*Contributed Article.
The idea of preparation is something that’s central to the human experience. Baking a cake, going running, and taking exams, among thousands of other things, are all activities that require care in their undertaking. For many of us, though, it’s probably fair to say that preparation isn’t our best skill. Others take the concept to its logical extreme by making plans for the most unlikely scenarios.
Rogue Asteroids
Doomsday prep, i.e. taking steps to stave off a threat to humanity’s existence, isn’t a new thing but it is growing in popularity worldwide. There are different grades of preparation, ranging from wards against household problems to hiding in a fortified hole in the garden. A good example of the former involves the creation of a go bag or bug-out bag, which can be useful in all sorts of scenarios.
Your basic go bag is a pack full of survival essentials, like tools, first-aid supplies, a compass, and a torch. These are only designed for brief holdouts in the region of 24-72 hours, which makes them ideal for power cuts and incidents of flooding. Much more specialised kits can be crafted to deal with technology failures, as a recent infographic from ExpressVPN demonstrated.
Source: Pexels.
A tech survival kit should cover several different calamities, including the loss of important documents, minor hardware damage, and finding rescue in the worst-case situations. To this end, you should pack a spare phone, satellite phone, a power bank, and all the necessary charging cables. Also, copies of passports, insurance details, and birth certificates can help when it comes to proving identity and ownership.
The obvious question to ask is, has all this really caught on in Ireland? Doomsday prepping is usually considered a bit of an American thing, largely due to the US-produced TV show Doomsday Preppers. Ireland does have its fair share of pessimistic people preparing for the end, only, they’re not particularly interested in zombies or rogue asteroids. They’re trying to survive storms.
Snowmageddon
Back in 2018, the Irish newspaper The Independent noted that a series of weather events with unhelpfully comedic names (Snowmageddon, The Beast from the East, etc. ) had revealed that most people weren’t equipped to outlast the worst storms. Drivers got stuck in snowdrifts and householders ran out of food in what local survivalist Frank Deegan saw as a preview of an increasingly fragile future.
Source: Pexels.
The problem facing Ireland is that the country is on something of a flood plain for melting icecaps. The Global Flood Map website indicates that 472,899 Irish people will be flooded or displaced if the sea level rises by 18 inches. That’s quite a large chunk of the nation’s nearly 5m people. Unfortunately, it’s easy to ignore these figures simply because the events that produce them have only just started to have an impact.
What may surprise some people is that Frank Deegan believes that winter could pose the biggest obstacle to life in Ireland, rather than dry and hot summers. Cold is still a worry for lots of people in the British Isles and, with climate change potentially making the issue worse, stocking up for even a mild winter is a good idea. At the very least, you won’t have to worry about running out of tomato soup for the next few years.
