It’s possible for something to be “worth it”, even if it ultimately isn’t necessary. Take health insurance, for example. If you have health insurance and are lucky enough to get cancer, obviously you’ll start pumping your fists with joy that your insurance plan is going to pay off so well.
But if you have insurance for 50 years and never get so much as a sniffle, would you say it wasn’t “worth it”? You might look back and say it was worth every penny to be covered just in case.
On the other hand if you spend $20 million building a private cancer center just in case you get cancer, and never get sick, you might think it wasn’t worth it.
For emergency preparation, storing food, water, medication, making other reasonable plans seems a lot more like keeping an insurance policy. Building a zombie-proof bunker seems more like overkill.
Well, you get the best chance ever to say “See? I told you so!”
Then you’ll get killed by the ravenous hoards, true, but at least you get to show them that you were right. And that’s what is really important to some people.
Well, after cleaning out my grandmother’s basement which contained a metric shit-ton of years-expired food, god-knows-how-old jugs of water, can openers, and other various dollar store crap that she’d been stockpiling for the hypothetical apocalypse…I’m going to say No. Not worth it.
An “Emergency Preparedness Kit” is worth it. Stockpiling your basement full of food that ended up being wasted? No.
It was absolutely heartbreaking to have to throw all that food out.
Was his generator really for the entire house? What you really need is to keep just one room habitable. Tack blankets on the wall and pile a bunch of people into a smallish room and body heat alone will suffice to keep it above freezing in most cases. Maybe power a smallrefrigerator (good during warm-weather emergencies) or a single light or fan or something of the sort.
I’ve known preppers who amass all sorts of documentation like first aid manuals and survival camping books… in e-format. No, no, no, you need that on PAPER! In a real volcanozombaflupocalyse the power goes out. Sure, you’ll probably have the occasional battery or stand-alone generator but you need to be able to manage without electricity. That applies even to short-term disasters, much less TEOTWAWKI.
My personal feeling is that having a stockpile for 1-2 weeks (maybe 3) is sufficient and if the Big Emergency lasts longer than that then what you need is a different survival strategy than simply sitting in a bunker and eating out of a tin.
Having food and water in the house and fuel in the vehicles is the biggest thing with me. When we had the tornado go through the neighborhood in 2008 power was out for awhile but between stockpiles and a campstove we ate decently. The annoying thing was flushing the toilets - we have a well and with no power we have no water delivery to the building. I almost went to the 5-gallon-bucket-with-hefty-bag system but we had sufficient rainwater to flush the toilets after Brown Events so it was OK.
The other thing people overlook is entertainment. Once the initial excitement is over there’s often quite a lot of sitting around and you’ll be better off with something to do. A deck of cards, a treebook, knitting project… all very useful. I sure hope all those bunker-dwellers have given some thought to that.
Well part of the thing with preppers is to not tell anyone about what you have. There was this one episode of “The Twilight Zone” where this one family had spend money on a bomb shelter, much to the ridicule of their neighbors. Then suddenly things went down and the neighbors all wanted in. They ended up breaking down his bunker door, then everyone else in town heard about it and wanted in… turned out to be a false alarm.
Thats another thing. Could one handle it if friends, relatives, and loved ones showed up demanding entrance and you had to leave them to die? Could you handle it?
I think some amount of prepping is a good idea. When I lived in California, I took a six-Saturday course to become a member of the local Community Emergency Response Team. Got a free Red Cross first aid/CPR certificate, a backpack with survival goodies, a hard hat, and a reflective vest out of it. The first thing the instructor - a trainer with the local municipal fire department - said was “if there is a disaster, we [meaning fire, police, EMS, et cetera] ain’t coming. We’ll be down at the nuclear power plant making sure the survivors don’t glow in the dark.”
That was a useful course - basic first aid, triage (fascinating but depressing), extremely basic search and rescue, how to use a fire extinguisher, how to check for gas leaks, how to deal with downed power lines, and what you need to keep on hand for a disaster.
