I have carried a fire extinguisher in my car for decades. A while back I bought a replacement at a hardware store sale. I was chatting to the woman on the checkout and she said that she couldn’t imagine fooling around with a fire extinguisher if her car was on fire. I said, “Neither can I. If my car catches fire I will get out and watch it burn from a safe distance. But if I am driving past you, in your burning car, you may appreciate me owning one.” She replied that she had never thought about that and promised to get herself one.
I have a first aid kit too that has only been used for one cut finger.
I do think this s a uniquely American phenomenon.
“If a burglar has a gun, I need to have one too, to defend myself.”
“It seems scumbags are carrying semi-automatics. A pistol won’t help. Better get an AR-15, just in case”
“Kids are being abducted left and right, I’m not going let my ten year old bike to school, I’ll drive them myself.”
“See what happened with Katrina. I can’t trust the government to keep me safe.”
And so on and so forth. It’s an ever escalating ‘arms race’ both in terms of actual weapons and also in preparedness for a perceived threat.
Some of those threats are real (Texas utility infrastructure, California Wildfires), others are ding-dong loco (Aliens want to probe my rectum). But all in all, as perceived from the outside, Americans seem to be scared of so very many things.
I’m going to pull a WAG out of my ass and say that ground zero for this is your flawed medical care/health insurance system.
The only two occasions I’ve heard about that window-breaking tool being used was the rescue an infant and a toddler left in a closed-up car on a hot summer day. Which may not have been the intended use, but was a use and arguably a life-saving one.
I argue that’s more of the problem - an excessive focus on one unlikely possibility while neglecting much more common and equally easily averted dangers.
Someone who keeps their spare tire and tire jack in the vehicle, who regularly check the operation of their smoke/CO detectors and has a window-breaking tool in the glove compartment is… very thorough, but not necessarily exercising flawed risk assessment.
Someone spending hundreds of dollars on, say, radiation detecting equipment, potassium iodide tables, and building a bunker under the backyard while refusing to get simple vaccinations against common diseases (flu, covid, etc.) would be an example of flawed risk assessment in my opinion.
After the IRA set off a huge explosion in the City of London in 1993, those who could, still went to work - crunching over the broken glass. My sister was one of them and the attitude was “We’re NOT going to let the buggers beat us.” The blitz spirit fifty years on.
Compare that to New York after 9/11 and you will get the general idea.
Points about international comparison of levels of stoicism notwithstanding, is it a good idea to compare these two events? I am English and I personally found 9/11 a bit more shocking than any terrorist attack that’s happened on our soil in my memory.
To be fair, so did I. Maybe it was because 9/11 took a while to play out, while the IRA explosion was over before we knew it.
Perhaps a better example would be what happened on the cruise around the Mediterranean that we took just at the start of the “Arab Spring”. This was on an American ship and the passengers would normally have been predominantly Americans.
We were scheduled for stops at Port Said and Alexandria and, presumably fearful of the situation, many Americans had cancelled and we Brits were offered bargain rates to fill the cabins. In the event, it was a memorable cruise for all the right reasons.
I think a comparison of the different national psyches (if there is such a thing) might be interesting, but it’s really difficult to eliminate nationalistic bias in this. A lot of people cite the ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ thing as an example of the British stiff upper lip, but if you think about it, it’s maybe an example of where people needed to be told what to do, rather than it coming naturally (you don’t need to put up posters everywhere exhorting ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ if you believe that’s what people will naturally do anyway)
I’m guessing you’re talking about the Bishopsgate bombing:
It happened on a Saturday, so the area was sparsely populated. On top of that, the IRA was thoughtful enough to phone in a 1-hour warning. In the end, the bomb broke a bunch of windows and killed…one reporter who had disregarded police warnings to stay away.
The bombing resulted in a lot of changes in London, both in terms of public security and in the level of disaster prep undertaken by businesses in London and elsewhere:
In contrast to a single bomb that broke some windows and killed one person, the 9/11 attacks leveled two of the largest and most iconic buildings in the world along with several others, and killed almost 3000 people - all on live broadcast television. The fourth jet, United Flight 93, would have been crashed into the US Capitol Building were it not for the heroic actions of the passengers on the plane.
In short, the scale of the 9/11 attacks and the security gaps they exposed were quite different from the Bishopgate bombing.
