Realtors Prepping for Return to Work – 9&10 News

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Like many types of business, realtors have been champing at the bit to get back to work. And this week it’s their turn.

Realtors are going back to business on Thursday, but things will look a little different.

In a business that’s all about face to face meetings, some things will have to. For the time being, Open Houses are cancelled. In person showings may limit the number of visitors, require face masks, and extra guidelines will be in place regarding touching surfaces and disinfecting. But the Traverse Area Association of Realtors says demand was high before the coronavirus hit, and they don’t expect to change.

Kim Pontius is the CEO of TAAR, the Traverse Area Association of Realtors. He says, “I think a lot of people have figured out that now is a really good time to find out what it is that’s important to us in our home , our apartment, our condo. And this has given them ideas about things they’d like to look for. Because they’ve been stay at home, because they’ve had to live within their internal environment within their home, perhaps there’s a lot of people that have found out they need a little more space, or a little less, or they need a different configuration of space.”

TAAR says their tracking data shows sellers are ready to go, and buyers are waiting. “We had pent up demand before we went into this. If you look at the tracking numbers we get… almost every one of them will tell you there’s been a massive uptick.”

Real Estate Adjustment Web Image1It may be too soon to tell how COVID-19 affects the overall transaction when it comes to mortgage approval, inspections, and closing. Pontius says, “It’s just going to feel different to people. But I think with some of the guidelines we’re putting in place we’re trying to make it a lot easier for people to have the experience of being able to view the property, sit down and talk to their realtor.”

Pontius also says the industry has worked closely with the State to reopen on May 7. “A great deal of credit is due to our state association who worked very closely with the Governor’s office to get some of these things lifted and to get restrictions in place to allow us to get back to some sense of normal.”

We Should All Be Preppers – The Atlantic

Preppers all over the world have been hunkered down safely at home or in their bunkers during the COVID-19 pandemic. For them, long-term food storage is a baseline, so making it through a season or two without venturing out is primarily a psychological challenge. I’ve spent the past three years interviewing people preparing for an ambiguous future disaster, and some of them emailed me in the early days of the pandemic from their redoubts, expressing wry frustration as they watched shoppers on TV frantically stacking supplies—hand sanitizer, bottled water, and, yes, toilet paper—in their shopping carts. One wrote me, “These people are fixing a leaky roof in a rainstorm.”

Chances are you have a neighbor who was ready for this pandemic. And if you knew they were stockpiling before the disaster, you likely thought they were weirdos. I know I did, even as I traveled the world writing a book about them. Not anymore. Although preppers have long been the subject of ridicule, I imagine many of us will take on some of their habits, or at the very least make space in our closets and garages for nonperishables.

Scooping up scarce necessities gives people a sense of control during times of uncertainty, so the great toilet-paper dash-and-grab of 2020 was a self-fulfilling prophecy. The rarer something is, the more people seek it. Six weeks after the initial pandemic hoarding spree, many key commodities are still in short supply. President Donald Trump recently signed an executive order to prevent meat shortages. With about 15 percent of the population now unemployed, Americans are looking for assistance from food banks, in lines stretching for miles in some places. These spectacles of desperation are both a censure of our society and a revelation about our collective lack of personal preparedness.

The crisis has also highlighted how woefully inadequate many of our living arrangements are for social distancing. I have friends in London, New York, Los Angeles, and Sydney who have little ability to cook, let alone store food. That level of base-needs dependency on society is anathema to preppers, who are quick to point out that only a few hundred years ago not having enough food and fuel stored to make it through winter was effectively suicide.

A couple of years back, I flew to Chiang Mai, Thailand, to interview a wealthy Canadian offshore oil-rig worker and doomsday prepper who asked me to refer to him as “Auggie.” I was baffled by Auggie’s desire for a pseudonym, because he was in the middle of building the most conspicuous house I’d ever seen. Operating on the extreme end of disaster preparedness, he was constructing an “eco-fortress” composed of four villas that he would stock with enough supplies for a multi-month siege. He designed three of these villas for future buyers. Auggie’s own stronghold was a three-story concrete block with bulletproof windows and an open-air central atrium. He planned to scaffold the interior walls with lattice for passion-fruit vines that would drape down over a swimming pool. He assured me that the off-the-grid building, which sat in the middle of an abandoned orchard at the far edge of a secluded village, would have remote surveillance systems, mantraps, a panic room, and a nuclear-fallout shelter that doubled as a day spa.

