by Ted Koppel
Brian, who is a financial advisor in New York, didn’t worry about disaster preparedness at all while he was single, but now that he has a family he has given it some thought. His first inclination is to stay in place and keep the family in their apartment. He has purchased something called a “water bomb,” which holds up to a hundred gallons and has a pump at the top (clearly it would need to be filled before the power and water pressure went out). Brian also recommends keeping a safe in the apartment and having lots of cash on hand. He is reluctant to own a gun but has acquired pepper spray and a Taser.
If and when he and his family are no longer able to stay in the apartment, he would arm himself with pepper spray and the Taser, go and get his car, pick up the family, and head for the Hamptons. Brian and I were, on the occasion of our conversation, actually in the Hamptons, and it does seem like a lovely place to hunker down in bad times. Still, I pointed out, if a major part of the Eastern Interconnect is down, the Hamptons would also go dark. Brian has considered this. Several of his friends have equipped their expensive houses with large generators. The conversation trailed off as we considered the likelihood that some of these friends, with limited supplies of food and water, might not choose to take in Brian and his family. Ever the capitalist, Brian considered an arrangement under which he would finance the provisioning of his friend’s house, with the understanding that he and his family would be ensured a safe haven in the event of a crisis.
Having the money to spend on disaster preparation is one thing; spending that money prudently is another. It depends, in part, on how worried you are and how much money you have. Apparently the combination is flourishing. According to the Freedonia Group, a Cleveland-based market research firm, spending on residential security has more than doubled since 2001, from $7 billion to a projected $16 billion in 2016. That little nugget was tucked away in a Wall Street Journal story on what may be the ultimate domicile for the worried wealthy: a decommissioned missile silo near Concordia, Kansas. Entirely underground and constructed to withstand a direct hit by a nuclear device, it has been reconfigured into a number of luxury survival condominium units. There is a community swimming pool, exercise gym, spa, movie theater, and lounge, and the old missile control center has been turned into hydroponic gardens and an aquaculture system. The units sell for $1.5 to $3 million and each comes with a five-year supply of freeze-dried and dehydrated food. The security guards have special-forces training, and although the silo is connected to the electric grid, there is backup power in the form of two diesel generators, a wind turbine, and a battery bank.
Craig Kephart prefers making his own arrangements. He bears a passing resemblance to Hank Schrader, the DEA agent in the hit television series Breaking Bad. Craig is slimmer and fitter but carries himself with a little of the swagger that marks the Schrader character. When he picked me up at Lambert–St. Louis International Airport, Craig had already put in some early road time. He had, he explained, been on his regular Saturday morning bike ride—twenty miles or so while the temperature was merely in the low nineties. Over the next ten hours I came to appreciate how much Craig embodies the aphorism “It ain’t bragging if you can do it.”
Craig is an avid prepper, and the biking is an essential ingredient of his approach to disaster preparedness. He and his wife, Gayle, each have adult children from previous marriages, but now they live in a large, handsome house in an upscale St. Louis suburb. Craig is executive director of the COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease) Foundation. Craig’s work entails frequent trips to Miami, New York, and Washington, D.C. For all the preparations he’s made to survive a variety of disasters, Craig worries that he may be trapped out of town and that all conventional forms of travel could be shut down. He always carries enough cash so that, no matter which city he’s in, he would be able to buy a bicycle, biking shoes, and whatever other equipment he would need to take him back to St. Louis.
I was skeptical. “D.C. to St. Louis? How far is it from D.C. to St. Louis?”
“I have no idea,” said Craig. “What is it, a thousand miles?”
Craig assumes that he could ride 150 to 200 miles a day. He’s thought about this a lot. “Last place I want to be is in a major metropolitan area during a time of national crisis.”
Gayle, meanwhile, would be quite literally holding down the fort. The Kepharts’ suburban home has two safe rooms for refuge if the house came under attack. A narrow, vertical safe holds a variety of long guns and handguns. Gayle traveled to Las Vegas to take a course titled Target Focused Training. “What it does,” she explained, “is teach you to target certain areas of the body. It’s not ninja stuff. It’s poke the eyes out.”
Not just the eyes.
“If someone had told me that I would be grabbing totally strange men’s…I would have told you that I would rather die than try that.”
“You’re talking about grabbing someone’s genitals?”
“Yes. Grabbing strange men in the groin. But I completed the course, and I think it was one of the best things I’ve ever done.”
She and Craig both have concealed-carry licenses. The possibility of using that handgun weighs on Gayle as she considers what might happen. “I think about it often, especially with Craig traveling. I sit there on my couch with a weapon on the coffee table in front of me, and I go through the scenarios. What if somebody breaks through that door? Could I get to my gun fast enough? Would I? Could I? It goes through my head constantly, and I guess my only answer is you never really know until you’re faced with that situation.”
Craig and Gayle have both done more than think about the situation; they’ve discussed it with their firearms instructors. One of them told Craig: “If you ever pull that gun in a situation, it will cost you $10,000. Whether you’re right, whether you’re wrong, it doesn’t matter. You will get sued civilly. You could be prosecuted.”
