What was the catalyst that compelled you to begin prepping?

Steve Martin - November 19, 2022

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I’m curious about what caused you to begin your journey to being prepared. For me, it really started in 1962….We lived in the Washington DC suburbs and most of our neighbors were government types or military. The trouble brewing in Cuba was only a secret to the rest of the country. Amongst federal employees, they knew something was afoot, maybe just not how serious is was about to become. Washington DC was ringed by Nike & Nike-Hercules missile sites….and the one near our home was 1 of only 2 who had nuclear payloads in those missiles, designed to shoot down incoming Russian missiles. ( although no one knew it then) One afternoon, we were driving home when we passed by the Lorton Nike Missile Site…and all of the missiles were erected and pointed skyward. We had never seen that before. We went on home and my dad turned on the tv and we heard like most others in the US, just how close we were to launch. My dad threw a bunch of our camping gear into the pickup and we headed to our normal camp grounds SW of Washington in the Shenandoah National Park. We stayed there until the trouble was over.(We bugged out!) I don’t remember exactly how long, I was only 8 at the time, but it was several days. I do remember the park being totally full and the new arrivals were sent off to camp in the “overflow area”. Little did we know then that we were camped next to a primary target not far away. The Greenbriar Hotel and Mount Weather…which was still very much a secret. The Cuban Missile Crisis is what spurred me into later becoming a prepper. By 1978, I had 6 weeks of supplies stored away but still living in DC area. The DC area used to have air raid siren tests once a month and the gov. would hold practice evacuations via helicopter a couple times a year….I lived within sight of the Pentagon….and the choppers would come right over the house during the practices. So survival was frequently on my mind as a young man and a couple years in Army Intel didn’t do anything to slow that down. So what’s your excuse? 9/11? Today’s troubles in Ukraine? Banking collapse? 

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My wife was the original prepper in our family. I was passively supportive (not objecting to gear expenses) and watched some related videos she recommended on topics like bugging out and pandemics…

On Jan 3, 2020, she wakes me up a bit early and asks me to read a news headline on her phone: “Mysterious Pneumonia in China”. She tells me she’s been up all night researching and “this might be what we were talking about” but she needs to do more research to be certain.

Around two weeks later she was convinced this would be a major pandemic. I started working with her on research and preparation. We focused on protecting ourselves first, then expanded our efforts to help as many others as we could.

Now there are two preppers in the family. We share the work of threat surveillance, planning, and preparation.

 

Good Evening Steve. I got started in preparedness as a condition of employment at the beginning of my career (1978). In those days, working for one of the big national / regional phone companies meant always holding your place of residence ready to go on its own for 10 days with no outside support. Big natural (or man made) disasters meant we worked until communications was restored. Most employees had standing arrangements with extended family, neighbors, or friends to “watch out for each other” for as long as it took until disaster recovery was complete. When the Loma Prieta earthquake hit the San Francisco bay area in October of 1989, it was just under 92 hours before I got to sleep in my own bed again. But groups of neighbors, family, and coworkers banded together to keep everything well at home during that whole time. It was also a HUGE learning experience for which preparations worked and which did not work. Advanced preparation gave us the tools, and GREAT PEOPLE made it work.

 

So you’re one of the people I should thank for getting our utilities restored SO quickly when I was a frightened kid in SF in ’89! Thank you! I still remember that having working phones and power was what made me feel safe again. 

 

Good Evening pnwsarah,

Thank you for your kind words! Major thanks to the first responders of the time from me also. They got us through all the confusion, traffic, and bridge failures to get us where we needed to be to do our job and thus restore communications.

 

Hi, Steve. Living for many years in earthquake country, for a few years in hurricane country, and now in the Midwest as we head into winter, I’d say weather-related power outages and risk of fire from infrastructure damage got me into prepping. Along the way, I took a CERT class and became involved in amateur radio and its emergency communications aspect. 

In the early 1990’s, I studied for two years, part time after work, to earn a certificate in toxic and hazardous materials management. I was introduced to risk assessment and learned that human beings are often poor at it — overestimating some risks and underestimating other risks. 