He called his customized hideaway “Sanctum,” which in Latin means “a holy place,” but in English denotes a private retreat. For Auggie, the doomstead served both purposes, being a place for safety, study, and self-improvement during the crisis he was sure was just around the corner. And here we are.

Even before the outbreak of COVID-19, preparing for emergencies, in the casual sense, could no longer be considered a niche activity in the United States. A 2017 survey by the financial-tech company Finder suggested that roughly 20 percent of Americans spent money on survival materials that year, and a further 35 percent said they already had what they needed for an emergency. But my guess is that many of these same people are now finding that their preparations were inadequate. Someone might keep a flashlight and a first-aid kit hanging from a garage hook or tucked under the bed, or may have even purchased a three-day tactical assault “bug-out bag” available on Amazon for $49.99, but only staunch cynics have stockpiled food, water, medicine, fuel, tools, weapons, and equipment for months of isolation.

Auggie’s eco-fortress in Chiang Mai, Thailand. (Courtesy of Bradley Garrett)

In 2013, at least 3.7 million Americans self-identified as survivalists, according to 24/7 Wall Street, a financial-news source. Many of these citizens, who suspected that the government lacked the resources to protect them after decades of cuts to the public sector, have hoarded with the gusto of frontier settlers. Prepping is a multibillion-dollar-a-year industry in the U.S. In a 2017 interview with Bloomberg, Aaron Jackson, then the CEO of Wise Co., a Salt Lake City–based producer of freeze-dried fare with a 25-year shelf life, declared that his food was a staple “that every American household in this age of uncertainty should have.” Jackson estimates that survival food sales alone total about $400 million annually. The company delivers certainty in a pallet of black plastic buckets for $9,499.99. Supposedly, this mail-order pantry can provide three meals a day for one year for a family of four. Long-term food buckets for your “deep larder” can now be bought at Kmart and Bed Bath & Beyond. Costco recently had a page dedicated to “Emergency Food by the Pallet,” advertising “one year of food storage” for $4,999. These pallets sold out two months ago, as did many of the televangelist Jim Bakker’s “survival food buckets.”

If you are a prepper, you probably haven’t told anyone. My brother, who knew for years that I was writing a book about prepping, let me in on a secret only a few weeks ago: He had a storage unit filled with two years’ worth of food, a handful of N95 masks, long-range two-way radios, and a small arsenal. The crisis having finally arrived, he’d activated the cache. That he never dared mention it to me previously was both vexing and unsurprising.

The reason for secrecy, according to a paper published last year by Kezia Barker at Birkbeck, University of London, is because “hoarding” has been deemed pathological. We’re meant to trust business, trade networks, and markets to provide what we need, to not question the resiliency of globalization. But as these systems shudder under the weight of a worldwide catastrophe, the curtain has been pulled back on the dangers of free-market faith. Prepping is, at its heart, a kind of activism, a bulwark against the false promises of capitalism, of the idea of endless growth and the perpetual availability of resources.

As Barker suggests, stockpiling exposes the magical thinking behind the assurances of universal state security. This is why this kind of preparation folds so well into conservative narratives distrustful of big government, experts, and elites. The right-wing commentators Sean Hannity and Alex Jones advocate doomsday prepping to their audiences, and market products to meet those needs. For people eager to dismantle state infrastructure, the failure of that infrastructure in an emergency is vindication of foresight. President Trump has consistently relegated responsibility for management of the pandemic to state governments and the private sector, all while claiming unprecedented executive authority and proffering erroneous information to the public on a daily basis. It’s the perfect cocktail for compounding the crisis, proving the conservative thesis that big government is bad government.

The political left also has its doom prophets, of course. The cultural theorist Paul Virilio once said that, due to our economic reliance on connection and speed, it was realistic to think that “there is an accident brewing that would occur everywhere at the same time,” words that reverberate dramatically under present circumstances.

I’m now holed up in a bunker of sorts in south Los Angeles—in my 78-year-old mom’s well-stocked and isolated house in a gated community. Like my brother, we’ve acquired radios and a deep larder, planted a garden, and have no need to panic shop. However, we’ve had to leave the house every three days or so to pick up my mom’s prescriptions and take her to doctors’ appointments. I imagine more committed preppers like Auggie in Chiang Mai shaking their heads at this.