The security measures implemented in NYC and elsewhere in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 don’t seem terribly different to what happened after Bishopsgate, and most of them were temporary in nature:
Worth noting that the Keep Calm and Carry On posters were hardly used in WWII, in part because of exactly that concern:
This decision [to cut the first print run of the posters] can be partly attributed to changes in staff and responsibility as the MOI moved out of the shadows and into the glare of public attention. However it was also likely to have been influenced by an unease that had surrounded the slogan since its inception. The individual responsible for sanctioning expenditure at the Treasury had, for instance, expressed real fear that ‘the population might well resent having this poster crammed down their throats at every turn’ whilst Waterfield maintained that the slogan was ‘too commonplace to be inspiring’ and feared that ‘it may even annoy people that we should seem to doubt the steadiness of their nerves’.
Part of the difference is the fear messaging comes from the commercial media who care solely about attracting eyeballs. Whereas the “keep calm & carry on” sorts of messaging, whether Brit or US, comes from the government.
The former has a lot more reach than the latter in both countries. In the US in particular, the latter has a much harder time developing a catchy message that more than a small fraction of the populace won’t sneer at for ideological reasons.
Prepping for an upcoming global disaster, is, ironically, fun. Get the bullets, rice, and preserves etc., and we are golden. You feel safe. It might not be a risk assessment issue, but more of a life goal.
Airline travel, well that’s in the same bag as car travel. I’m OK with it if I’m driving. It might be a flawed risk assessment, but we won’t know until the end of the journey, will we?
Exactly. I’m not saying being prepared for the expected natural disasters wherever you live is a bad idea. Far from it, in fact. It’s the overlooking of obvious and clear risks that are likely to happen in favor of ones that are extremely unlikely, regardless of how dire the outcome.
And I used hyperbolic phrasing in my earlier posts- sorry about that. I know that people do indeed get mugged at gunpoint, and that there are people who die in flooded cars and other reasons to break windows. My point wasn’t that those things happen, but that going out of your way to have a window-breaking gizmo doesn’t make sense if you haven’t already made sure your flat tire and other automotive emergency prep is up to snuff. The likelihood of a flat tire or being stranded at night (flares, reflectors, working flashlights, etc…) is a LOT higher than the need for those window breaking hammers. If everything else is taken care of, then spend the $5- it’s not much money and doesn’t take up much space. But that should pretty much be the literal last thing that you worry about as an emergency preparedness thing for your car. That’s what I’m getting at.
Similarly, if you have a week or two’s worth of food, water storage containers, candles/battery lanterns, propane stove, etc… that’s probably all smart stuff to do for most people in most parts of the country (with regional variations depending on climate and expected disasters). But actually socking away Krugerrands and whiskey for post-apocalyptic currency? Only if your other stuff is all taken care of first, and even then it seems absurd to me. The odds of that sort of civilization collapse is, while non-zero, probably up there with being hit by a meteorite. Drink the whiskey and invest the money- you’re more than likely better off in the long haul, than squirreling it away in your basement.
The problem is that the hammer is acquired once, stowed in the car, and then nothing has to be done with it again unless it’s needed. Keeping the spare tire in good condition requires periodic checks, maintenance, and infrequently, replacement. It can be very easy to skip doing that for a few years, and then find the spare is low on air when it’s needed, but if the hammer was needed it would still be in place in the center console.
I think a more apt analogy is somebody getting a hammer, keeping emergency blankets and water in the car, and triple checking the spare tire, but refusing to wear a seat belt.
Check the batteries in your smoke detectors, people.
So the classic example of this to me (especially as when I ask about it to my fairly rational friends IRL, I amazed at how many make a dubious risk assessment) is the case of what to do when you break down on the hard shoulder of a major freeway.
The absolutely right answer is to get out of the car and off the hard shoulder, and behind the crash barrier (assuming you can do so safely without entering the carriageway, and there is a safe. fairly flat, verge off the freeway you can stand on, and its not -20F in a blizzard and you’re in shorts, etc.)
The risk of being struck from behind on the hard shoulder (particularly at night as sleepy drivers tend to drift into the outside “lane” even its actually the hard shoulder) far outweighs any other risk. But a lot of people will say they will stay in the car with the doors locked, because they are worried about being attacked by a stranger while waiting in the open. The chances of this happening are orders of magnitude less than being struck by another driver.
I find it interesting that one of the YouTube preppers I intermittently watch made a video about why he has ditched the bug out bag and stopped promoting them.
Ah, here it is - there’s a bit he does from his sponsor for the first minute you may or may not want to skip over. And he meanders a bit. It’s about 20 minutes long. He gets going on the main topic around 7:20 but still meanders.
