What is “prepping” and is it for me?

What is “prepping” and is it for me?

Greg Wilburn

Oftentimes, friends, family and referrals ask me how to get started in prepping.  Before answering, I always dig into why they feel the need to “prep”.  What usually happens is a discovery of some life event or of some exposure to information, which has that person concerned that we are at a tipping point, the beginning of TEOTWAWKI or “The End of the World as We Know It”.

The first priority is to talk them off of the ledge and to point out that in recorded history, we have not faced a true lights-out scenario, either globally or even nationally.  Yes, we have faced economic civil unrest, foreign invasion, despot rulers, and even pandemic scenarios, which have disrupted, and even severely disrupted, daily societal life; but we have not experienced a scenario where mass chaos sends us back into the dark ages.      

Once that is out of the way, the next talking point is to address government conspiracy theories and its impact on how one should prep.  There are the “truthers”, “birthers”, “the UN has 368K troops in the US”, and of course “Obama is a foreign agent”, etc., etc., etc.  None of these things have anything to do with prepping, what skills to learn or gear to buy, yet they do have one thing in common.  Nobody can provide any proof…none, zilch, nada.  That isn’t to say that they can’t be true or that they aren’t true, it’s just that it is irrelevant to the Organized Prepper.

The first real topic about prepping is to define the types of events to prepare for, the scale of potential events, and how these two variables affect someone’s planning and response.  The most common event type which people should prepare for are natural disasters.  Statistically, we are much more likely to face a natural disaster, either locally or regionally.  Recent examples are easy to come by. Katrina, Sandy, Arizona fires, Colorado floods, Oklahoma tornados, Florida hurricanes, California earthquakes, and the list really does go on.  Losing power at the worst possible moment can mean the difference between life and death.  The full list of variables are:

• Scale of Event
  • Local
  • Regional
  • National
  • Global
• Disaster Types
  • Natural Disaster
    • Tornado
    • Hurricane
    • Snow/Ice
    • Flood
    • Tsunami
    • Fire
  • Astrological
    • Solar Flares
    • Asteroid/Meteor
  • Terrorist
    • Nuclear/Radiological
    • Biological
    • Chemical
    • EMP
    • Pandemic
    • Conventional explosive
  • Industrial Accident
    • Chemical
    • Biological
    • Nuclear/Radiological
    • Explosive
  • Civil Unrest
  • Economic Collapse
  • War
  • Pandemic

The average big box supermarket has 2-3 days worth of food on the shelf, but that doesn’t account for emergency shopping due to a disaster, where the store usually has about 6-12 hours worth of essentials.  The skills, plans, and gear needed to survive one event are very similar to what is needed to survive other events.

Next on the priority list is setting realistic expectations on surviving a real “Sh** Hits The Fan” (SHTF), apocalyptic, TEOTWAWKI event.  Hollywood has done a wonderful job of portraying the romantic notion of the hero saving the day but a horrendous job of illustrating the seriousness and lethality of true survival scenarios, with very few exceptions.  (More on this later.)  If we ever find ourselves in a true large-scale disaster, access to food and water, or lack thereof, will cause major problems for a large portion of the population.  Having 12 weeks of food and a way to get clean water is highly recommended to increasing your odds of survival.  The Japanese Fukushima nuclear event clearly illustrated how one event, the tsunami, can cause an industrial accident, the Fukushima nuclear meltdown, and how it can affect a local population where access to food and water was a real issue.  Survival is predicated on your level of preparedness, which requires training, supplies, equipment, and prior planning.  Without hard work and a good plan, the ability to survive is greatly reduced.

Once the basic idea of food and water storage is covered, the discussion turns to the last two major topics, skill development and gear acquisition, as well as how to develop a plan to deal with and define real world events.  Let’s address the events first as they map directly to skill development and gear acquisition.  After a lifetime of studying this topic, starting with Cub Scouts, then Boy Scouts, joining the military at age 18 during Desert Storm I, and continuing my education as an adult, I have settled on a two-category system.  The two categories are fixed time events and variable time events.  Fixed time events are given a higher priority for planning purposes due to their critical nature, time to terminal event, or more bluntly, how long until you die.  Variable time categories are much more complicated to define.  If you have just lost an arm or leg, you are in a time-0 event.  If you are soaking wet and it is 30 below zero, with a 30 mile an hour wind, you are in a 2-5 minute survival scenario.  Similar scenarios exist for each category below, but as a whole their order is correct.

Below are the high level topics.  In order of importance, they are:

1. Fixed Time
   1. Self Defense – Time zero
   2. Water – Time 2-3 days
   3. Food – Time 7-14 days

The importance of each of the following topics cannot be stressed enough, but due to their variable nature, I have assigned them a spot of importance based on my experiences. 

1. Variable Time
   1. Medical
   2. Cover
   3. Fire
   4. Technology
   5. Engineering
   6. Survival