Interest in ‘prepping’ grows with political, climate fears – Pueblo Chieftain

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COLUMBIA HEIGHTS, Minn. — The tiny house that Bryan Korbel is building in his Columbia Heights driveway will have all the comforts of a 260-square-foot home.

There’ll be a shower with an on-demand water heater, a microwave oven, stove, composting toilet, satellite dish and power provided by solar panels. It’s being built on a trailer, so it can be towed anywhere.

Korbel’s self-sufficient micro-cottage isn’t being built out of a Thoreau-esque desire to simplify, or to achieve a chic minimalist aesthetic.

He’s building it for the end of the world.

When all hell breaks loose — war, natural disaster, a breakdown in civil society — Korbel will hitch his house on wheels to a 1972 Ford F100 pickup. (That’s before the advent of computerized car systems, which Korbel says will be fried by the electromagnetic pulse created by a nuclear blast.)

He’ll haul the structure and his family to a patch of land he has north of Hinckley, Minn., stopping to get supplies he’s cached along the way in PVC tubes buried underground. He’s prepared, he believes, to ride out anything that man or nature might throw at him.

Korbel, 53, is a prepper, that breed of person who stockpiles food, toilet paper and ammunition to last not days, but months — just in case.

“My wife gave me the nickname Mad Max,” Korbel said. “My brother, he thinks it’s nuts. He’s lazy. I already know he’s going to be knocking on my door.”

Predictions that the end is near are as old as Noah. More modern manifestations have included people who felt the need to build home fallout shelters during the Cold War and pessimists who feared the worst from a Y2K collapse. Events such as 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina have continued to fuel fears.

The latest bad news: This year, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists decided to reset its famous Doomsday Clock — “a universally recognized indicator of the world’s vulnerability to catastrophe” — from three minutes to only 2 1/2 minutes before midnight.

According to the Bulletin scientists, in the 70-year history of the Doomsday Clock, the last time things have been this bad for the planet was 1953, just after the U.S. and the Soviet Union developed the first hydrogen bombs. At that time, the scientists deemed we were only two minutes to apocalypse.

No wonder Costco is selling $3,399.99 packages of freeze-dried and dehydrated emergency foods that promise 31,500 total servings, enough to feed four people for a year, with a shelf life of up to 25 years. The food shipment arrives on a pallet that is “black-wrapped for security and privacy.”

Or you could buy end-of-the-world supplies from a specialty retailer such as Safecastle.com.

Safecastle was started by Prior Lake, Minn., resident Vic Rantala after 9/11 because he saw a niche for an online source of affordable, quality, long-term stored food.

The company has since branched out to sell surveillance robots, radiation detectors, folding “bug-out” bicycles intended for paratroopers and a 35-piece pet survival kit designed for a “CATastrophe.”

You can even buy an underground fallout shelter that costs more than $100,000.

“We early on developed a relationship with a steel plate shelter builder in Louisiana,” Rantala said. “Our builder has done seven-figure bunkers for people.”

He said his best-seller is something homier: canned, cooked bacon with a shelf life of more than 10 years.

“We sell peace of mind to people,” Rantala said.

He estimates that as many as “10 percent of the population are into prepping these days,” although he admits figures can be fuzzy because preppers are notoriously secretive about their preparations.

“Sometimes you don’t even tell your family members,” he said. “It can be a little bit of an obsession, I have to admit.”