In various settings, I saw how “under stress, we regress.” I understood that it actually doesn’t take too much stress for people to start losing good judgement and making mistakes having cascading effects. The covid pandemic and what I would call the politicization of public health and the reluctance of people to protect those who are medically vulnerable showed me what I can and can’t expect of government agencies and of my family, friends, and neighbors under present conditions. 

So if I started being oriented toward preparedness some 40 years ago, each decade since then has reinforced the importance of it. 

 

My family has pretty much been prepping for generations, at least back to two sets of farmer great-grandparents, and before that I’m pretty sure it was just how everyone lived.  My parents took things a step too far and bugged out somewhat prematurely in the 1970’s.  I guess you could say I got my “start” in prepping by being born on a tiny subsistence homestead hidden in the wilderness.  I’ve really never lived in a household that wasn’t prepared to survive on our own for quite a darn long time.  As I started to take advantage of some of the conveniences the modern world provides, I was conscious of how fragile that infrastructure is, and have avoided letting myself become too reliant on it.  For example, I now cut firewood with a chainsaw because it is so much faster and easier, but I still know how to use and maintain my bucksaws and two-man saws.

 

I became more serious about being prepared during Y2K. I was working for one of the post-divestiture companies of Bell Labs at the time and they were, in many ways, at the epicenter of Y2K research, planning and upgrades. Their software ran almost all telecommunications systems in the world. They had significant plans for employees as the clock rolled over. They had prepared for a very significant disruption and had many staff members and their families at work. They also coordinated with state government to allow 2nd tier engineers to travel if roads were restricted by a bad outcome. As most know, very little happened and it became a joke among the MSM and many people.

I had seen how much effort a world-class, top-tier engineering company had put into Y2K mitigation but finally did not really know what was going to happen in spite of that effort. I walked away with a disturbing lesson: systems and software had become so big and so complex that it was close to impossible to truly understand it. That bothered me but I wanted to think it was a one-off.

I subsequently worked on another large TCP/IP telecommunications project. One day I was talking with the senior architect about the project when he told me he did not fully understand the project end-to-end, it was just too big.

My take away was that system complexity was so great that inherent risk was not ever going to be understood and that any suggestion otherwise was not informed or entirely honest. Systemic crashes could harm my family – like the Texas ice storm impact to electric power.

That’s when I started prepping my family for all risks.

 

I’ve only been seriously prepping since the pandemic started when I inadvertently (or not so inadvertently – there are no accidents) was sequestered in my home with every Chris Hedges book I could check out from the library. Schools had closed, and no one knew what would be closing next. I went to the library on Saturday, March 14, and grabbed everything I could by this journalist who had written two articles I had stumbled on in the time of Trump and whom I remembered walking away from the NY Times over comments about the Iraq War. I also checked out Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. I’m not a big fiction reader, but it was an National Endowment for the Arts novel and the author was going to be visiting, so I thought I’d check it out. OMG! It didn’t freak me out, people weren’t dying of covid in a matter of hours, but it was really readable and I devoured it in three days. Then I started on the stack of Hedges. OMG x 10 to the nth!

In my earlier years I had political aspirations, but walked away at 31 after having a Road to Damascus kind of awakening. I spent the next 17 years with my head down, trudging the road to serving my purpose (Ayurveda, yoga, mindfulness, degrees, licenses, teaching, mainstreaming Love and Self-awareness) without time or necessity to look up. Then the pandemic hit and I had almost nothing but time on my hands to read, read, read, and be awake at 4 in the morning working in the yard and listening to lectures.

I’m one who has always been able to see the big picture, taking in large amounts of information and processing it very quickly. I can connect dots quite easily and have never been polly-anish about the nature of the human being. I knew how we lived as a culture/society would eventually turn us into what we feared (I speak of the US) and that our species in general was a strange one seemingly bent on self-destruction.

Between finding a source (Hedges and Friends) that spoke the words describing what I had been watching, feeling, and seeing culminate in the rise of Trump (he’s the symptom – not the cause), white nationalists being emboldened (I live in a white supremacy hot spot and they were/are again rearing ugly heads), the pandemic laying bare the US as a failed state, and the obviousness of what our rabid consumption has brought us (climate collapse) I started to prepare accordingly. I refi’ed my house and got to work!