I sent him a message recently to ask whether it’s realistic to think that we can prepare for every eventuality. He wrote back immediately: “I created an Ebola hazmat kit a few years ago when I thought the outbreak would take off.” His friends at the time thought that this was a superfluous line of defense. Now he’s unpacking the bunny suit and powered air-purifying respirator. I thought about him laying out that kit in his fortress and recalled some of the skeptical questions I’d fired at him during my visit. I felt my cheeks redden. Then the next message arrived.

“Preppers don’t seem so crazy when there’s a pandemic, correct?” Auggie has now sold two of the three other villa plots at Sanctum.

Over the past three or four years, I’ve hung out in luxury condos inside missile silos, in bunker complexes on the Great Plains, with groups growing food in secret forests, with people building heavily armored vehicles, and with religious communities that have collected supplies that they’re ready to hand over to strangers. Most of the people I’ve met aren’t getting ready for an extinction-level event, and sneer at the suggestion. Rather, prepping for them is about building up hopeful confidence that they’ve planned ahead for the inevitable catastrophes of existence. This pandemic, which they consider mid-level, is rightfully causing us to reckon with the failures of our social, political, and economic systems, and we should all collectively push to make them more resilient to contingencies. But in the meantime, a bit of practical prepping can take some strain off these systems while we wait for the next cosmic surprise.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

How Colorado’s Office of Emergency Management is prepping for reopening – 9News.com KUSA

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Kyle talked with Kevin Klein, from Colorado’s Office of Emergency Management, to discuss the state of testing and PPE, food and supply chains, and wildfire season.

We mocked preppers and survivalists – until the pandemic hit – The Guardian

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You’ve heard of preppers, right? Survivalists? If you’ve watched TV shows like Doomsday Preppers, you know about their strange, apocalyptic beliefs: that a disaster could strike at any time, overwhelming first responders and the social safety net; that this crisis could disrupt supply chains, causing scarcity and panic and social breakdown; that authorities might invoke emergency powers and impose police curfews. Crazy theories like that.

In fact, many perfectly reputable organizations – including the US federal government and the Red Cross – recommend Americans maintain extra food and emergency supplies. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) advises keeping a two-week supply of food, as well as water, batteries, medical masks, first-aid supplies and a battery- or hand-powered radio, among other things.

In mainstream society, however, interest in prepping usually invites ridicule about bunkers and tin-foil hats. Preppers have spent years as the objects of our collective derision.

Until now. Today, we’re all preppers – or rather, wish we had been. Non-preppers have been caught in a rain shower without an umbrella. I don’t know if preppers are laughing right now, but perhaps they’re entitled to some vindication.

Now, I’m not a prepper. I am an effete quasi-intellectual with no practical skills of any kind. My current “emergency supplies” are some Hungry-Man Dinners and a liter of bourbon. If things get really bad I will finish the bourbon, lie down and wait to be eaten by stray cats.

But I’ve come to respect the preppers’ ethos of survival and preparedness. One of my friends is one, or at least on the spectrum. When coronavirus hit, he wasn’t one of the millions of people scrambling for surgical masks; he already had them in his survival kit. He kept a few and gave the rest to elderly people.

It has become fashionable to argue – not entirely accurately – that there are “no libertarians in a pandemic”. Certainly, this crisis has been a stark reminder of the importance of collective action. We’re all on this ship together; Covid-19 has laid bare the pathetic inadequacy of the US social safety net, our lack of investment in the common good, and our government’s short attention span for preparing for crises that don’t involve terrorism or war.

But collective action also requires some level of individual responsibility and preparedness, too, at least for those with the ability and the means. You can’t aid your elderly, immunocompromised or poorer neighbors if you haven’t taken the bare minimum of preparations. There’s a reason that airplane safety demonstrations warn passengers to put on their own air-masks before assisting others.

We’re right to be angry at the people stripping supermarkets bare and hoarding desperately needed supplies. Those people aren’t preppers, however. Preppers don’t engage in panic-buying. That’s the whole point. That’s why it is called prepping.

