the world.
Note that these Big 5 survival necessities are in generally descending order of importance: a human can survive for only minutes without air, a few hours without adequate shelter in harsh conditions, a few days without water, and a few weeks without food.
Security, well, you have as much time as the situation allows; the bad guys and mean critters get a vote, too!
Now let us look at some examples of how the priority of these necessities shift based on the environment.
If you’re surviving near a massive and remote fresh water lake, water might be among the least of your worries.
Similarly, food is not going to be much of a problem if you are sitting on top of a store room or pantry packed to bursting.
Air is often the most plentiful survival resource in any given situation, but if you are surviving in space, by way of a fun “for instance”, it would be incredibly precious and pressing indeed!
Shelter would be priority number one if you were in an arctic environment but less of a concern in a pleasant, temperate one. And so on…
Despite surviving in an urban environment you’ll still need all of the above, but compared to more traditionalist survival scenarios that postulate survival in remote or pristine natural areas your priorities will change.
Air will be in no short supply in a city, but many disasters both man-made and natural could quickly result in air so contaminated that asphyxiation will be a grave and imminent concern.
Security will also take on new and prime importance when surviving in an urban environment.
Being surrounded by hundreds of thousands or millions upon millions of other people means you’ll have to be constantly on guard against human threats.
Our other survival necessities are far from guaranteed, also. It is easy to think that food will be among the last of your worries in a city, but consider that those hundreds of thousands or millions of other mouths will quickly be scarfing up any food there is to be found.
The only way cities get more food is through their reliance on ceaseless, around-the-clock deliveries from elsewhere in the country.
Water, too, is far from guaranteed despite the countless taps and faucets that surround you in the city.
Public water works are incredibly intricate systems that depend on legions of trained workers maintaining and operating the system.
When that system breaks down or gets damaged contamination may make that water unsafe to drink, if it appears at all when you turn the handle.
In short, any survival scenario worth the name is going to be just as difficult if not more difficult in an urban environment than elsewhere and that means both you and your bug-out bag must be up to the task, and your BOB along with its load should reflect the specialized nature of the environment you’ll be surviving in.
Bugging Out of Urban Areas
Since this article is about bug-out bags, and bug-out bags support bugging out, we should consider what our bug-out is going to look like when we are starting out in a built-up, urbanized area.
What disadvantages will that force on us? What advantages will we have, if any? What special characteristics could trip us up or cause unforeseen problems?
The two most obvious and iconic characteristics of an urban area are the sheer population density and the avenues of approach and departure. Let us consider the latter, our paths for movement in or out, first.
Movement Considerations
Cities are designed to handle massive amounts of traffic, but how well they handle that traffic is always a precarious balancing act that is usually just on the far side of the tipping point.
A slight rise in volume or any sort of accident or other mishaps that slows or stops traffic quickly causes a domino effect that can lead to total gridlock.
Natural or man-made choke points like bridges, tunnels, and major thoroughfares are particularly vulnerable to this effect.
And this of course refers just to vehicular traffic and the adjacent sidewalks for pedestrians.
Any area that is not comprised of roadways is likely going to be buildings, and buildings are basically giant concrete beehives with many, smaller paths and corridors leading into, under, and through them.
Accessing buildings and other man-made paths means you’ll need to enter through a door, window, or some other portal.
These smaller paths offer many more opportunities for free movement when things get clogged on the street but also many more opportunities for obstacles and barricades to be put in your path, be it a locked door, gate, security shutter, or just an improvised blockade.
The smart urban prepper will have a plan for dealing with all of these so that your progress is never totally halted.
Also, consider that being in either cramped confines or just jam-packed streets means an opportunity to be snagged or tangled will be high, and your bug-out bag should be kept correspondingly compact and lean to help offset this.
Population Considerations
And what about that population density, how does that affect our bug-out?
Simply stated all of the problems attendant with huge numbers of strangers taking action in an emergency will now be your problem.
These people will be moving to and fro, doing whatever they think they must improve their chances of survival assuming they are acting accordingly.
They will be gobbling up resources, jamming thoroughfares with bodies and vehicles or just acting in a panic, making them irrational and possibly dangerous.
Of course, mixed in with all the mundane survivors will be opportunistic predators that you’ll have to be on the lookout for.
Security becomes a very high priority in any urban environment, at least compared to less populous, rural environments.
Major urban centers are infamous for their high crime rates even in the best of times, and these crime rates are only going to explode in times of chaos and pandemonium, especially when law enforcement is busy with bigger problems.
Opportunistic thieves and those that are desperate to equip themselves might target you for what you carry, and you’ll need both a plan and tools to deal with them.
Air Quality is a Major SHTF Concern for Urban Areas
The last thing you should consider is that, more than almost any place else, you will need equipment that can ensure you have clean, or at least cleaner, air to breathe while bugging out.
There is hardly any natural or man-made disaster that does not create a substantial risk of fire, and fires in cities are particularly dangerous, not just because they can spread with frightening rapidity but also because they will churn out a frankly unbelievable amount of toxic smoke, quickly poisoning the air.