I even transferred to a K-5 campus with an honest to goodness real garden at the center of a wooded community, thinking it may provide compound security in the future. Best to have a key to one of the rooms, right? It also took me away from middle school where I was aware of extremist cells forming and figure an active shooter is a matter of when, not if (I’d been taking krav maga classes for 8 months when the closures hit). Funny thing about the above, though, as I was checking out my new campus, after knowing I got the transfer, I watched a Stealth drone fly overhead (on its way in for a landing at an air force base not far away as the crow or SR 71 or Stealth flies) and the Uvalde shooting happened two days before the end of my time in middle school. How ’bout that? Sometimes you just have to laugh. Then put your head back down and continue trudging.

 

I am brand new to prepping…I started in mid September.  I had stumbled on a fictional novel about an EMP and what happened afterwards and was fascinated.  At the same time I found out September was National Preparedness Month.

Since then I have accumulated approximately 2 months of food and 1 month of water for my 2 dogs and I as well as a few more basic preps:  fire extinguisher, more flashlights, etc.

Prior to September I was completely oblivious to how truly ill-prepared I would be in an emergency.  I didn’t struggle much at all during the pandemic and felt that if a major emergency hasn’t struck me by now (I am 51) it probably won’t.   I now feel like there is no harm to be more prepared – I’d say at this point I’m preparing for supply chain issues but thinking also of grid down scenario – but for a few weeks to months…not years.  I don’t know how far I’ll go with preparations but I feel better already with the little bit I have done.   And I’ll admit I am hooked on this topic and am having a lot of fun learning by reading this site!

 

That is very impressive to have 2 months of food, 1 month of water, and many other things in such a short period of time! 

What novel did you read about the EMP? Do you recommend it?

 

Thank you Ostrich Eggs!   It was actually a 7 book series – it was good and it really got me thinking a lot about what I’d  do if something like that happened:  Chaos Rising by Kyla Stone.  But being the obsessive person I am, I then read another book which was very similar but was written much better – it was REALLY good.  First book in a series of 3…I’ve only read the first one so far:  One Minute After by William Forstchen – I recommend his book over Kyla Stone’s but I found both fascinating.

 

I think when I was around 14 and started doing search and rescue. After that I was usually moderately more prepared, the knife person usually. Sometimes had gear and stuff.

Normally we’d just stock extra toilet paper and like some basic food and sometimes extra clothes. That’s about it.

Kinda pressed into that stuff when the pandemic came on, and a few times of service interruptions.

I think Jan 6 was what really catalyzed things for me. It was always low level and low concern and seeing that it was like, hm.

Now apparently I live the lifestyle, cuz things keep happening all the time.

 

I’ve been doing this so long, I really don’t recall what compelled me to prep.  Granted I was a Cub Scout and a Boy Scout, and that was actually good beginner training.  The scout motto is be prepared.

For the vast majority of those years, my family considered me eccentric… and worse.  The shortages of the Covid pandemic immediately changed all that.  Then the concerns with Russia talking about possibly using tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine, took me to a new level of being a forward thinker.  Just a couple of weeks ago my wife said she was glad we were preppers.  Made her feel more secure.  You know things have changed when she now considers herself a prepper.

 

Enjoying reading all these responses, and your original post, Steve. Great thread!

I think I’ve had prepper tendencies since I was a kid, due to my and my family’s experience during the Loma Prieta earthquake in ’89. I was five and it was incredibly frightening, but after that I gravitated toward earthquakes and read anything I could about them. In 1995 or 1996, I convinced my mom to buy us a pre-made earthquake kit.

I reconnected with prepping in my late twenties, when I got a puppy and moved to a small (<1000 people), isolated Northern California town with frequent power outages and water shortages, where the main roads out were vulnerable to flooding, and large earthquakes were a possibility. My dog was so obviously helpless and dependent on me; I figured I had to get ready to be cut off for a while, and have been engaged in prepping to one degree or another ever since.

 

I can’t remember the name of the book, but in elementary school I read a book about how there was some kind of a disaster and a group of kids survived – I think by hiding out together in a library?  I vaguely remember lessons within the story (which was fictional) about prioritizing things like multivitamins over candy or something, and how the kids built a community and everyone shared jobs helping the community to survive.  After that I was always just fascinated by – being prepared.  So many stories from childhood increased that interest, like the Bible story about Joseph and the famine and how storing grain saved so many people.  Even the stories of enslaved people escaping to freedom:  How preparedness was so critical.  As a child I could not understand the horrors of slavery, could not fathom starvation and famine. So on some level I think it was a desperate attempt to feel in control in a world that sometimes felt overwhelming. 