I read a book on survivalist prep by a guy who lives the life 24/7. He did two-week living-off-the-land workshops and told a story about a class of ten people. Eight of them were prepper nuts, all men, all over forty, and the first night they mercilessly teased the other two, a single mother and her daughter. The next morning, out in the wild, all eight men were in severe caffeine and nicotine withdrawal, and since they were living off the land, and none of them had brought aspirin for their withdrawal headaches, let alone nicotine patches, they were completely useless.
I suspect that a lot of preppers are doing it for reasons other than what they stated, especially if they don’t take into consideration what substances they are physically addicted to and won’t be able to get on a reliable basis when society collapses.
Maybe it’s been mentioned and I missed it, but what about the Mormons, who believe in keeping a year’s worth of food on hand? They, however, rotate their stock so it doesn’t get wasted.
I watched several episodes of “Doomsday Preppers” and the saddest ones were the people who were so obsessed with prepping, they weren’t taking proper care of themselves and their families right now. I also wondered if some of them were trying to precipitate a disaster, so they could say some variation of “Told ya so.”
The very first person profiled on NatGeo weighed over 400 pounds and was clearly on the show primarily to find a benefactor who would pay for his bariatric surgery. Not long after the show aired, his guns were confiscated and he was declared incompetent by a court after (among other things) expressing suicidal ideation to his doctor.
I post on another website that has a small but very militant group of people who do exactly this, and some of them are scary. Some of them have even been contacted by law enforcement because of some of the things they have said about Obama and the current government administration! :eek: I’m talking about people who do things like homeschool their children because they don’t want outsiders finding out about their huge unlicensed arsenals.
Some sorts of preparation are useful even if you don’t have a disaster. Stockpiling food, for instance: What you do is, whenever there’s a good sale on some nonperishable food, you buy a whole bunch of it and store it. The next week when something else is on sale, you buy that. Then, you eat it as normal. If a disaster does happen to come, you’ve got a lot of food on hand… But in the meanwhile, you’re still paying less for your food.
And then, even among disasters, there are many different sorts of disasters. Really big disasters like dino-killer asteroids or zombie apocalypses are quite rare, but smaller disasters like a burst pipe or a flat tire are much more common. And preparing for one sort will often also involve preparing for the other.
Here’s a tip: stockpile distilled water. It sells for the same price per gallon as regular water, is perfectly drinkable, is useful for things like car radiators; and most importantly, because it contains no dissolved solids at all, bacteria and mold won’t grow in it, especially if kept sealed. A gallon jug of distilled water will last virtually forever.
Ugh, yes, please rotate your stuff if it can spoil. I probably have enough food for a solid month* (between standard canned goods and dehydrated “emergency food”), not nearly as much water as I should, and a good supply of serious first aid gear, medications for us and our pets, etc. Probably 3 months’ worth of pet food.
Stockpiling stuff and then letting it go to waste is not only stupid and wasteful, it may leave you less prepared for a real emergency because you’re complacent - only to discover you’re in a bad situation due to the expired/damaged supplies.
And yes, count me among those who believes in preparing for taking care of my family during a disaster/extended power outage/whatever when government and charitable resources will be stretched thin. As fun as the CDC’s “zombie apocalypse prep” materials are, I think it’s silly to be prepared for TEOTWAWKI-type events (and those CDC materials don’t go that far, BTW).
Unless you’re a crazy overbuyer or experienced in preparing for disaster, you almost certainly have less food than you think, at least in terms of edible, nutritious food with sufficient calories that you would have the means to prepare. Remember that in some disaster you probably won’t have power for your fridge, your freezer. Not only will those foods spoil soon, leftovers from your meals will go bad fast too.
Let’s assume we’re not talking about the basic level of preparedness any household should have - some non-perishable food, flashlights, batteries, a radio, water, first aid kid etc., that would get you though a natural disaster or power outage of up to a week or two. We’re talking bunkers. Long term.
