Doomsday Preppers Week 4: Fish and Firepower
Jeff Bushaw lives in Vancouver, Washington, with his wife and two sons. He is prepping for the eruption of the Yellowstone super-volcano.
From time to time, I give preppers crap for being scared of stupid things. In Bushaw’s instance, being scared of Yellowstone is not dumb in and off itself, as it would be a big deal for much of the country if the volcano ever blows. The fact of the matter, however, is that being 800 miles west of the super-volcano, he is quite close to being in the part of the entire world that would be least affected by any eruption. Read about the jet stream, Jeff. If Yellowstone is truly his only concern, he’s pissing his time and money away on something that would likely never directly affect him, even if it came to pass.
All that said, Bushaw is the best-prepared for what the community calls a “sh*t hits the fan” scenario. He’s hoarded a ten-year supply of toilet paper, which he got “for a really good deal.”
The opposite of Adrain’s “spare no expense” approach, Bushaw is trying to prep on a restricted budget. He has an interesting if hit-or-miss strategy for obtaining prepping gear, and that’s bidding on the contents of abandoned storage units at auction. In the episode, he won a unit with a bid of $500. That doesn’t seem like such a wise investment to my way of thinking considering the complete randomness of the approach. To each his own, however, and Bushaw seems to think it works.
That he has not done his research about his “favored” disaster is again shown when Bushaw reveals that if he does bug-out because of a Yellowstone eruption he’ll go by air. While the west-to-east flow of the jet stream suggests that it is all but impossible for the ash cloud to affect them in Washington, I’ll leave it to you, dear reader, to read what volcanic ash does to aircraft.
The show’s experts give the Bushaw family 6 months to live if things go wrong. At least he’ll have enough toilet paper.
As a single guy with two dogs (neither of them a guard dog, though my Chihuahua, like Bridget Johnson’s Chi-Chi, might gum you to death) yes, our lives are worth saving. Adrain is correct that staying put is best, though there are times you may have to evacuate — think Hurricane Sandy. I don’t know if he has his own power supply, but depending upon what emergency happens, he may not have the power grid to rely on. His main weakness is a lack of manpower. One guy cannot defend a castle.
As for the Yellowstone super-volcano, the west coast, probably New England, and the deep South will be spared the ash cloud. But so much of the country will be shut down that the entire economy will collapse. And if Timbora affected the world’s weather for a year, Yellowstone would have long time global affect.
Most of our disaster scenarios involve heading out west to my parents’ place – the family land where we can farm and grow food and have cousins and ties to the local community. The plague scenario involves staying put and self-quarantining for at least 10 days to two weeks during the height of infection (or longer if need be). And the super-volcano is the only one that sees us actually heading east because east usually means more people and more chaos in almost every other case, but the volcanic ash clouds would make it viable.
“Most of our disaster scenarios involve heading out west to my parents’ place – the family land where we can farm and grow food”
Dude, when the SHTF, who’s gonna enforce your idea that this bit of land is yours?
Don’t go on Doomsday Preppers…just don’t.
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Sorry Bob, you can claim to rock the Grendel, but I still figure you for a brown stock-good, black stock-bad kind of guy at heart. It’s the way you made clear your own prepping supplies should include Depends over the issue of teaching a child to fire a weapon, and then talked about how traumatizing it was for your friend to properly use a firearm to defend himself–like that mattered a whit compared to the fact he needed to and was able to do it.
I don’t know why you aren’t making it clear you realize these people are prepping generally and the directors emphasize a scenario they want featured. You think there isn’t a script?
At no point should a reasonable person ever get the impression that I am against teaching responsible children and young adults how to shoot. As an Appleseed volunteer, I set aside a weekend away from my own family every month to teach marksmanship and heritage to other individuals and families, and children are some of my favorite shooters I have the privilege of instructing.
Did you watch the episode in question, Tom?
My point of contention with Tom Perez should have been very clear, and I apologize if I did not do a better job of explaining it. Perez was using children aged 6 and 12 as front-line “soldiers,” forward-deployed, without cover, adequate weapons, training, or the mental capacity to understand their actions in any meaningful way.
His defensive training across the board was tactically incompetent. He split his family up, with he and his wife “patrolling” the perimeter of a 700-acre piece of property, fully exposed as individuals waltzing around with no field-craft or guile. They abandoned–and there is no more accurate way to say it–his three children to guard the two buildings of the compound proper.
