mapping your neighborhood

Having the right resources in the right places is the essence of surviving and thriving. Disasters challenge that pleasant place. Proper planning includes mapping resources and features that may be useful to your community in emergencies.

Also valuable is placing on that map any threats you know of, along with potential avenues for likely threats. Obviously, so you can plan to minimize their negative impacts on your community.

This is a big topic that deserves thought, planning, organization from a handful of proactive, foresightful neighbors. While I can’t help you with that, I can point you to a couple of hugely valuable resources.

Samuel Culper publishing in Forward Observer offers A Primer on Tactical Intelligence Collection that is a prize if you are even considering preparing your neighborhood for emergencies. He also has numerous highly-rated training classes.

He defines both “Area Of Interest”, and “Area Of Operations” (AO). You will want a map including one of those, and some clever, trustworthy friends to add useful details to that map.

Great, customized maps are available from MyTopo.

I initially worked with their 1:25,000 scale map, but found it covered too much area with too little detail of the area we needed to define. I just reordered the key area on a 2′ x 3′ 1:10,000 map. I am confident we will like this a lot.

Your Mileage May Vary.

MyTopo has various scales you can choose from with the greatest detail in their 1:10,000 that I selected.
For a slightly larger AO, they have a 1:12,500. Stretch to fit the key area for your application.

As you will learn from Samuel Culper, putting the map on a board with clear overlays will also be useful.

Happy mapping

🙂