“OK, then,” Craig asked, “what’s the rule of thumb?”
As Craig reported, the instructor said, “If you’re in a situation and you have time to think, ‘This is going to cost me $10,000,’ that is not the time you’ll use that gun. It’s when you are in such fear for your life that the only thing you would do is grab that gun and use it.” Craig added, “His point was, it’s not a conscious decision.”
Prepping in general is, for Craig, very much a conscious decision—a long-term, carefully planned, and deliberate process. “That’s one of the problems with prepping,” he said. “People buy all this stuff and don’t know how to use it. So the skills you obtain are much more important. How do you can and preserve food? What about hunting, fishing? How about sanitation and first aid? If we can’t access antibiotics, a scratch or a cut can become life-threatening. There are some guys near here, former Rangers, who offer a survival and first-aid course. The other skills I’m trying to learn—how to build privies.”
By almost any standard, the Kepharts seem pretty much prepared for anything. They have several months’ worth of food in the basement. “We’ll put up a year’s worth of chicken and then eat it over the winter.” In the event of a major catastrophe, though, Craig decided some time ago that it wouldn’t be enough. “Our house is not defensible.”
Heading out on I-70 west, Craig drives the two of us toward a turnoff about sixty miles from St. Louis. We are in rural Missouri on what might be described as a Protestant road to salvation. The Warrenton Church of God cautions that “anger is only one letter away from danger.” We pass the Church of Christ and the Pentecostal Power Ministries, the Fellowship Baptist Church and a stark, simple cross looming above the no-nonsense sign for the Warrenton Christian Church. Grace Bible Church humbly suggests that we “be imitators of God.” We are driving through the Bible Belt toward eighty heavily wooded and isolated acres where, in extremis, Craig and Gayle Kephart and members of their extended family of children and grandchildren could survive disaster. Not all members of the family are convinced they would take advantage of the opportunity.
Like many preppe
rs, Craig is indifferent to the precise nature of what might drive him and his family to seek extreme shelter. Echoing Bill Cirmo, he credits his awakening to William Forstchen’s One Second After, which he said provided him with a keener understanding of how dependent we are on electricity. These days, Craig would more accurately be described as a disciple of the Keith Alexander school of thought. As the former NSA chief put it, if you’re hit by a car, it doesn’t matter whether it’s a red car or a blue car.
Before joining the COPD Foundation, Craig Kephart was a successful business owner. Having cashed out, he is now able to harness money to determination in order to support a conviction. He does not, he told me, want to be the guy who puts a quarter of a million dollars into a bunker. He has, however, invested significantly more than that in what he refers to, using a common prepper phrase, as his “bug-out property.” It is a place to live, as distinct from being just a place to hunker down and hide.
There’s a forty-by-sixty-foot metal barn erected on poles sunk into concrete footings. It has a high bay that accommodates a large recreational vehicle and which would serve as living quarters for part of the family. The other half of the building is, for the time being, a weekend cabin. The roof faces south so that solar panels will get maximum sun. There’s a cesspool. There’s a well. Craig is contemplating a second building, something more permanent, with a basement and a root cellar. Craig envisions a vault, a secure place to store weapons and ammunition and for long-term food storage. Ideally, said Craig, this would become a permanent residence, which would entail selling the house in the St. Louis suburbs. When we talked, Gayle was not yet sold on taking that final step.
In the meantime, Craig continues preparing his property for long-term survival. A major element of Craig’s long-haul plan was a lake; there wasn’t one when he bought the property, so he purchased two additional two-acre parcels of land to accommodate a road and a dam. Then he brought in a lake builder, who excavated three acres of land down to an average depth of about twenty feet. During the excavation they found clay with which to construct the dam, and Craig hired a geologist to confirm that it would be adequate for holding water. Looming above the completed dam are three-hundred-foot limestone bluffs; below are about sixty acres of catchment area where rainfall gets funneled into the lake. Craig has now stocked the lake with fish, which were small and not moving much on the afternoon I visited—perhaps due to the blistering hundred-degree heat—but Craig assured me that they will grow to catchable, edible size.
We drove around the property on an all-terrain vehicle that remains on the site. Craig paid the local electric company to put in the poles and lines and hook up the property, so under normal circumstances there is electricity, but he also has a couple of generators. He showed me where he plans to put in his orchard and where the beehives will be someday. Craig estimated that the lake project alone cost about $50,000 and that, all told, the finished property will cost somewhere in the range of half a million dollars. That seemed on the light side.
Not far from the lake, Craig has carved out a small shooting range. I happily accepted his offer to let me try my hand at target shooting. What made a particular impression on me was the setup. From the back of his car Craig pulled out a folding table, on which he laid out the guns, the ammunition, and a first-aid kit. He was scrupulous about showing me the kit’s contents, explaining that if I inadvertently shot him, there might not be time or the opportunity to spell things out. Even more than the unexpected difficulty of placing my shots into a man-sized target from only fifteen feet away, that precaution stayed with me. Craig approaches every undertaking by preparing for the unexpected, and doing so with care.
