I'm a prepper, he's a prepper, she's a prepper...

"... we're a prepper, wouldn'tcha like to be a prepper too!!"



the idea of "prepping" has been totally mocked and destroyed by tv.

about a month ago, some major storms hit, and my house was without power for over 24 hours. not a big compared to most "disaster" scenarios, except for when you have premie one month old and you're in the ball-sweat heat of a south texas summer. a large gas generator fixed the problem, and i now know that not only can it keep the house a "comfortable" 78 degrees when outside is above 100, but also it can handle my fridge as well and save all that precious meat. it was something i should have purchased a long time ago. those few hundred bucks were some of the best i've ever spent, even if i only use it maybe twice a year.

fast forward to now: i have just surpassed 48 hours without running water (our well/pump broke, there's a leak somewhere, and yes people are actively trying to fix it). fortunately, we have also three now-invaluable assets: a brita filter, several trash cans, and a creek. as soon as the well went out, i went to the creek and filled up the trash cans. we pour that water into our toilets to "flush" them, and we run that water through the brita filter in order to wash dishes and baby bottles. bottled water is our drink of choice.... so we're not in a bad place per-se, but i'm also considering a rain water harvesting system as a backup just because this experience has shown me how vulnerable we are.

focus: modern-day prepping. i'm not talking the extremist "getting ready for zombies" crap. i'm talking about the realistic disasters everyone has to deal with, like hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, power outages, in-laws, etc. what do you do to prep, and why?

alt. focus: the "prepping" culture, as-seen-on-tv. agree with it or disagree? why and on what points? think any of it has any shred of potential? is tv just making fun of extremists crazy people, or is there actually something to the idea of prepping for [name your favorite] fallout?

 

prepping culture is no different than those people who believe the religious apocalypse is coming tomorrow. they haven't been right once so far, and its not likely they'll be right tomorrow.

 

are you boiling the water before you run it through the filter? a brita isn't going to filter out the stuff that can make you sick. it just remove chemicals and minerals to improve taste. if you really want something on hand for this type of situation you should get a larger camping water filtration system. you could probably make it a month with one of those before you need to replace the filter. in this situation boiling is the simplest solution though.

 

my uncle bought into that y2k shit. he purchased some survivor kit from a mail order company. 50 pounds of powdered meat, 25 pounds of dried apples, palettes of canned vegetables later, come 2005 every time i went to visit i'd still be getting a bag of dried apple slices to take home for pies. i think he chucked the meat because it was fucking disgusting. this was an otherwise completely reasonable, sane, pragmatic man. but the media buffoonery made him lose his mind.

during the 2004-2005 hurricane season my prepping was thusly: 15 gallons of bottled water, 12 pack of guinness, hot dogs. everyone cleaned out the stores like the end of the world was nigh for a level 2 storm. worst case scenario your street is flooded for a few days, and your roof is toast. day after the storm, the generators went on and it was business as normal until all the power lines went back up two weeks later.

the prepper people, weird bunch. it's like they're hoping civilization ends just so their "training" doesn't go to waste. or they finally have carte blanche to shoot someone. by all means, stock pile. it's great for business. why they have their own shows is what's curious. you just showed the entire world you're a paranoid nutbar at best and in the event of a tragedy they all know whose house to rob. bit counter-intuitive there, buddy. for otherwise insulated people, they sure love the attention.

 

what i find most interesting about preppers is the assumption that their supposedly well thought out plans will work. i know for a fact everything i've done the first time i've not done expertly and yes, that includes losing my virginity. i can only assume the vast majority of preppers will have their plans fail catastrophically. i imagine planning for failure than raiding other people would work best.

 

i live 30 minutes south of toledo, who was fortunate enough to make the country wide news with tales of its water. thankfully i live far enough way we don't get our water from there. apparently whatever was creeping through toledo water was so bad that boiling it actually made it worse. they've gotten the all clear for drinking and using but i buy bottled water when i'm up there and just wipe my hands on my pants.

everyone is acting as if everything is fine now but how can you not be thinking of the apocalypse when the water gets worse when it's boiled? scary stuff.

 

i own firearms and know how to use them, if a true doomsday event happens then i'll take what i need from city folk.

 

i imagine he should stay away from the inner city, seems he might be out gunned there. go to suburbia, much softer, well off targets.

fuck college towns, kids don't have money, their parents do. i want a nice suburban town thats full of surbaru's and audi's. a place where they don't believe in a firearms, and preferably, a place where they don't believe in the stock market and keep cash in the house. if the apocalypse comes, i'm heading up to boulder.

 

the snow storm preppers are the ones that crack me up. a couple of times i've made the mistake of going grocery shopping just before a blizzard is about to set in. fucking people hoarding bread and milk like the icbm's just launched. and what the fuck is with bread and milk, anyway? what are you gonna make with that? i have visions in my head of these people huddled in their dark homes eating plain slices of bread and washing it down with milk. i'm not sure what they're planning for, because the worst blizzard i've ever seen left 20 foot tall snow drifts and it only kept us at home for about 30 hours before the plow went by. besides that, we lived 15 miles out in the country.

 

i live walking distance from a hospital, in a country where cops are basically the only people with guns. my prepping consists of a shelf full of booze, a first aid kit with some stuff i don't care about to apply pressure to any serious wounds, some bottles of water and a battery charger for my phone.

in the event of the zombie appocalypse - fuck it - use me as food. i dont want to live in a world without candy crush, where manual labor is a requirement to live. if i can't talk to people, or at a pinch fix computers for a living, i'm fine with checking out early.