The 6-year-old was deployed on the front porch with no cover, fully exposed in a roughly 270-degree arc. The boy was armed with a .22 LR Charger pistol. It was mounted on a bipod, because he was to small and weak to hold the firearm otherwise. It had a cheap red laser sight, which is near useless in bright Texas sunlight beyond point-blank range.
Panoramic shots of the property indicated he could be engaged from hundreds of yards away, far before he was aware of an attacker sneaking through the scrub brush.
This child, and his older, slightly better armed but no better trained brother, wouldn’t survive an attack from a Brownie troop, which was devastatingly demonstrated during the episode when a couple of off-duty cops armed with pistols disarmed them without a simulated shot fired.
In a real-life scenario, how likely do you think it is that someone raiding a compound like Perez’s is going to bother with attempting to talk these children into laying down their arms?
If all that stands between desperate people and the food, shelter, and medicine they need are a couple of untrained kids, these kids will be die. If they are lucky, their killers will give them the kindness of a headshot, and they’ll never know what hit them.
I called what Tom Perez did to his family through his incompetence and fantasy “child abuse,” because their is no greater child abuse than placing your children in a scenario where the most likely and almost assured outcome is their violent death.
Bingo. I have thought a lot of this kind of thing especially with regard to tactics and personal ability. Faced with a real military force you are screwed any number of ways, so don’t even think about it. But in terms of marauders, and a plan of harassment with my CZ-52 Tokarev and GSG-522 .22, I think I could do OK. But for the average person to think they could sustain opposition against a determined force is pure fantasy. Try to discourage an amateur opponent but have a well-designed escape plan otherwise. Death or serious injury is not a good option.
And Bob, when someone raids your compound or home, what do you intend to do? Will you surrender yourself and your whole family or will you just surrender your kids?
If I were young and had to choose, I think I’d rather take my chances with Mr. Perez as my father.
Bob, you are a bigot.
Chris
Chris, You get quite the exercise jumping to conclusions.
At no point have I said children shouldn’t be defended, nor have I said they shouldn’t have the tools and training to survive.
Tom Perez spent $2 million on his compound including bullet-resistant homes with 7″ thick stone walls. He put his six year old IN FRONT OF IT, armed with a .22LR pistol he can’t even pick up. What I said repeatedly, and apparently clearly to everyone but you, is that sending you children into a scenario where their dying is the MOST LIKELY scenario is child abuse.
I can’t put it any plainer than that.
While I agree with Bob’s tactical take on this, his sociological take is in error.
In a mad max survival situaion, EVERYONE is a combatent, and a potential meal. Arming kids isn’t wrong, but exposing them to sniping IS. Kids in a situation like this should be in hardened positions, not expensive to build, mostly dirt and rock. Also kids like this would be more effective in an internal ambush inside a compound with a small clearly defined killing field.
Also patrolling in the open is suicide, with a nearby treeline. What would serve the best is a chamied spy post up high, with several armoured posts at corners of the parimater using short tunnels to enter. wired communications between the posts. Also dig ditches with a backhoe that run to the post entrances so a defender can belly in unseen. let them grow over. In the madmax situation, what WAS your private property may expand to include defensible positions nearby.
Excellently said. I wish those points had jumped out more in the original article, but good to see them now.
Made it to your comment about people “bugging out” and you not understanding it, and I feel the need to explain it for you since you don’t really grasp it I guess?
Think about this, one of the major issues in any disaster, be it nukes or terrorism or hell just normal ordinary disasters like hurricanes. There is ALWAYS an element of social unrest to go along with it. There is always looting, pillaging, murdering… These things just happen because there are always those scumbags walking around who will do that when they get a chance. This means, that especially if its something MAJOR like, oh say, the federal government finally collapses up its own ass with its debt and suddenly cant pay all those leeches who are dependent on the state to survive? Those sorts of people come looking for what they can take. They did it during Sandy just recently, look at how many are so hopelessly dependent on the feds that they basically almost died rather than fend for themselves. A lot, however, will simply take to stealing/killing each other.
Now, put yourself in the situation where that happens. Do you think its safe to stay anywhere near a population center? Not, even, a, little, bit. Sure you can board your home up and get guns and “defend your property,” but truth is, thats dangerous and you can easily die that way if the attackers are armed to. Or hell if theyre just SPITEFUL and set fire to your home with you in it, THEN you’re fucked to all hell.