Craig Kephart is applying what he has—money, determination, and a great deal of time and effort—to sustain him and his family in the aftermath of disaster, in whatever form it comes. It would not be fair to suggest that these are the mindless expenditures of a wealthy dilettante. But what Craig has constructed and assembled in rural Missouri is clearly an enterprise beyond the means of most Americans.
Farther west, outside Cody, Wyoming, another determined survivor has invested an enormous amount of sweat equity instead of money. The last time you ran into someone like Andrew Rose may have been back in junior high school, at the science fair. There were the predictable entries: the combination of Diet Coke and Mentos, the modeling-clay volcano looming over a village assembled from a discarded Monopoly set. Andrew was the kid who compared the effect of electrical load on a fuel cell and rechargeable batteries. (That, actually, was the winner of a more recent seventh-grade science fair, but there have always been science fair winners and the rest of us.)
These days, Andrew Rose works at the University of Wyoming helping manufacturers with product development and providing energy audits and assessments for businesses that would like to reduce energy use through retrofitting. He, his wife, Stephanie, and their eight-year-old son live about a mile up the road from Wyoming’s Heart Mountain Relocation Center, where Japanese Americans were interned more than seventy years ago.
As one approaches the Rose family’s hilltop home, the most dominant feature is a sixty-foot mast, atop which sits something that looks like a three-bladed, single-propeller airplane with a very large tail fin. It is, Andrew later explained, a ten-thousand-watt wind turbine, capable of producing an average daily energy output of twenty-two kilowatt-hours. Envision ten 100-watt bulbs casting bright light for an hour and you have the equivalent of one kilowatt-hour. The wind turbine generates twenty-two times that much energy every day.
The Rose family home is on the electric grid but could survive without it. Andrew has installed solar panels and a hydronic heating system. The hot water from a propane-powered boiler flows through coils under the brick-and-tile floors. Andrew’s various systems generate more energy than the home actually requires, so he sells the excess back to the power company. Though the company pays him only 50 percent of the power’s retail cost, by the end of the year his energy expenditures essentially zero out.
Andrew and Stephanie consider themselves early adopters. “When I hear ‘prepper,’ ” said Andrew, “I think prep school. But for what we’ve done, people say you’re an early adopter because you’re one of the pioneers to develop renewable energy on a small scale.”
The pioneer label seems apt. They’re about fifteen miles from Cody in one direction and fifteen miles from the next town, Powell, in the other. The nearest neighbor is a quarter mile away and, as Stephanie said, “with an eight-year-old, playdates are a challenge.”
Andrew built the house, he said, “because I feel it’s an act of being self-reliant. It’s using resources on our land. It’s creating electricity that’s carbon-free. There are absolutely no emissions to the electricity that we generate, and I think it’s also a good way to show by example that you can do some things to create your own energy.”
Andrew Rose is a role model but not a practical example. He lives in a house that he built from the ground up. The walls are ten to twelve inches thick, made of thousands of adobe-like bricks, and—this probably distinguishes Andrew from all but a handful of other Americans—he made the bricks himself.
“Right, right. I built it with local materials, natural materials. I learned how to make the adobe through a lot of reading. I also did a four-day workshop in adobe and rammed-earth building.” The blocks alone, he said, took five to six years to make. “And then, of course, there’s a lot of exposed wood, so there’s wood beams and a lot of unusual features to the house. There’s arches, curved walls, one fireplace built within a wall. A lot of unusual touches that make it unique.”
“Andy,” I asked, “would you be offended if I told you that a lot of people out there would say you must be some kind of a nut job?”
A man who spends five years assembling thousands of adobe blocks is not easily offended. “I’m a little bit eccentric,” he allowed, “and that’s OK.”
Stephanie offered up her own definition of what it means to
be an early adopter: “Someone who is willing to try something that would not fit into the status quo at that point in time.”
What they’ve done, Andrew added, can serve as an example for the future. The concept, called “distributed generation,” is not unique to Andrew Rose. It envisions downsizing the current system of large-scale power plants to clusters of smaller generators spread across a broader area. His own home is an example of how this cottage-industry energy plan might work.
None of this is going to be of any immediate value to a family in Chicago wondering how they will survive the loss of a power grid, but it provides a glimpse into a more sustainable future. In that very real sense, Andrew Rose and his family are pioneers. Movements may grow out of what they are doing. In the meantime, they are neither discouraged by their current isolation nor particularly driven to find converts. Still, many of the advantages enjoyed by millions of people today emerged from designs and inventions produced by innovators inspired by nothing more than insatiable curiosity and an indefatigable drive. It seems important to acknowledge that Andrew Rose and I are made of different stuff. A hundred and fifty years ago, I would have dropped off the wagon train in St. Louis. Andrew would have made it through the Donner Pass.