In adulthood I gradually began to see preparedness as – being an adult.  Being responsible, for myself and for my community. Making my own life easier, doing my part for my neighbors.  I’m also a gear junkie – I seriously love gear.  But overall I just find what some call preparedness is really just the next level of adulthood.  While I probably began prepping after reading that story in elementary school, I became very serious about it once the pandemic hit. At that point a friend introduced me to The Prepared and this site, combined with all my time in lockdown, has certainly been a wonderful guide. 

 

“book about how there was some kind of a disaster and a group of kids survived – I think by hiding out together in a library?”

Any chance this was the book?

 

I’m sure it wasn’t, both because that book was only published in 2017 and my elementary school days were LONG before that, and also because the hero in the story is apparently male and I remember that in the book I read it was a little girl who saved the day. I wish I could remember the title of it – it certainly wasn’t great literature or anything, and despite much googling I can’t find a book that matches. But the one you linked to looks very cool also – thanks for posting!

 

I was watching a news program when a story came on about a family who was asked to pretend an emergency occurred and they had only 15 minutes to pack.  It wasn’t so much what they took but what they left, like food for the dog and their cell phones (this was before smartphones).  It started me thinking what I would have done in that situation and I didn’t have a good answer.  Now I do. 

 

After the first time I had to evacuate for fire, in about 15 minutes, was when I really prepped (practiced) to evacuate for fire. It’s the things you leave behind, but also the things you take. I had important things thrown in with unimportant things and precious things not brought at all. I basically unpacked panic when I got home. It was a moment.

 

Steve, that was a great story. I’ve heard some of the Cuban missile crisis, but it’s not relatable like your story. Thanks for sharing your perspective.

There’s been a previous thread on this topic as well. It may be interesting to you and others. https://theprepared.com/forum/thread/what-triggered-you-to-prep/

I’ll summarize and expand on my response there: I started because I saw the examples set by my parents. We had a fairly self sufficient home, but not completely. In the blizzard that took out power to most of my county, our home was spared. We couldn’t go anywhere, but were warm and well fed. We checked on neighbors and heard of the hardships in other areas on the news. Some ‘shut ins’ that lost power died in their homes. Had we lost power, it would have been a different experience since our home heat and cooking were all electric. Dad purchased a kerosene heater and installed a fireplace the next summer. Lesson learned. We also regularly had tornado warnings/watches (one did come through), enough rain to swell creeks and flood neighborhoods (not our home), and ice storms that would bring down trees and power lines.  

Additionally, Dad enforced responsibility as part of privilege or ownership throughout my upbringing. He had a few guns in the house and if you were to shoot it, you had to also learn how to load/unload it and clean it. When I got my drivers license, I had to check the fluids and change a tire on my own before I was allowed to drive anywhere alone. If I asked him to do something ‘for me’ he would typically teach me how to do it instead. Mom was similar in different areas of expertise. These added confidence and self assuredness to a young teen, while also reinforcing skills and self reliance. My older brother joined the local volunteer fire department and took EMT classes while my mother started nursing school when I was in high school. I helped both with their studies and got CPR certified along the way. 

 

I too have enjoyed reading about other peoples experiences and motivations into prepping. I, like others, can’t say I had a single catalyst. Maybe, like Redneck, it was all those years as a Boy Scout and the “Be Prepared” motto but I think honestly I was brought up doing a few things that, for my mom weren’t prepping, but were everyday life to survive.

My mom had a garden out back in our suburb house outside Baltimore. I grew up heling her can peaches, spaghetti sauce, apple sauce, all sorts of jams and jellies, etc. It was natural for me.  When I married, I brought this lifestyle to my wife. It was never meant to be prepping, it was just the food I enjoyed over store bought.  I have always had a shelf of canned goods in my life.

