There is no shortage of sources about prepping. From ‘Doomsday Preppers’ to 3000 gallon water storage tanks, to year long dehydrated food supplies to starter ‘seed kits’ for growing your own food post-apocalypse, prepping is big business. In fact, it seems everywhere you turn these days, Bear Grylls has an orange handled knife or a medical kit or a combo survival pack to sell you. The fact is, there are a lot of valid reasons to be prepared, and ‘prepping’ is nothing new. If you’ve ever done a backup of your hard drive, you’re a prepper.
There are different reasons for prepping, and therefore different levels of commitment to the prep that you’ll have to undergo. Related to the hard drive example above, if you want to be prepared for the eventual crash of your hard drive, a weekly backup is probably sufficient. If you want to ensure that NOTHING gets lost, ever, then you need a real time backup on the fly with a 5 revision history and a RAID array of mirrored drives. More complex requirements demand more complex preparations. Preparing to endure a severe winter storm if you live 50 miles from the nearest town is going to be different than if you live in an apartment building next to a grocery store.
The prepping portion of this site is going to focus on preparing for the Zombie Apocalypse (Z-Poc). There are going to be many areas where prepping for Z-Poc will overlap with prepping for any other disaster. The CDC tried to capitalize on the popularity of the Zombie subculture for just this reason with their Zombie Preparedness page (complete with a graphic novella). Clearly, having a go-bag is a good idea. Of course, the CDC is not going to tell you to pack some of the things you would need to survive the initial outbreak, but it’s a clever way to get people thinking about what-if situations. Kudos to them for trying something different.
There are also many areas where prepping for Z-Poc is going to be dramatically different from preparing for a snow storm or a hurricane. In most cases where you’re preparing for a natural disaster, you’re getting ready for a 3-7 day inconvenience that will be over once power is restored, roads are cleared, and so on. For Z-Poc, you are preparing for the complete collapse of society. Not only will you need to be prepared for dealing with the masses of the undead, but you’ll need to defend yourself from the raiders who survive but make their living off of raping and pillaging the weaker survivors and find ways to stay fed and hydrated in the process. No small feat to be sure.
As this column goes forward, we’ll discuss many important topics. Go-bags, weapons, food, conditioning (physical AND mental) will all be discussed at length. Because each person and therefore each personal situation is different, there are no completely right solutions. We’ll present common solutions, people will have their opinions, but in the end each person will have to customize a solution to their own set of circumstances. The only WRONG solution is to do nothing, unless you want your fate to be determined by those who are better prepared than you.
Better dead than Zed,
Rich