“Prepping is a choice that occurs before a panic, not during,” a prepper recently complained on Reddit. “If you didn’t stock up over time, you are a hoarder or, perhaps worse, an opportunist. In times like these we need to come together and support one another. That doesn’t mean giving away your supplies, but it does mean living in a society.”

Another added, “We aren’t the reason that elderly or immunocompromised people can’t find hand sanitizer, masks or toilet paper. We bought things in small increments when it made zero impact on the supply.”

Yes, some preppers are individualistic to the point of being antisocial. Rightwing survivalists, in particular, are often motivated by paranoid, apocalyptic, and racist or conspiratorial beliefs. A massive doomsday industry caters to their fantasies with expensive survival supplies of questionable utility.

The preppers we encounter in popular culture are invariably the worst examples – religious or political zealots, eccentrics, middle-aged men suffering crises of masculinity, and, in the case of shows such as Doomsday Preppers, caricatures selected for entertainment value.

But not all are gun and gear fetishists with delusions of grandeur; many are apolitical or even leftwing. Global warming, environmental degradation and anxiety about the Trump administration have spurred liberals and leftists into the fold. Websites such as ThePrepared offer useful, non-alarmist advice on disaster preparedness.

The more sophisticated practitioners have always understood that prepping is a matter of both individual and collective wellbeing. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, better known as the Mormon church, operates a massive network of grain silos and food depots. People undergoing hardship receive food and household goods, for free or in exchange for volunteer service, at the church’s Costco-style warehouses. The system is vertically integrated, with food supplied by church-owned farms. All Mormons are also encouraged to maintain emergency stockpiles in their home – not only for their own sake, but to assist neighbors when a hurricane or flood strikes.

When disaster strikes, not if. The problem is that disasters always look like remote possibilities before they occur, and historical abstractions afterward. Even the coronavirus, as insurmountable as it seems, will eventually pass; we will return to normalcy, and then complacency, and maybe even go back to ridiculing preppers.

Yet global warming probably means more and more of these kinds of crises – natural disasters, but also economic instability and possibly more pandemics, as thawing ice releases long-dormant pathogens.

I suspect the real reason many people instinctively recoil from prepping is psychological. Prepping comes across as pessimistic or even cynical. But perhaps it is better to think of it as pragmatism. We should prepare for disasters for the same reason we buy life insurance or back up computer files: hope for the best, plan for the worst.

Recently, while doing some quarantine cleaning, I found several books I acquired during younger – less lazy, and more idealistic – days: The Boy Scout Fieldbook; The US Army Survival Manual; Living Off the Country. It seems unlikely they’ll prove too relevant here in Brooklyn, New York, but I’ve decided to brush up anyway. I also found a book called Home Brewing Without Failures, by the unimprovably named HE Bravery. The utility of that one should speak for itself.

Sola Salon prepping for comeback after quarantine – ABC 12 News

The doors to hair and nail salons, barbershops, spas and other businesses offering similar services have been closed since March 21.

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Sola Salon in Fenton, it is home to 30 stylists, nail techs, and aestheticians.

“We listen and we’re more than just hair sometimes we’re therapists in a sense. And it’s nice catching up with them and it’s like a little spa therapy,” said stylist Cheyenne Eads.

Sola like many salons, spas, and barbershops use the gold standard disinfectant Barbicide. Moving forward, all stylist at Sola must get Barbicide Certified.

“The sanitation training goes beyond hair so I’ve made it a requirement upon entry to the world again that they provide their certification and have it posted in their studio. At the end of the day the most important thing in our industry is providing safe environments for our clients when it starts to reopen,” said owner Kevin Lent.

When Salons do open, social distancing will be a big factor and with individual studios it’ll make keeping space easier to manage.

“The physical set up is uniquely positioned to encourage social distancing required and minimize exposure. It’s just client and hairstylist that’s it. No people you have to get through,” said Lent.

Along with only one client and one stylist in each studio, new protocols will also be put into play for everyone involved.

“We’re going to ask them to do a lot of things to help us help them. Stay in contact,” said stylist Denise McDowell. “When they arrive for an appointment we can say don’t come in, stay in the car. We’ll let you know when it’s your turn. We’re staying up on that so we can make it safer.”

Courses prepping for reopening Friday | News, Sports, Jobs – Altoona Mirror

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Most of the area’s golf courses will reopen Friday after Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf’s announcement allowing them to do so on Monday.

