A 2024 FEMA survey found 43% of Americans are engaged in some kind of preparation for a disaster. While evangelical Christians might be preparing for the second coming of Jesus, northern Californians prepare for earthquakes and wildfires with “go-bags” at the ready.
You can find buckets of ready-to-eat meals at Costco, dig a fallout shelter in your backyard or buy a luxury bunker in an abandoned missile silo in Kansas.
McKinley recently held his third annual three-day prepping expo in Little Falls, Minn., where 20 speakers taught people how to build fires, purify water, forage, plan an evacuation, develop a “survival mindset,” make a “bug-out bag,” wear camouflage, and make a Faraday cage to block electromagnetic fields.
McKinley became a prepper after a harrowing experience in North Dakota’s Bakken oil patch in 2010. A snowstorm with 70 mph wind gusts took down power lines.
“Being a Minnesotan, it was no big deal,” to him, he said. But some people who weren’t accustomed to hurricane-force winds in a snowstorm “panicked,” looting grocery stores.