TL : DR - BoB’s are of limited utility, especially for the average person, and for many/most situations. If you can stay put you’ll probably have more resources and (one hopes) be around people familiar to you to help you survive. Being alone on the road is dangerous.
There’s considerable overlap between being prepped for local hazards/natural disasters and at least the initial period of a social/economic collapse.
Frankly, if anything lasts longer than 3 months stockpiling isn’t going to do it, you need a network of other people to survive.
I have twice used one of my fire extinguishers to put out someone else’s fire. The second time it was a neighbor’s kitchen so in addition to saving their butt I saved my stuff, too.
For me, personally, I like to have a couple weeks worth of what’s needed to keep me going - food, water, etc. During covid my toilet paper stash turned out to be a very good thing (so much so I actually shared with others who were running out and could not easily resupply). While isolating with actual covid I had plenty to eat and drink at home and didn’t have to worry about running out of essentials. About 6 years ago the utilities were cut off from the building I lived in and I could “camp out” for a couple weeks between when that happened and I realized this was going to last more than a couple days and actually finding a new place to live. Having a fire extinguisher sure helped when the downstairs neighbor set her stove on fire. If money is tight for a week or two I can eat out of my pantry and not have to worry about going to the store.
I’m a very small scale prepper. It’s been useful often enough that I continue to do so, but like I said, anything longer than a couple weeks to a couple months requires an entirely different strategy than “stockpile stuff”. I don’t have a bunker and don’t expect I ever will. I don’t have room where I live for a year’s worth of food and water. I’m not going to survive alone if the zombie apocalypse occurs so I don’t plan for solo survival.
I have a firm knowledge that if true disaster strikes I might not survive. I can’t guarantee my survival (indeed, we all die in the end of one thing or another) so gearing up for the most likely problems makes the most sense, and as a bonus if you do that rationally you’ll also be ready for the most likely of the less likely events. Beyond that - I don’t have the money or resources to do more than that.
I once broke down on I-25 in downtown Denver on a motorcycle. It was at an area with about a 5 foot shoulder from the white line to a concrete wall. It was terrifying but I had no place to go. I knew what was wrong and had the tools to fix (it was a loose ground connection), but the few minutes it took scared the fucking shit out of me. I knew I was at risk of death and would do anything to get to safety.
The other aspect of breakdown dumbness is if someone is going to get out of their car to wait but can’t get on the other side of the crash barrier for whatever reason, should you stand upstream or downstream of your disabled car?
Lots of folks answer “Downstream; my car will protect me from oncoming traffic.”
My answer is “Upstream. You can see the oncoming cars better, run some to avoid one veering your way, and you’re a smaller target than your car is. If you’re downstream and they hit your car even a smidgen, they’ll shove it into you.”
This also applies at a national level, though perhaps not as extreme as the collapse part. Remember back to GWB’s administration and how the country was so focused on responding to terrorism, and then completely messed up the response to hurricane Katrina?
It was said at the time, and is very obvious in retrospect, that many of the preparations for say, a dirty bomb, a hurricane, a major earthquake, or flooding all overlap. More resources should have been put into FEMA’s ability to help displaced people, which are the results of all those events, which happen at smaller and larger scales all the time. Instead, resources were focused on spinning up DHS, TSA, and others to deal with terrorist attacks, which thankfully are incredibly rare for 9/11 scale events that require a nationally mobilized response.
Technically, you should buy a lottery ticket exactly once in your life, just so your odds of winning aren’t exactly zero. Every subsequent ticket will statistically be a loss.
I’d say that ground zero for this is the news media, which has an inherent interest in sensationalizing injuries and deaths- yet ironically enough not the ones so mundane (e.g. car accidents) that they are at most only locally newsworthy. To give only the most blatant example, one would think from news reports that the USA is in such a constant holocaust of firearms massacres that one might hardly dare step outdoors. Yet the truth is far more banal: depending on varying definitions used and incomplete statistics, somewhere between 38 and 513 people died in mass shootings in the USA in 2020.
One thing one has to remember is the continental scale of the USA, which means something sensational happens somewhere in the USA almost every day. For comparison, online references give the UK as approximately 242,000 km² and 67 million people. Discounting the unrepresentatively large and empty state of Alaska, the other 49 states are approximately 8,100,000 km² and 331 million people. Five times the population and thirty-two times the area.