 

yea, that's why you need to give it some sort of dress rehearsal. not saying you need to conduct quarterly dress rehearsals, but if nothing else, take the bugout bag you've put together and try either camping out of it or at least spending a weekend at a random hotel with nothing but it. you'd be amazed at what you'll find you wish you would've brought and crap you did bring that was a waste of time and effort.

i wouldn't call myself a prepper, but between growing up rural where power outages, etc were normal, scouts and military survival school i guess others might. i keep about ~20 gallons of water stored at my condo and a few waterbob bags plus in addition to the normal stock of canned/dried goods i have on hand i also have several days of freeze dried camp food on hand. i backwoods camp often enough that it's rotated on a regular basis. the shit has a ten year shelf life and i've found it's easier to have it already bought and ready for a last minute camping trip than needing to run out and buy random shit last minute.

i also keep a bugout bag at my place and another 'oh shit' bag in my truck with everything from comfortable walking shoes to basic medical, food, and shelter supplies in them. i've game planned what types of emergencies would drive me to evacuate the city, or hunker down in place and if i needed to. i can be out the door on my way with a bag, weapon/ammo, etc in under 10 minutes or have my place secured until the initial panic/calamity has either passed over or stabilized enough where its safer to evacuate the city.

fuck...maybe i am a prepper?

 

we all remember sandy




the reality is that this was a storm large in size but smaller in intensity. you remember what it did to the ny metropolitan area. gas shortages, power was out for a long time, areas destroyed, no food on the shelves in certain areas. all because of a tropical storm. the most unfortunate part of this were the people who were caught flat-footed. in general, it is estimated that people don't keep but 10 days worth of food in their homes, in many cases, people couldn't survive 48 hours in their homes based on the essentials they keep.

now, we are fortunate, we live in a place and time where things have never been better. you flick one switch and lights come on, you flick another switch and the heat comes on. you turn a knob and clean, potable water comes from a spigot. you walk down a block and there is medical treatment and food, goods and services to be purchased with pieces of paper that hold a notional value. that hasn't always been the case. as the video above shows and accounts from hurricane sandy point to, from time to time we get glimpses of what life could be like if something went wrong.

i don't consider myself a prepper, i would say i am keenly aware of how fragile the system we live under is and that there is a very real possibility that at some time during my lifetime this system could falter or even collapse in localized areas or for periods of time.... look at new orleans during katrina, that was a full-on collapse. more than anything, i like to learn. i like to learn about the way things used to be done. how the average farmer could perform rudimentary medicine on himself as well as his livestock. he could prepare a harvest and make it last through the winter, he knew how to hunt and butcher animals as well. i find a lot of the stuff interesting and some of those skills, skills that the average person has understandably lost because they no longer need them on a day-to-day basis, to be more interesting than reading some of the other topics others are interested in.

i also find it entertaining to watch real preppers in action. there are a lot of crazies out there. expending all of your resources to prepare for a certain type of disaster is not much better than no preparation at all. what makes it worse is going on tv and broadcasting your preparations to others. it just invites trouble.

 

we were without power for 9 days. honestly, given that we live in suburban/rural nj, it wasn't too bad at first, until the weather started to get cold the last couple of days (snow on day 9). we've responded by installing a whole house generator. it powers literally the whole house, turns on automatically after 30 seconds of power outage, and is run off our natural gas line. we are up on a hill, so floodng and its issues won't disrupt our gas service, like it did along coastal nj during sandy. barring something completely catastrophic that would end society as we know it, we should be just fine for any future disasters, natural or manmade.

we also camp regularly, so we have our supplies for roughing it, if we have to. i've also stocked up on water and canned/freeze dried food, enough for about a week.

and of course, every week i make sure there is at least a case or two of beer in the house and the bar is completely stocked. #priorities.

 

i think the majority if these people are kooks. my god, i remember the y2k faux-panic like yesterday: idiots running around stocking up on water, pork n' beans and cheese whiz so they could stay alive until the beginning of march in a darkened cellar eventually drinking their own recycled pee. thanks but no thanks, you'll find me with the cool kids in thunderdome.

you should have an "emergency kit" for the trunk of your car and your house, but once you're buying the withstandinator you're approaching the weirdo zone.

 

i'm always most shocked by the fact people didn't already have 2-3 days of food at their homes.

 

i wouldn't call us preppers but we do have about 2 weeks worth of water and canned goods in our storage room. we also have a nice little stockpile of guns and ammo to defend ourselves or hunt game, if we need to. we have a first aid kit but we've let it get low on basic stuff.

my truck... i'm prepared for just about anything. i have ropes, first aid kit, tools (wrenches, screwdrivers. etc.), recovery tools, fire starters, extra ammo/magazines for my carry gun. i have extra clothing, a rain suit, boots, gloves & blankets in there as well.

i would like to thank sweet baby jesus for the inventors of under seat storage and tonneau covers, otherwise my crew cab truck would pretty much be a regular cab truck.

 

i think most people do have a few days of food around. even if it is the day before payday, most folks can usually scrape up a couple of days worth of food from what's hiding in the freezer, fridge and cabinets. some leftover cereal here, freezer burned chicken legs there, a can of corn, it all adds up.

speaking perosnally, i've probably got 3 to 7 days (or more if i ration) from what i'd consider "rotating stock" of pasta, sauce, cereal, pop tarts, tuna, etc. the 2 weeks or so of food i've laid in is above and beyond that normal excess.