The safe bet is to leave. A home, your “things,” these are replaceable. Your life? Not so much. The safer bet is to know the backroads out of town and to somewhere safe to avoid larger populations of people and the chaos that goes along with that.
That, is the purpose of “bugging out.”
I think you misunderstand. It is not that leaving is not a good idea, it is that everyone has had this idea and is right now stuck on the car choked highways.
During the clean up in New Orleans, after Katrina, huge amounts of ammunition were found. So much ammunition, that separate dumpsters had to be designated for ammunition that needed to be disposed of, in the ninth ward. The gang bangers are well supplied with weapons and ammunition. You had better be similarly prepared, and ready to defend yourself, in the case of a societal breakdown. The predators will be coming to your neighborhood.
“On behalf of sane people everywhere, thank you, Mr. Adrain, for pointing out the common-sense idea that so many people on this show just don’t seem to grasp.”
Except that Adrain is wrong.
1: People with secondary locations are big into learning signs of the initial panic. That is those signs that will at a certain point blossom into rioting for resorces.
They learn these signs so that they can be gone *before the panic actually occurs*.
2: Having a BoL does not you are not prepared at home but a BoL opens up new ways of doing it since the concern is handling attack and surviving bad times.
Not entertaining guests.
Problem — bugging out doesn’t always work. Sometimes circumstances make it impossible.
I *HEARTILY* recommend any prepper read Daniel Defoe’s “Journal of the Plague Year”. It’s “fiction” that was apparently heavily cribbed from his uncle’s diary kept during the London Black Death plague of 1665.
The narrator intended to leave London, but fell ill. It wasn’t the plague, but it was enough to derail his plans to leave. He ended up staying in the city through the entire plague.
You’re right, bugging out doesn’t always work.
I heard a story about a guy in the 1970s who was pretty sure the world was going to hell in the proverbial handbasket. He felt that a major war was inevitable and looked for a safe place to relocate himself and his family. He scoured maps and finally located a small chain of islands in the South Atlantic that he figured no one would want or fight for. He and his family packed up and moved there. A few short months or years later, he discovered that the Falkland Islands were not as safe against war as he had expected….
Bug-out bags, or the less-sexy sounding 72-hour kits as they are called in the LDS church lingo, are for the times you need to outrun the fiery flood (see Sandy). As such, they are an essential piece of preparedness and should probably be at or near the top of your preparedness priority list.
Imagine all those suffering Sandy folks, instead of being at wit’s end, just being sort of annoyed. A crisis becomes a mere irritation. At least, that’s the idea, much like Dave Ramsey’s proscription for a $1000 emergency fund.
Yep. For lots of situations you want to bug in. For others, bug out.
I haven’t finished watching this episode, but I’ll do that tonight. I don’t take the show very seriously and feel that the producers try to put all the preppers in a bad light.
I’ve been interested in aquaponics for years and really liked the setup in season 1. The idea of having the chicken coop above the duckweed was brilliant. The biggest issue with aquaponics is bringing the food that feeds the fish into the circle. Worms are great, but then you have to feed and prepare the worms to grow, which means more space. Sometimes people plan on reintroducing the human waste back into the system, but if you don’t start with only eating what is in the system, you could have some troubles. Recently I found Equaris , which would be the perfect solution for a prepper aquaponic system. Well, as long as you had a deep battery system to provide plenty of energy.
I don’t think I have seen a complete prepper system. But, I am guessing Southern Prepper (season 1) has it and he has a second family in his group. I believe that you should never prep alone, but I would never have a huggy prepper in my group, especially if I was stuck out in a Texas desert.
my question of course would be “how many rolls is considered a 10 year supply of toliet paper?”
3,650.
You get yours at the “Dollar Store”?
A full roll per day??
You either have a large family or consume way too much fiber….
Or maybe I’m just constipated. I can go months on a package of 12 rolls….
1500. Use coupons.
Toilet paper is a large waste of time and energy. The bidet is a much better and more sanitary way and moves the waste to a place that it can be broken down faster into fertilizer.
The guy with the little kids has absolutely no idea how to set up and defend a position of any kind. Lots of money and no knowledge. His only saving grace is that his castle is not on one of the paths of travel so he may miss the first wave of predators. But the surviving lot of predators will be looking for targets such as him and his family.
