Disaster ‘preparedness’ diversifies as more Americans lose confidence By Reuters

By Brad Brooks

LONGMONT, Colo. (Reuters) – Brook Morgan surveyed booths at the “Survival & Prepper Show” in Colorado, filled with boxes of ammunition, mounds of trauma medical kits and every type of knife imaginable.

Morgan, a self-described “thirty-something lesbian from Indiana,” is part of a new breed of Americans preparing to survive political upheavals and natural disasters, an activity that until recently was largely associated with social movements. far right like whites. nationalists since the 1980s.

Researchers say the number of preppers has doubled to about 20 million since 2017. Much of this growth comes from minorities and people considered politically left-of-center, whose sense of insecurity has been heightened by Donald Trump’s 2016 election, the COVID-19 pandemic, more frequent extreme weather, and the 2020 racial justice protests following the murder of George Floyd.

“I’m really surprised by the number of people of color here,” Morgan said. “I always went to these shows with my family in Indiana and they were only white people who were my parents’ age. There are a lot of young people here, too. It’s a real change.”

Morgan grew up in a prepper family and still considers herself self-sufficient and ready to handle a disaster, but she has partly left the prepper world of her youth to escape the conservatism associated with the movement.

The diversification of preparedness was clear last weekend at the Survival & Prepper show at the Boulder County fairgrounds, a liberal district that President Joe Biden won in 2020 by nearly 57 percentage points over Trump. More than 2,700 people paid $10 each to watch the show, organizers said, and the attendees were diverse.

There were bearded white men with close-cropped hair and heavily tattooed arms. But so were hippie moms carrying babies in rainbow-colored slings and chatting about canning methods, Latino families checking out greenhouses and water filtration systems, and members of the local Mountain View Fire Rescue team, which in 2021 fought a devastating fire in the region, providing CPR demonstrations and encouraging citizens to be more prepared for extreme events.

Attendees and booth managers said the show reflects the concerns of millions of Americans who no longer feel they can always rely on government or private industry to provide basic necessities, such as electricity, water and food.

They cited pandemic disruption to supply chains, the 2021 power grid crisis in Texas that left millions without electricity, and recent outages for thousands of AT&T (NYSE:) mobile users.

Chris Ellis is a U.S. Army colonel who works on disaster preparedness and recovery and is a leading researcher in the prepper movement who has tracked its growth to 20 million people based on family resilience data from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

He said what shapes individual preppers — who he defines as someone who can live for a month without outside support — is how they react to a single question: “Do I feel safe?”

“People want to regain their agency, their sense of control, and do something to adapt their fears to their actions,” said Ellis, who stressed that he was not speaking on behalf of the Defense Department.

People motivated by climate change, Ellis said, tend to be homeowners who grow their own food and move to more “climate-proofed” places, like the balmy summer paradise of Duluth, Minnesota.

Others, whose primary fear is lawlessness, are often the gun enthusiasts stereotypically associated with the prepper movement. The super rich often respond to their fears by spending millions to build bunkers in remote locations.

For John Ramey, a former Obama administration innovation adviser and creator of the website The Prepared, the community has grown to reflect American society at large in terms of political beliefs and demographic categories.

“The only real unifying denominator among preppers these days are people who are smart enough to be aware of what the world is like…and have the courage to do something about it,” Ramey said.

Back at the prep show at the Boulder County Fair, Jennifer Council pinched her thumb on the edge of an ax, balanced it in her hand and said it was perfect for both chopping down small trees and doing the delicate work of shaving needed to create the bait.

Council, a 50-year-old mother of three adult children and self-styled Black urban farmer, lives in a suburban home northwest of Denver.

“Preppers were seen as extremely weirdos,” Council said. “Then the pandemic hit and grocery stores were running out of food. Then there were the riots over the killing of young black men by police. Then there was the storming of the Capitol in Washington.”

“People are realizing that it’s important to be able to depend on what you can do for yourself.”