Post college, living in the mountains of the Northeast, Maine, we get some hard winters. It isn’t prepping up here, it is just smart living and being ready for undriveable roads or power outages.  Due to my career and being gone from home for months at a time, when we built our house we bought in back ups to back ups, but never thought it prepping, more just in case.   We bought in a generator, but rather then the normal tank that runs for a few days we opted for the 500lb tank that will run the house for a week 24/7 when full. We bought a propane back up for heating in addition to the geo-thermal, we have a wood fired oven built into the kitchen-no need for electrical or propane just good old caveman fire and we can cook anything. We are on a well and septic. Have a fire place with built in blower to room the house.  Have a coleman 2 burner camping stove and 2 Big Green Egg grills for cooking as well. We have a garden, though we aren’t the best at it. We have always kept 2 spare sets of jackets/hats/gloves in the vehicles JIC since we were in college.

Little less than a year ago, I saw an reference to a website on prepping. I don’t remember which, but it was way more SHTF, zombie, EOW then I could handle or except. Then I came across TP, the only site I have yet to find with level headed, normal people prepping for relevant IRL circumstances.

From my experiences here I have learned so much and have grown to actually starting “prepping” even more. We know have oil lamps, stored water, more flash lights, more lighters/matches, more dog food, in process of making a well bucket, more gas. I have calculated how much propane my generator runs and know that if we cut the run time to only a few hours a day we can have occasional power for fridge/freezer/well for a month if needed. We have expanded our vehicle kits to include air pumps, snow shovels, and Battery Jump Starters to come soon (Christmas gift for wife). We are slowly expanding our stored food goods as well to give us a bit more. Solar generator to come.

It has at least given me even more confidence that my wife can survive for a while if there is a grid town, snow storm, loss of supply chain that requires her to do so. She isn’t a “prepper” and kinda laughs at me but is more then happy to go along with me if it makes me feel better and she does see the point in being ready.

 

That sure is awesome that TP accelerated your prepping in the right direction and how you are rationally in a much better place now. Thanks for sharing your experience!

 

I agree with you about those other websites….IMO they spend too much time talking about combat and death and destruction versus how to deal with real issues that will probably be important if troubles do happen. 

 

That is what has been so great about TP, you gain rational good guidance and advice about relevant and realistic topics. Plus the people are great.

 

Every little bit helps! I recently “rescued” a friend after a hike; her car battery had died far out in the woods and having the battery jump starter fully charged in my car made the whole situation a big “nothing” (instead of her missing her daughter’s party that afternoon while waiting for AAA).  Being prepared significantly reduces drama.

 

One thing that always triggers me to prep is when I see neighborhoods go without power due to wildfires, hurricanes, or even a car hitting a power line. I want to be resilient to go without if I need and have ways to generate power also.

 

I became interested in solar energy and sustainability in the early eighties leading up to the anniversary of Earth Day.  I originally found the idea of living off the grid to be good economically and a way not to fund utilities in my youth.  A move to a hurricane prone area 20 years ago began initial preparing for the all too frequent weather storms and the down-grid and limited supplies that occurred with each storm. This rekindled my interest in off-grid living and as I did more research on other aspects of survival; I then, began studying on security and defensive protection of my family, as well.

 

Solar sure has progressed leaps and bounds since the early eighties hasn’t it? It now is a viable option for most and there are many more options. 

 

I never started, it was just the way we lived growing up on a border hill farm in the 60’s.   

In the early 80’s I figured there was little future for me following sheep around a hill all-day, so joined the Military.  First time outside the UK and I was looking at the inner German Border.  Luckily I had a Cpl who was training up for selection and a Colour Sgt who was crazy, so we spent more time in the field than in barracks.  

Both of these situations reinforced the idea if you want something it’s probably best to make it yourself (that way you can fix it when it breaks) and a small community looks after its own.

These days I live in a small village (back in the borders),  I help out on the local council resilience team as well as working for private ambulance companies, so I tend to get a call at stupied o clock in the morning from my neighbours.

 

Both of these situations reinforced the idea if you want something it’s probably best to make it yourself (that way you can fix it when it breaks) and a small community looks after its own.

That’s one of the reasons I wanted to learn how to make my own power station instead of just buying a commercial product. I could repair or upgrade as necessary because I know how it worked. I’d like to be able to do that with more things in my life.

