Freeze jolts prepping movement
Adherents could offer lessons on disaster readiness
Many preppers have an origin story, when they realized the world was a more fragile and unpredictable place than they had thought, and that any help they might have assumed was on its way wasn’t.
Superstorm Sandy, in the Northeast in 2012, and Hurricane Katrina in 2005 convinced many it was time to keep stores of food, water and maybe some ammunition around so that the next time an unforeseen or once-in-a-lifetime catastrophe arrived, they’d be prepared.
Jon Stokes’ moment came in 2008. He’d just sold a company and had some money to invest. He was meeting some bankers in a marble-clad Chicago office tower when the discussion took an apocalyptic turn.
“They started telling me that if TARP doesn’t pass” — the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the government bailout of the subprime mortgage disaster — “there wouldn’t be food, there wouldn’t be gas,” he said. “Walking out of the Credit Suisse building was the moment I became a prepper.”
When last month’s deep freeze settled over Texas, Stokes was at his house north of Austin. An evangelist in the prepper community, he had a stockpile of food, go-bags packed for himself, his wife and three kids, and a truck with extra diesel fuel ready to bug out.
But as the temperatures fell, a pipe in his well house burst. He noticed his diesel fuel was gelling. “I grew up in Lake Charles, Louisiana,” said Stokes, a co-founder of the Ars Technica news website. “I didn’t even know that diesel basically turns to wax.”
Worse, online chatter was telling him the electrical grid was on the verge of collapse — a fact later confirmed by state officials. Stokes had researched electromagnetic pulses, so he knew a socalled “black start” to recover from a total shutdown could leave residents without power for weeks or even months.
A long, deep, paralyzing Texas freeze “just wasn’t in my threat model,” he said. “I’m going to have to elevate my prep game in a big way.”
If the prepping movement is about acknowledging that disasters or emergencies are constant, so it just makes good sense to be prepared, Texas’ leaders might be ready to take a page or two. In recent weeks, politicians and corporate executives have struggled to explain how a week of bitter cold brought the Lone Star State to its knees. Millions were left shivering in the dark for days; an estimated 57 died, many in homes that had lost electricity.
The energy breakdown occurred despite similar problems during winter storms in 1989, 2011 and 2014 — a triple sin for those who make disaster readiness an integral part of their lives. “The problem is not that these things aren’t solvable,” said John Ramey, who runs The Prepared, a one-stop prepper site with articles, advice, product reviews and instructional videos.
“It’s, ‘Why aren’t you solving them?’”
Much to be concerned about
To scan the weekly news roundups on The Prepared is to observe a world of perpetual catastrophe. Eight million pigs dead in China from swine fever! The Texas agriculture sector is down $600 million after the winter storm! Iceland had nearly 20,000 earthquakes in a week! It is meant as a reminder that disasters, imaginable and not, happen constantly, everywhere, and that if you think you’re safe, you’re not.
“The common denominator among this community is the recognition that our institutions fail us,” Ramey said. If there is a silver lining to 2020, he said, it’s that “I haven’t had to try to convince people of that much anymore.” He said the site’s traffic was up 25-fold in the past year, one marked by the coronavirus pandemic and election chaos.
In a 2018 study pegging the movement as a market of more than half a billion dollars, a British researcher who studies American preppers concluded it was fueled by “disaster-based speculation” on television and the internet. Yet if anything, events of the past year have confirmed the community’s animating anxiety is fundamentally sound.
You may or may not believe a polar shift, extreme continental drift or government gun confiscation is imminent. But it turns out that worrying about obscure viruses on the other side of the globe isn’t so crazy. Neither is fearing that, under the right conditions, elections in even a mature democracy can be as fragile as butterfly wings. And whatever your feeling about climate change, sustained winter weather in Texas is something that needs to be acknowledged.
“You don’t have to be focused on the fantastical doomsday stuff,” Ramey said. “There’s plenty of real-world stuff to be concerned about.”