No, it’s not worth it, because there is a very, very high likelihood you will fail miserably. Show me any survivalist plan and I’ll poke a million holes in it. Planning how you are going to stay alive for a long period of time is like any other long term plan; it’s going to fall apart as events change your needs. But a bunker-survivalist plan is by definition a plan that can’t be changed much - you’re stuck in the bunker with what you have, and if what you have is insufficient or not suitable to the disaster, you die.
You may not be prepared for the correct type of disaster - a supervolcano eruption requires different pre from a nuclear war, which is different from civil disorder, which is different from a plague, and so on. So depending on what you’re prepping for you could be dead in the first three days because it’s not the catastrophe you were planning on.
And your needs in the bunker are not that easily anticipated because you do not know for sure what you will need. Sure, sure, you need food and drink. What happens if your concrete bunker springs a water leak due to the way water pools around the outside and it starts filling up with stinky water every time it rains? Did you bring professional grade foundation grout? I bet you didn’t, so now you’re ankle deep in water and there’s black mold and you die. Nice job. Okay, how about medicine? Do you know how many different kinds of medicine you might need? You can’t stock it all. You have guns? Terrific, but what if what you need were respirators? You’re dead.
No private individual is going to have the means or the knowledge to be genuinely prepared to survive long term completely independently. They’re wasting their money buying an insurance policy that won’t pay out.
I participate on another board that has a survivalist sub-forum that is pretty fascinating to read. One of the guys there intentionally poisons some of his own canned food. He puts strange hieroglyphics on top of each jar and can tell which ones are poisoned. It’s mind-bogglingly insane, but gives a glimpse of the mind-set.
I agree with RickJay above. We keep probably a little more than the basics around, but there’s no way to prep for everything. If it’s a massive failure of the infrastructure of our country, we’ll die with the rest. Also agree with phouka, I took the CERT training and it was great.
I figure that if there is a TEOTWAKI event, and I survive that to be even able to bug out, the odds are near astronomical that I’d survive longer than a year. A guy on foot with a decent weapon set of his choosing and a well stocked backpack will be able to carry at most 5 days of food at 2000 Calories a day, and my strategy would be to avoid people at all costs.
I have no hideout location, and I’m diabetic. I’d die either by a bullet or my health issues soon enough. Prepping for bunker survival in my case is foolhardy and worthlessly expensive now.
As far as skills, I’m a retired volunteer fireman and EMT. That will help.
There are people for whom prepping is a hobby - they’re the sorts who’ll go wilderness/survival camping and have a 3 month supply of MRE’s and practice at the firing range, but they aren’t bankrupting themselves with underground bunkers they can’t really afford. It’s no crazier than, say, Society for Creative Anachronism (which might actually be more useful for the long term rebuilding of civilization) or people re-enact historical battles in period costume.
And really, part of the problem here is simple stockpiling with nothing else. As noted, you need to rotate your stored foods to avoid spoilage. (The Mormons really do seem to have a solid grasp of the food storage thing.) It also allows you to practice using those foods and turning them into something you’d actually want to eat. I know people with emergency cooking equipment who have never actually tried to use it - when I got a flint and steel I actually lit my home-made hobo-stove with it a few times to make sure I had the hang of it. I despise pre-made first aid kits because they seem woefully inadequate and, hey, some of that stuff should be checked and/or rotated on a regular basis, too. I keep extra dry socks, footwear, and gloves in the car all winter having learned the hard way why Wet Boots Are Extremely Bad. People will stockpile clothing but not a sewing kit - what? They don’t consider double-duty items (sewing kits and tampons have use both for mending clothes and menstrual periods AND they can sew up wounds and soak up/make pressure bandages for severe injuries, for example. Add some fishhooks to a heavy duty sewing kit you have a crude fishing rig. And so on.) If you have fantasies about shooting game to eat in the Great Aftermath you should be a hunter in this reality right now so you can deal with the learning curve when failure doesn’t mean real starvation. (That includes combining a sewing kit and fishhooks for a little practice before the zombie outbreak.)
It’s not enough to simply pile stuff up, you have to know how to use it just like you need to actually have the occasional fire drill.