 

Well, I didn’t consider it was prepping, actually. The last incident involving severe storms during the previous winter validated the need to be ready for unknown emergencies. In my youth, I experienced most natural disasters (except massive flooding-Clarification required; we had flooding occur, just not in our vicinity). and formulated the opinion; it behooves one to initiate due diligence for oneself and loved ones. If not, you can become a victim of the environment with a higher probability than the norm.

 

Like many others I was preconditioned by influences including depression-era grandparents, scouts, and hobbies that involved being off the beaten track for several days at a time.  I became intentional about it while living in Klamath Falls, OR.  It’s a town on the eastern slope of the Cascades in Southern Oregon, a long way from anything.  A freak snowstorm hit Portland and suddenly a lot of the supplies we needed at the hospital where I worked were stuck on the freeway in more snow than that area could handle (which wasn’t much).  We started to run out and things got a little stressful.  During another storm the local airport ran out of deicer so we couldn’t fly patients out when they needed more care than we could provide.  When thousands of people from CA decided to watch the total solar eclipse a few hours north of us, fuel and a some other supplies got scarce as they passed through.  I realized that being prepared wasn’t about post-apocalyptic fantasy but rather being ready for unpredictable breakdown in our fragile economic system and infrastructure.  

I do think another milestone was early 2020.  I was caring for COVID patients before we knew much about it and staying in a camper to prevent possibly exposing my wife and 2 month old if I got it.  I think I was trying to find diapers online and not having much luck.  I searched for something like “prepping for people who aren’t crazy” which Google mapped to The Sane Prepper Mantra on this site.  The articles and community have definitely helped me be more thoughtful in what we are doing.

 

This is such a great thread! Really enjoying reading everyone’s stories.

I first started thinking about being more prepared in 2018, after gas workers replacing a line in Lawrence, MA, about 30 miles from wherever I live, over-pressurized the line by mistake and caused upwards of 80 fires at once. People’s homes literally exploded. It was totally crazy and shocking. Much of the surrounding area was evacuated and power was shut off for days; my then-boss’s brother lived in the area and was one of the folks evacuated. I remember seeing stories on the news of people who fled their homes without their wallets, glasses, prescription medicines, etc. — firefighters had to go in to retrieve these basics for them while it was still quite dangerous to be inside. I realized two things: 1) I didn’t want to be one of those folks who put others in harm’s way if I could help it, and 2) unless we did something to prepare, there was no way my husband and I were getting our pets out of the house in a situation like that! At the time, we had 2 cats and one bulky old pet crate, which was almost impossible to get out of the closet (and even if I did, they fought like hell not to go in it). I started with a small, poorly equipped emergency bag and a pair of more reasonable pet carriers. After the pandemic started, I realized I needed to think more broadly about preparedness and luckily found this site.

 

The Blizzard of ’78 was the initial kick in the pants.  When we built our house I wanted to have the option of wood heat.  We heated solely with wood for 6 years then put in a propane boiler that gave hot water and baseboard heating on the first floor.  Several years ago my wife expressed a nervous feeling about the future (as in SHTF) and asked what we could do.  She’s since regretted that request.  We’re good for several months if something happens.  It could be better but available room and finances are constricting our options.

 

I’m not much of a prepper.  I’ve just begun thinking about this.  Two things got me started:  Putin’s nuclear threats and the realization that to get to one of my favorite swimming pools you have to walk across a footbridge over a gully that I found out was created by the New Madrid earthquake in 1811!

 

Initially, I was passively worried about the future ever since the lockdown happened in 2020. Prior to that I generally assumed that my family, comprised mostly of people with outdoor hobby experience (hunting, fishing, etc.) was prepared enough for whatever came our way. Then Covid-19 blindsided everyone, and my anxiety started to rise.

That was when a video randomly popped up in my YouTube recommendations by a channel called City Prepping. I believe the video was about cooking if the grid goes down. His calm demeanor about it and approach to preparedness as more of a safety net than a conspiracy theorist fearmongering mindset is what ultimately hooked me into the concept. I’m probably one of the few members of Gen Z who’s gotten into preparedness, but since doing so a lot of my passive anxiety feels alleviated rather than increased.

Then I discovered this website while researching good firearms for beginner gun owners. ThePrepared has the same cool-headed approach as the YouTube channel that exposed me to preparedness, and I feel all the better for it.