KNOWING THE ROPES
In your overall plan for preparedness, you may not have considered getting out of an elevated area. However, height, like most other environmental factors, doesn’t discriminate. If there’s no other viable option, you may need to descend a tall building or structure, whether you’re hunting on an elevated platform or just at home or work. Though the differences seem great, the principles and most of the equipment are very similar. Putting aside experience level and environment, bailout systems can be easily added to your personal preparedness plan.
The environments in which we live and our individual experiences differ greatly, giving us widely varied ideas of the potential threats we anticipate in our lives. Consequently, we’ll each have different measures to achieve what we deem to be a safe level of preparedness. Since there isn’t a “one size fits all” approach to any plan, including this one, your first step should be to identify the gap between your current capabilities and where you’d like to be to feel comfortable in your perceived “worst-case scenario.”
Most of us have already adopted things like wilderness survival kits, first-aid kits, and concealed carry weapons, as logical and effective methods to manage risk. What types of risk are those items managing? Physical threats, massive trauma, protection against environmental factors. A bailout kit also helps manage environmental factors by enabling you to rapidly evacuate a structure at height (such as a multistory building or high-angle terrain).
Let’s look at commercially available kits to see how they’re put together and why that should matter to you. The most popular kits have been developed based on the needs of the groups who use them most frequently to manage the potential risk in their operating environments — primarily fire departments and military units. Most bailout kits currently available were designed for scenarios that probably don’t match what you might encounter as
