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Owning the ... preppers?
I'm often on youtube (guitar repair videos are soooo soothing) when the algorithm sends me down interesting rabbit holes.
The past few days it sent me to some videos of some rather extreme prepper types. It pays to be prepared, I'll admit (glances at her small hoard of pasta, juices and canned goods) but sometimes people go a little overboard.
The youtube channel was by a company that makes steel prefabricated underground bunkers - and they were showing off how bad their competitors were and some decommissioned commercial or military bunkers were up for sale.
Neither were handicap accessible I can tell you that.
The prefab bunkers they were looking at were fairly small - around 1500 square feet. You dig a big hole, drop the thing in then stock it. Cheap ones go for around a quarter million dollars so yeah, a rich person's game. The first thing that struck me was most of them were located 'off and gone' somewhere hours away from anything and anywhere.
Okay, isolation can be good... but in an emergency... can you get there? Or are you going to get stuck in traffic with everyone else running away?
Of course, this is one company's youtube so they like to slam their competitors... and with good reason. You drop a poorly designed and built hunk of metal into the ground and you get water leaks which leads to mold and mildew and other unhappy things. Your safe shelter will kill you... slowly.
Then there's the built in kitchen and electrical generators running on bottled propane. Ah... a sealed bunker with gas? That's a big old Nope. If there's a gas leak you're dead, if there's a gas leak and a spark you're explosively dead and open flames mean carbon dioxide and you're dead.
Ventilation intakes next to exhausts? Another big old Nope.
Your shelter has become your tomb. No amount of guns will save you.
I didn't see much about handling waste products... sewage treatment was glossed over. It won't help to have six months of food, water and large amounts of ammo if you don't have a good septic system. Having an underground shelter in places with tornadoes and other types of violent storms makes sense but if you need to drive for hours to get to your 'safe place' it doesn't.
They had water, they had food, they had guns... but I didn't see a single book.
The pandemic has shown me how we were prepared my household was for even a short term emergency. We had medical kits, flashlights and an outdoor grill to cook on - but not a lot of extra food. We're a little better now. The pandemic has also shown how interconnected we all are.
Survival *can't* be a 'rugged individual' type endeavor - societies have be built with redundancies, safe guards and back-up back-up systems.
This winter, Texas was caught with it's pants around it's legs because they failed to plan for the cold that would inevitably come. Wind turbines froze, gas lines froze, even nuclear plants had problems when their water cooling systems frozen Water pipes frozen and burst because they were located in uninsulated outside walls. Our hundred year old house has their water pipes in a pocket *inside* the house so they don't freeze. Building codes and practices are there *for a reason*. Yeah, it's 'harder' to build but you get building that last.
Even some of the preppers were caught flat footed when they had no power for their electric can openers and couldn't cook on their backyard fire pits that ran on piped natural gas. Ooops.
Planning for trouble on an individual level helps. Planning on societal levels helps *more*.
-m
The past few days it sent me to some videos of some rather extreme prepper types. It pays to be prepared, I'll admit (glances at her small hoard of pasta, juices and canned goods) but sometimes people go a little overboard.
The youtube channel was by a company that makes steel prefabricated underground bunkers - and they were showing off how bad their competitors were and some decommissioned commercial or military bunkers were up for sale.
Neither were handicap accessible I can tell you that.
The prefab bunkers they were looking at were fairly small - around 1500 square feet. You dig a big hole, drop the thing in then stock it. Cheap ones go for around a quarter million dollars so yeah, a rich person's game. The first thing that struck me was most of them were located 'off and gone' somewhere hours away from anything and anywhere.
Okay, isolation can be good... but in an emergency... can you get there? Or are you going to get stuck in traffic with everyone else running away?
Of course, this is one company's youtube so they like to slam their competitors... and with good reason. You drop a poorly designed and built hunk of metal into the ground and you get water leaks which leads to mold and mildew and other unhappy things. Your safe shelter will kill you... slowly.
Then there's the built in kitchen and electrical generators running on bottled propane. Ah... a sealed bunker with gas? That's a big old Nope. If there's a gas leak you're dead, if there's a gas leak and a spark you're explosively dead and open flames mean carbon dioxide and you're dead.
Ventilation intakes next to exhausts? Another big old Nope.
Your shelter has become your tomb. No amount of guns will save you.
I didn't see much about handling waste products... sewage treatment was glossed over. It won't help to have six months of food, water and large amounts of ammo if you don't have a good septic system. Having an underground shelter in places with tornadoes and other types of violent storms makes sense but if you need to drive for hours to get to your 'safe place' it doesn't.
They had water, they had food, they had guns... but I didn't see a single book.
The pandemic has shown me how we were prepared my household was for even a short term emergency. We had medical kits, flashlights and an outdoor grill to cook on - but not a lot of extra food. We're a little better now. The pandemic has also shown how interconnected we all are.
Survival *can't* be a 'rugged individual' type endeavor - societies have be built with redundancies, safe guards and back-up back-up systems.
This winter, Texas was caught with it's pants around it's legs because they failed to plan for the cold that would inevitably come. Wind turbines froze, gas lines froze, even nuclear plants had problems when their water cooling systems frozen Water pipes frozen and burst because they were located in uninsulated outside walls. Our hundred year old house has their water pipes in a pocket *inside* the house so they don't freeze. Building codes and practices are there *for a reason*. Yeah, it's 'harder' to build but you get building that last.
Even some of the preppers were caught flat footed when they had no power for their electric can openers and couldn't cook on their backyard fire pits that ran on piped natural gas. Ooops.
Planning for trouble on an individual level helps. Planning on societal levels helps *more*.
-m
no subject
Also, on your advice, glad my place already has hand-cranked can openers.
We're Preppers From Way Back
Although I was appalled by what happened in Tx, I was horrified by what some Texans considered 'prepping'. I hope they learned from their awful experience.
no subject
Excuse me while I choke on this strange gurgling noise coming up my throat which might be suppressed laughter.
*tsk-tsks about not having used one of those things in my own home since maybe 1993*