Also, any collapsing buildings or parts of buildings will clog the air with fine dust to the same effect.
You will need some sort of mask to filter this debris and smoke should you encounter it. We’ll talk a little more about that in the loadout section.
Picking the Best Urban Bug-Out Bag
Any BOB must meet a certain standard and fulfill certain requirements. As you might expect this definitely applies to the urban-centric bug-out bag.
Below are five important criteria you should consider prior to selecting your urban BOB, and when we get to our list of recommendations later you will find that each of them more than ably fulfills all of these requirements.
Capacity
Any BOB that is worth the name is going to be sizable enough to carry a good assortment of gear, but on that note, your average urban-oriented BOB will not be as large as one that is destined for a life of service in the remote backcountry.
Also consider that capacity and size go hand in hand, with a larger pack able to haul more stuff but also have a greater overall footprint and weighing more.
You definitely do not want to be carrying a massive backpack in an urban environment. As mentioned above there are just too many snag hazards both inside and outside buildings.
Urban BOBs must be just big enough to carry what you need and no bigger.
Fit
No matter the environment and no matter the situation a BOB must work with you, not against you, and that makes fit, good fit, critical for getting good results out of your BOB.
Your BOB, whatever its configuration, should ride comfortably and carry the weight how you want it while remaining easy to adjust and maneuver when you need to.
Pay particular attention to sometimes ignored creature comforts like strap and belt padding and texture, as these can quickly become make-or-break items when wearing the pack for a long period of time.
Remember that anything annoying about the way a pack carries in the beginning will turn intolerable after mile 20, so take fit seriously!
Durability
Always remind yourself that your bug-out bag is a piece of emergency gear, not gear to facilitate a hobby or something for fun, no matter how enthusiastic you are about the endeavor.
Your BOB must endure and perform under the same circumstances you’ll be enduring, and that means it has to be durable.
Rough handling, snatch attempts, snags, abrasion, heavy loads and more will put all the materials of your pack and its construction to the test.
You cannot risk losing your pack or, even worse, suffering a blowout that spills your gear all over the sidewalk where it will be quickly hoovered up by teaming masses of panicky people.
Whatever pack you choose make sure it can go the distance under hard use.
Organization
Organization is an important but highly nuanced factor for BOB selection. You want enough compartments inside the pack that will allow you to store and protect your gear in a useful and meaningful way, but not so many that it slows down your access or eats up those ever-valuable cubic inches of capacity.
Similarly, while you don’t want the exterior of the pack festooned with barnacle-like pouches or gear strapped to it openly like you’re some sort of nomad, quick access compartments that you can open up without breaking into the main compartment or even taking the pack off can keep your quick-use or emergency items close at hand ready to use when you need them.
Color/Pattern
Urban environments make choosing the correct color and or pattern of your BOB challenging.
On one hand, choosing a BOB that is in a bright, obvious, and non-threatening color or pattern will help you blend into a sea of similarly colored bags of all sorts in the hands of other people, especially during everyday life. This is a sort of “blend into the herd” mentality.
On the other hand, there will definitely be times you need to go low profile or avoid observation, and those aforementioned civilian colors and patterns will work against you.
What is a clever prepper to do then? This is a decision you’ll have to make for yourself, though I would be inclined to choose a color that could work in either direction, like a seal gray or loden green.
Alternately consider a camouflage cover for a brightly-hued pack so you can hide it in an instant.
Great Urban BOB Choices
Grey Ghost Gear Gypsy
Grey Ghost Gear has a well-earned reputation for making tough, intelligently-designed, and tactically-oriented backpacks.
The Gypsy lives up to that reputation and then some but based on appearance alone it is not a pack one would typically expect to find in a tactical or bug-out setting.
It looks like one of the traditional overlanding packs from years gone by, but make no mistake, despite its traditionalist looks and ageless canvas construction this is a bomb-proof pack that can put up with anything while looking as unassuming as possible.
The Gypsy is what you might call an old-school flat top pack, and this classic aesthetic is married to an equally classic material: waxed canvas.
The canvas is used wherever they can get away with it but Grey Ghost switches to the expected tough ballistic nylon where it is needed in order to add even more strength or versatility.
Regarding storage, you will want for nothing, with a large main compartment featuring a divider as well as a concealed bank of PALS webbing for pouch attachment.
The main compartment can be completely unzipped and laid down turning the pack into an easy-access front loader when required.
A secondary compartment has the expected velcro field which allows you to modularly organize the interior with mating pouches or a holster for concealed carry.
The exterior of the pack gives nothing away in appearance, with no webbing and no tactical-looking design choices, just a couple of zipper pouches and a few pockets for commonly used or small items, and the lower section of the outside has a load-bearing panel that can allow you to hang larger or awkward items.
When it comes to retro trendy appeal, the Gypsy pack earns top marks while sacrificing nothing in regards to strength or storage. A winner!