But after being closed for more than a month, many courses are trying to pinpoint exactly how the reopening will proceed.

“I think a lot of people are in limbo right now,” Sinking Valley Country Club head golf professional Troy Monahan said. “I have been talking to five other courses, and everyone is kind of stuck waiting right now for the governor to give us some more rules.”

Monahan said Sinking Valley would definitely be open for business Friday, but the course could be facing some challenges. He said they own 68 golf carts, and if only one person is allowed in each cart, it could be tough to meet the demand for tee times.

“If you can only get 130 people on the golf course and you have 150 members, that doesn’t leave much room for guests,” Monahan said. “If people are going out in 15-minute intervals, and there are four carts in one group, you won’t get those carts back in the rotation for at least four hours.”

Monahan said walking the course will be allowed and encouraged.

At Iron Masters, club professional and general manager Rick Grubb said people who arrive together would be allowed to ride in the same cart when he was contacted Tuesday morning.

“You can request one person to a cart,” Grubb said. “They don’t have to go one person per cart. If you have two or four guys drive together here in a car, they are already 2 feet apart in the car. So, they can get in a cart and go out together. If a person comes in that drove themselves and requests a single cart, they can go out and that’s fine. If there are four guys like that in a group, they can go out with four carts.”

Later in the day on Tuesday, the Pennsylvania Alliance For Golf released a guideline for rules to reopen, but a call to Grubb was not returned to see if he’d be following a different policy.

Iron Masters will allow a first-come-first-serve policy that lets people who make tee times first, member or non-member, get first dibs on playing.

“Everyone is excited,” Grubb said. “People have been going out of state for the last month, going to Virginia, West Virginia and Ohio to play golf. Of all the things they shut down, we were probably one of the safer things. You are outdoors in a group of four at the most. We’re glad to get back open.”

Golfers can expect some safety measures to be in place such as only two people allowed in the shop at one time to pay for rounds and keeping people who arrive separately at least 6 feet apart.

“We also have floaties we’ve cut and put in the bottom of the cups so that the ball doesn’t go to the bottom of the hole,” Grubb said.

Other area courses like the Ebensburg Country Club will be sticking to one person per cart and a 6-feet distance between all golfers at all times. The clubhouse will be for takeout only and golfers must have a plan to maintain social distancing throughout their round.

The Summit Country Club in Cresson is deciding to err on the side of caution when interpreting the rules handed down by the state when it opens Friday.

“I was talking to another club professional, and he asked if a husband and wife could ride together?” Summit Country Club head golf professional Randy Repko said. “I said, ‘well, I kind of feel like they should be able to, too, but the state said one person per cart.’ So, that’s something that could change, but starting out, I’m going to go with one person per cart, because we don’t want to break any rules.”

Repko said that in the future, the Summit may also look at foursomes taking out two carts with two people riding and two people walking with all four bags of clubs on the carts.

Courses are preparing for large crowds opening weekend.

“Our members are ecstatic about it,” Monahan said. “The first weekend it looks like the weather is going to be really nice, so I’m assuming we’re going to be really busy. Everyone is happy to get out of the house and get away from doing nothing.”

Grubb said Iron Masters recently benefitted from the Paycheck Protection Program designed to aid small businesses.

“We’re seasonal, and we obviously have to mow grass,” Grubb said. “We have been mowing grass since the end of March. Sometimes those people weren’t being paid. We had some volunteer help. We did whatever we could to keep ready. Now we did finally get the paycheck protection, so we got a lot more guys back to work at the beginning of last week. That helped to get everybody here and not having to rely on volunteers to mow and pick up sticks and leaves.”

Iron Masters plans on running its regular golf schedule once June begins. Grubb said all the outings and events for May had already been pushed back to June or July. The Chamber Golf Classic, previously scheduled to take place in early May, is now set for Monday, June 8.

“I don’t see anything that’s going to require us to not have the outings we have scheduled, and by June, the rules may be even more relaxed,” Grubb said. “Of course, there won’t be food, because the restaurant is not open. We can’t have beer, because the lounge and bar aren’t open. It will be golf only, but we’re thankful for that.”

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Prepping To Open – Times Record

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When I moved to San Francisco just under a year ago, I was really looking forward to meeting my first “prepper.” You know, the kind of doomsday evangelists who allegedly have a spare set of Allbirds and a gallon of Soylent at the ready should the apocalypse strike.