If that message hasn’t penetrated, it’s because preppers have struggled for years to separate themselves from telegenic fringe groups training to survive a world-obliterating disaster they half-hoped would happen. Although both share a belief that the systems intended to protect us won’t, everyday preppers concentrate on being ready for everyday calamities.
“I can’t survive every disaster,” said Sarah Avery, a PH.D. fantasy writer and “low-impact” prepper who reviews survival guides. “In the event of a nuclear war, I intend to die.” But for lesser disruptions, she said, “Each of us can do things to make them suck less.”
Anna Maria Bounds, a sociology professor who has studied prepping communities in New York City, discovered that, unlike doomsday survivalists, who tend to be older white men, preppers spanned gender, race and class. The basics of self-sufficiency — in a natural disaster or after a layoff — overlapped with tamer-sounding trends such as homesteading, crafting and gardening. Oprah’s 2019 holiday gift guide included the Prepster Emergency Backpack (Natural Canvas and Leather, $395).
Lisa Bedford’s philosophy is also more “Little House on the Prairie” than Navy SEAL. For the past decade, the suburban Houston founder of The Survival Mom blog has been preaching everyday self-sufficiency and readiness revolving around stockpiling enough food, water and daily necessities to ride out a rough patch.
In some ways, February’s deep freeze, which sent temperatures plummeting into the teens and caused mass power outages, still caught her off-guard. With power off in her home, her pipes froze. Although she said the family’s prep-honed resiliency helped them survive without any major damage, she added, “We were kind of blindsided.”
“I’m not going to tell myself anymore that it can’t happen here,” she said.
In New York, where Bounds is writing a follow-up study to her earlier work, she said two groups she knows of have already planned training sessions around the event. “Texas was a real eyeopener for people,” Bounds said.
Freeze was ‘nothing new’
A couple of weeks ago, a film crew gathered on Stokes’ property to shoot a series of do-it-yourself emergency medical care videos. As pandemic quarantine quarters go, it could be worse. The stone house overlooks a hot tub and swimming pool, which perch above the tennis court.
“Things gotta be what they are,” Stokes said. “This is not an off-grid house.”
But a smaller house going up next door will be.
In a nearby wood-and-metal shed, a wilderness medicine instructor named Tom Rader sat behind a wooden desk. A rescue dummy with a bloody severed leg lay in a corner. Helicopters circled overhead.
“Maybe we’ve made some watch list,” said Ramey, craning his neck. (Stokes said they were more likely pilot trainees from the nearby airport.)
Ramey coached Rader from a folding chair behind the camera, suggesting wording to better convey the you’re-on-your-own theme of a lesson about infections. “There’s a place when, if you’re in a hospital, things would be OK, but without one, you’re screwed,” he said. “You don’t have the clean environment, you don’t have the drugs.”
On his website and in his life, Ramey pushes what he calls “sane, modern prepping — what our grandparents called daily life.” He believes self-sufficiency under stress is personally empowering and optimistic.
Yet his worldview is fundamentally pessimistic. His work as an innovation adviser to the Obama administration did not fill him with confidence in the government. “I’ve been in those rooms,” he said. “And I can tell you how bad it is there.”
“There was nothing new about what happened” in Texas last month, he added. “The problems are known, and in most cases the solutions are known.” He expects the freeze to add thousands of newly skeptical Lone Star State residents to the prepper ranks. “There is an acceptance now that, ‘I don’t trust the people running the state grid.’”
In Austin, it remains to be seen if the freeze will prompt sweeping changes to the state’s energy markets or just a few tweaks around the edges. But during hours of hastily convened legislative committee testimony, the discussions of weatherization failures, inadequate backup power, communication breakdowns and government missteps didn’t sound so different from the prepper community’s many online forums.
Some speakers even sounded as if they had arrived at their own origin story.
“I want to tell you that in my nearly 40 years in the energy industry, this event has shaken me like no other,” Curtis Morgan, CEO of Vistra Corp., which owns the power-generating company Luminant, told legislators. “Moving forward, this event has taught us that we have to imagine and prepare for the worst-case scenario.”