Thanks for the ideas, I already have a 5 month supply of food, water, med kit and a lot of other useful supplies, also have a 5 month sanitation problem solved if we decide to bug-in, I have solar flare warning app on my phone and other emergency warnings. I'm a winter camper, so have all the supplies + -15C sleeping bags. I have 2 stoves for heat and cooking + fuel and a lot of insulation material (many yards of thick fleece) that I can sew what ever I want or just cover the floors.. I'm definitely prepping for Winter and bugging-in but I really want to solve our lack of bug-out place.
I just don't feel safe at our cottage if something happens, I'd be willing to nail the huge glass windows with wood but the neighbours... I don't know.
If your name actually points to where you're living, we probably live in very close proximity to each other, perhaps minutes away. My family used to have a cottage just off a lake about an hour and a half to the north (since torn down, but I'm hoping that I'be able to rebuild there sometime within the next couple of years).
Potential Threats:
The 1979 Mississauga train derailment (just west of Toronto for any Americans reading this) resulted in the largest peacetime evactuation in N. America before Hurricane Katrina (over 200 000 people at the spur of the moment in the middle of the night). To the east of the city, the Pickering Nuclear Power Station would pose the single biggest known threat in the event of a meltdown, though thankfully the prevailing winds are generally from the west.
The city was also out of power for about two to three days (depending on where you lived) in the 2003 blackout. Given a "perfect storm" scenario, we could also have something like the 1998 Montreal Ice Storm hit here, leaving large parts of the city without power for days in the middle of the winter.
Downtown, we have a very thick concentration of glass sided condos and office towers. That would be an awful place to get stuck in during a major power outage, but probably constitutes the area most likely to suffer from a terrorist attack. Just one large conventional bomb could cause a world of hurt, and a dirty bomb would cause utter mayhem even if it was relatively benign. I would hate to imagine the evacuation plan for the downtown core!
Whether you're downtown or not, evacuating the city for whatever reason is probably the greatest challenge. In one simulated exercise about two years ago, I am told that people would have died evacuating if the scenario they were playing out happened in real life. And if you know the main routes north of the city, you'd probably recognize a couple of bottlenecks on the way to cottage country.
I'm not convinced that you should be losing much sleep over your neighbours up north, since for the most part the area might get flooded with the families of middle class professionals who own or are related to cottagers should an evacuation of the city ever happen. I wish I could say that they'd be better prepared, but I doubt that more than 10-15% of the people who own cottages would even own basic hunting guns and have difficulty imagining the people who'd initially flood the area providing the nucleus of armed gangs and looters. And while there are some depressed areas in the city to the south, the overall poverty and crime is still a fraction of what you'd find in most American cities of comparable size, so I find it difficult to imagine large numbers of violent gangsters from the city flooding the area to prey upon the ill prepared. Perhaps things would change in a worst case, long term scenario, but that wouldn't happen overnight and should afford additional time to prepare.
As for my priorities, I'd say that having decent BOBs for an unexpected evacuation of the city would be a Godsend if you ever needed it, as well as familiarizing yourself with several routes out of the city and perhaps along the highways and sideroads to the North should you want to make your way to the cottage. If you need to shelter in place, I'm pretty sure that you can figure out how to remain reasonably comfortable for quite a while even if electrical power and the weather become an issue.
Having the cottage already places you at a great advantage to over 90% of the population, and your other preps put you in the top fractions of a percent! Even the worst case scenarios I've looked at for a major solar event (frying the electrical grid of most of the US East Coast and much of southern Canada) would probably only extend northwards to somewhere between Orillia and Muskoka, so your cottage might even be spared from that kind of catastrophe. Slowly working away on making the cottage more resiliant (i.e. wood stoves, generators, solar energy, learning about what kinds of fish and game you could realistically harvest in decent numbers during an extended stay, possibilities for gardening you're not sitting on granite, etc) could probably be a fun an interesting way to enhance the property and enjoy it in the process. but I'd approach that with a spirit of enthusiasm rather than fear.
Perhaps you might want to learn some alternative ways of communicating (i.e. HAM radio) and think of ways to be able to stay apprised of things in an emergeny where more conventional communications could fail. You could work that into plans to keep in contact with closest friends and relatives and and possibly coordinate their evacuations and or mutual assistance.
Those are my first thoughts on the scenario you've portayed.
Canadian Prepper
PS. I'm currently studying disaster and emergency management and could probably dig up more info or clarify further if you feel that it would be of help.
