Vulnerability Assessment

The first thing that must be done to protect a home is to conduct a risk assessment to figure out the potential for threat in the designated neighborhood, vulnerability, and the possibility of consequences of risk occurrence. Three tools that are normally addressed when planning security for any home are: 1. What home security and safety risks are the most typical of the neighborhood for which the assessment is working and what would families be more exposed to? 2. How exposed are the neighborhood residents?

Have they taken the necessary precautions to prevent a disaster and to deter all threats? 3. How much could be lost if these precautions have been ignored? To answer the first question it is important to discover the types of crimes that have been committed in the neighborhood most recently. By asking fellow neighbors and local police crime prevention officers, statistics on most common crimes and how that particular neighborhood stacks up to others in the rest of the county can be found.

Once a list of possible threats has been established, checking the home for vulnerabilities that would leave it susceptible to a crime or an accident would be the next step in the process. After identifying the vulnerability to these potential threats, a vulnerability assessment on a residence may be conducted. A vulnerability assessment of a home as well as a list of countermeasures and their costs’ is what is required next. Focus on the different directions that potential threats may use and the avenues of approach that they will likely take to threaten property or the area surrounding property.

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There is a neighborhood watch program that is counted on to support additional observation and early warning. The signal for such a warning is slamming metal object to metal object in a series of three to alert the neighbors as a code to indicate direction and threat. You can better observe your surroundings from your roof or second story. Establishing an observation post/listening post (LP/OP) can be an effective way to gain a superior advantage gaining an elevated advantage in addition to limited access for potential attackers.

If your LP/OP has a covered and concealed approach and withdrawal route back to your house, then this would be an ideal location looking out for one another. You probably do not want to open your home to too many family or friends in case of disaster or attack because of the supply of food, ammunition, clean water, and toiletries. There are not many avenues of approach that threats can use in order for them to see straight into the neighborhood or directly to the house so the focus of mitigating this risk is centered around the front and back yards.

Place your landscaping like boulders, rock, gravel, trees, and vegetation as well as blinds or curtains can limit the amount of visibility that a threat has to see into your home. Loose gravel placed under the windows, broken windows, and doors will make noise and could possibly spook anyone from attempting a break in. There are not any covered or concealed routes for attackers on foot to approach your house undetected from, so if they did not use a frontal assault they would have to jump the fence in the backyard to try to gain entry through the back door.

The visibility from all windows downstairs is limited due to the landscape, but the upstairs has one hundred percent visibility 360 degrees around the entire house. Many dead zones (areas that you cannot see) due to the house being in a sub-division, but no brush will have to be cut down. Windows are easily broken, so keep yourself prepared for Hurricanes, tornadoes, other bad storms with ? to ? inch plywood cut for all windows with mounting hardware. The lighting that you have surrounding your house can have many uses.

Illuminating the areas of approach to your house can force intruders to look for a softer target, and it can also give you and your neighbors a better opportunity to give a more detailed description to police when they flee. Mounting your lights with easily re-moveable hardware like wing nuts will assist you if you ever have to relocate them to a more vulnerable part of your residence. Ballistic breaching is the act of using a shotgun to remove the deadbolts from doors, making it possible for attackers to breach the security of your home.

Think about installing manmade levers that can latch from the bottom of the door to the floor and the top of the door to the ceiling. This creates a major problem for any intruder because it forces them to stay in the fatal funnel for a longer period before entering your home. The fatal funnel is the area most dangerous for anyone trying to breach a room because it is the smallest area of any room. This creates a better opportunity for the homeowner to defend him or herself by being able to fire a weapons system into a smaller area, reducing the risk of missing the target.

The ability to defend your home with small arms does not come cheap. Probably the most expensive cost of any home security tool used is the money you will spend, not only on the fire arm itself, but also the ammunition as well. However, being able to shoot from your home is not as near important as it is for your home to withstand small arms fire. Most homes provide terrible cover (protection) from small arms fire. Aside from sand bagging or laying sheet steel on the walls around your windows, any containers that hold dirt would also do. Wargaming” is a term often used by the U. S. Army before every mission they conduct overseas. The best vulnerability assessment would come from you “wargaming” various situations based on the environment you live in, then develop countermeasures to mitigate the threats and weaknesses you have determined. Again, call it “wargaming” or whatever you will, but it is an effective way to look at contingencies and resources needed to implement better plans and countermeasures.

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