The truth is your best prepping is done in your brain. Knowledge and skills will enable you to make the proper decisions at the proper time. Without those two things you have no chance beyond the grace of GOD. The second most important part of prepping is to have a network of families and friends that live in close proximity and have different skills and knowledge than you for specific problems.
I understand the show has to pick certain people in order to make it entertaining and draw viewers but in my opinion none of it is viable in a real shtf scenario.
Mr. Owens thank you for your service in bringing this discussion to the fore and also thank you for your service to our country. Sua Sponte my friend.
Not everyone is situated or able to afford to successfully go to defendable ground in a big breakdown. Our society is highly organinzed and based on law and obeying contracts. For those who cannot go to ground, the fallback task is to restore social organization, survey problems and start work on the worst first. Volunteer groups could go and splice dropped power lines, plow lawns to grow food, do health care, pool resources, see about getting the steam locomotives in the museum back to work, using available radistion detectors blah blah. Clinton parted out Civil Defense, replacing it with FEMA checkbooks. There is no pre-existing idea in anyone’s head to organize to make the best of the mess. Actually there is a rudimentary form.
On taking the oath and getting orientation, Federal employees are told that if a disaster etc. ruins the ability to do one’s job, one is to report to the nearest Post Office for any other duties which may be available (it helps the paycheck continue).
Cities should tell the population to report to city hall or the nearest library so problems can be surveyed, assets defined, and skills and abilities located so social organization and problem-solving can get off the ground. Despite what Hollywood and nervous academics think, when the people face some horrendous mess there will be a good chance it will be more like the evacuation of Dunkirk than “Lord of the Flies.”
Where I part company with most, dare it say *mainstream* preppers, is in their imagining of who is coming after them. It is popular to blithely imagine that “scumbags” and “looters” are the ones who you will have to defend against. This disembodiment of potential foes is actually comforting, is it not? It is also why the “zombie apocalypse” metaphor is so popular. It is easy to imagine oneself bravely shooting random people that you don’t know, to defend your stash of … toilet paper. Reality however, is that the people who will more immediately be after your stuff are your friends, neighbors, coworkers, relatives, etc., who have not themselves seen fit to similarly prepare. And we all know that the numbers of prepping-oriented folks will never be all that great. Most folks are either in denial of potential threats, have their heads in-the-clouds or think the government will always ride to their rescue. Thus, one’s biggest problem initially is NOT going to be in repelling faceless “looters” by force of arms, but in refusing the entreaties for help of unprepared people that you actually know. Are you ready to pull that .50 cal trigger on Uncle Fred? You ready to turn away your hard-working, loving and caring single mom coworker and her hungry children? Are you gonna put a round of 9mm through the skulls of “that nice family down the street?? I’ll bet that none of the hapless nimrods featured on that show, nor even the so-called “experts” associated with the show have a decent answer for dealing with that.
As far as friendly people looking for food, well that’s a good reason to keep a low key about any preps.
I’m not a serious prepper, but think it is wise to have at least 6 months of food and plenty of ammo, etc.
I’m willing to help out or share some with others, but on my terms. I have in-laws who will have to help themselves.
Zombies have certain things going for them, being slow, stupid and easy to kill……
Preppers might think of bugging out; but everybody else will have to count on coöperation, tolerance for misery and personal sacrifice. Many may not make it but those that do will be hardened, capable and not taken with any particular sort of nonsense. If they need come after you for any reason, it’ll be you that will need offer prayer or at least the flexibility to curl around and kiss your posterior goodbye……..
I love it!!!!!
“Doomsday Preppers” using a motor coach with all the amenities of home.
Where’s the bidet and the hot tub?
James Rawles at http://www.survivalblog.com recommends living at your retreat. Move now, before things get ugly, to a sparsely populated place and put down roots. Get involved with your community and stock up. Learn to grow food, make things, be self sufficient as much as possible. He’s written several novels on the subject of collapse, the first (and best, IMHO) being “Patriots – a novel of surving the coming collapse” that lays it all out in a fictional, yet believable scenario. His website contains literally terabytes of information on surviving.
