Lessons from a disaster pt5: Carried gear

Lessons from a disaster pt5: Carried gear

Pictured is the only kit I actually wore while doing disaster work all weekend.


This is an @awsgear snack pack, along with 2 @arborarms 16oz nalgene pouches.

Medical: While working with chainsaws you do have a fair amount of risk to injury. The front pocket of this pack houses my IFAK and you can see the TQ across the bottom of the pack.

Radio: The tornado knocked out the main cell tower covering this area. Cell phones occasionally worked, but couldn't really be counted on. To coordinate response of our team of 10-30 people we used radios. Ear pieces, or radios routed to hearing protection was critical to hear radio traffic over the noise of chainsaws. This was kept in one of the arbor arms pouches

Firearm: I found running chainsaws and lifting and maneuvering heavy pieces of trees uncomfortable and prone to brandishing with a firearm on my midline. I kept my sidecar 2.0 with extra mag in the main body of this pack.

Water: Roads were often congested and we had to hike in to many areas on foot. Having water on your person was critical. The arbor arms pouch was a great way to secure and carry water while in the field.

Food/liquid IV: In the back pocket of the snack pack I kept caffeine packets, a quest bar, and some liquid IV packets. We would often find or have cases of water dropped off to us, but keeping the crushing caffeine addiction and electrolytes up was key. We would often work through meals so having some option for food was a good idea.

Gloves: Working with nails, trees, and glass; gloves were a key piece of ppe. I wore this pair of @magpul patrol gloves with leather palms. Many others in my group were wearing mechanix gloves. Any time I needed to remove them for extra dexterity I made sure to put them back onto the ITW grimlok I keep on my bag so I didn't misplace them.

Overall I was really happy with this layout and loadout while in the field. It let me easily carry everything I needed on my person, and it looked very "normal" while working with a number of different groups.

If you don't already have a solution for something like this in a disaster I would highly suggest looking into it.
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