Being former mil and having served in friendly and hostile 3rd world countries where the standard of living is/would be about the same as if the SHTF here gives me a little more hope. When disasters do strike there seems to be the predominant theme of Americans helping Americans, IKE, Katrina, Sandy etcetera, thats not to say there are those that will take advantage, unfortunately that is true in every country I have ever been too… Now that being said there is nothing wrong with some realistic prepping for extended periods of blackouts, my family spent 10 days without electricity during Ike, we still had water and gas, so we survived quite well, infact the time without TV/Cable helped us spend quality time together, talking, reading books and playing family board games… I found my mind was running at a hundred miles an hour worrying about emails and company projects, sort of how I grew up back in Ireland, Kerosene lamps and candles.. wasn’t so bad… For this show though it would seem they are preparing for the perfect Black Swan event, when so many disasters combine to bring about the ultimate disaster… Wow… could it happen is the question… I think personally it could, but I also think that you would see it coming giving you the opportunity to prep and get the hell out of dodge, the question is what do you do it the forseeable future is one of total denial of all modern conveniences, electricity, comms, water, Gas (Cooking and Vehicular)… its gonna take more than a stash of ammo and food to move on… seeds for crops, water for crops, no pesticides basically heading back to the 18th century.. even these preppers don’t seem to be prepared for that, additonally they don’t seem to realize it will take communities to survive….Interesting..
Do you mean 19th century? Going back to that level means the deaths of millions of people no matter how you cut it.
Consider Southern California.
The greater LA area has some 17M+ people. San Diego county has another 3M.
The area depends upon water being brought in, and food delivered using JIT. To the north is essentially the desert of the Central Valley. East is just desert. South is Mexico and the populations of Tecate, Tijuana, and Ensanada, which probably greatly exceeds Mexican census data. Below Ensanada is desert.
To the West is the Pacific Ocean.
This represents a very bad situation if we went back to 19th C. tech.
What is more likely is disaster that presents a short term situation but one where modern civilization can recover and continue. That would mean perhaps a period of weeks or months where you would have to feed yourself and defend yourself. But such a thing can happen quickly and give you no time to bug out or prepare. And to the extent you can see such a situation coming, it means that others will too, and the cost to prepare will become much higher.
No time to prepare?
Like Joseph interpreting pharaoh’s dream, we have years of fat to save and store grain. How anyone believes in fully stocked grocery stores every day of their life is more of a fantasy than worrying about Yellowstone erupting.
Everyone with sense in SoCal would have a few 55 gal drums, 3-6 months of food. Rice and beans works, doesn’t have to be expensive prepper fare.
When else in human existence have people been so unprepared for a week without food?
Personally, I think we are in a decadent society more concerned with killing babies than survival and believe we deserve God’s wrath. But, I want to live and so prepare.
I’ve seen one episode that I would describe as child abuse (it aired a while ago). The father was demanding that his son learn “survival skills” — which consisted of eating bugs. He forced his son to eat insects. I don’t think it had anything to do with “survival”; it was about power. Abusive power. (There were other episodes of some “preppers” on the verge of divorce — the husband squandering huge sums, wasting a fortune, while threatening his skeptical wife, etc.)
Do-it-yourself Go-it-alone strategies make for interesting conversation,
about as interesting as whose football team will win the Superbowl, and
about as practical as trying to train oneself up to NFL performance levels.
The most practical course for the serious survivalist is to move to a
Red State, _now_ , to a city of around 100k population, and put down
roots in the community. A city that size is large enough to provide all
the amenities of civilized society, and too small to support an Underclass.
Sorry, but there’s no place too small for an underclass.
And if there’s not one already, then the government will plant one there for you.
Absolutely true. I lived for several years in a community of less than a hundred people and and ten to fifteen per cent were getting food stamps or some form of government benefits. And that was thirty years ago.
since most people live in cities “bugging out” is probably a good strategy. being in a city will not be pleasant and the bigger the city the worse it will be.
having a place to go would also be part of the bug out plan. and since most people are not preppers prepared to “bug out” then it wont be as difficult as it may seem.
just plan for multiple scenarios … I think the most likely one will be riots due to either natural catastrophe or economic collapse.
Wake up America! We MUST repeal the PATRIOT Act! NOW!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EiY7AarMoI
Everyone needs to do some type of preparation. In light of all of the recent disasters I hope people are a little more concerned about being prepared. Bugging out can be extreme but some people feel more comfortable with that. If that’s not you then get together some extra food, survival gear, and water. I recommend starting out with a simple 72 hour kit for each member of your family. When that is complete then store a 6 month supply of food. Good luck with what ever you chose. Just remember preparation starts with you, not the government.