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Of course, preppers aren’t exclusive to the Bay Area. In fact, the concept of prepping needed a Silicon Valley makeover in order to make the concept palatable to many of the west coasters who’ve since adopted the practice, but there apparently exists a specific kind of prepper here, a supreme prepper, if you will, that puts the rest of the community to shame.

Unfortunately, I never (that I know of) came into contact with a Bay Area prepper prior to California’s shelter in place mandate, and now, if this profile in The New York Times is to be believed, I fear I never will, as it appears they’ve all evacuated to the various burner properties they own to wait out the end of days.

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According to the profile, many preppers felt “mocked” by the rest of the world because they were stockpiling toilet paper and hand sanitizer long before Costcos across the country were pillaged for supplies and now feel “vindicated” because everyone else is currently trying to catch up.

For what it’s worth, I think it’s a smart idea to be prepared, however, where the prepper message loses me is in the extreme wealth required to achieve what appears to be the final goal of preparedness. John Ramey, the founder of the prepper blog The Prepared, spoke to The Times from “somewhere in the Rocky Mountains.” Sam Altman, another person mentioned, has an in-case-of-emergency property in Big Sur. Still more are noted as having relocated to “patches” of land they own. Considering most people I know are just worried about making their rent right now, securing a second property isn’t exactly on the list of achievable goals.

Prepping, at least in these terms, is a means of survival only for the ultra-rich, who are seemingly aware of the fact what they’re doing is hoarding wealth and resources and also aware of, and made uncomfortable by, the fact that other people are taking notice. “You’re seeing more awareness,” Ramey said to The Times, “The billionaire class are saying, ‘Yeah, you know, hey guys, we can’t keep doing this. They’re going to come for our food.’” Can you imagine?

And this kind of greed and paranoia is to say nothing of the weaponizing of the prepper movement. Ari Paul, chief investment officer of BlockTower Capital, keeps a machete by his door “just in case.” Ramey said that once others in San Francisco found out about his prepping and became interested, many of them inquired about where to acquire a gun.

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As it turns out, the Silicon Valley makeover of prepping didn’t mean making the practice of prepping more accessible to people, it meant ensconcing it in the kind of elitism that makes it unattainable to all but the very few.

There’s a lot of talk in the profile about making becoming a prepper appear more normal, and less alarmist, than it has previously been thought of. However, I don’t know if discussing the practice in terms of people with machetes next to their doors and properties in Big Sur is doing the movement toward rationality any favors. Definitely congratulations to these preppers who were ready in advance of the coronavirus outbreak, but I don’t know if that makes them smart so much as it just means they are rich.

I Used to Make Fun of Silicon Valley Preppers. Then I Became One. – The New York Times

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For years, one of the most smirked-at subspecies in the technology ecosystem was that of the Silicon Valley Prepper. You were always hearing about them, these men with soft jobs and hardened paranoia. The $0.99 game developer with a bug-out bag; the venture capitalist with a bunker in New Zealand; the cloud administrator learning to bowhunt for a survivalist future. The preppers were living in flush times in a beautiful region, but it seemed like the first thing they did with money was steel for the apocalypse.

Now, with Covid-19, they feel vindicated. Because they are. The coders and founders long snickered at for stockpiling flour and toilet paper were absolutely right.

Properly masked and drenched in Purell, they are railing against a tech press that they feel mocked them as late as February for reducing travel and not shaking hands. They are — of course they are — making a slew of Covid-related start-up investments. And a coolheaded blog called The Prepared, with features like “Prepping Checklist for Beginners” and “Rational Reasons You Should Prepare,” is emerging as the voice of a movement.

John Ramey, a longtime Silicon Valley entrepreneur, started the site in 2018. “People are realizing the last few stable decades have been a fluke,” he told me by phone, from somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. “It’s the coronavirus now, but people have been watching climate change, inequality, late-stage capitalism, post-World War II systems falling apart. Our institutions have dropped the ball.”

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Credit…Benjamin Rasmussen for The New York Times

Observing all of this is one thing. Acting on it is another. The moment when you first started prepping for coronavirus has become perhaps the hottest new credential in Silicon Valley. Noticing it early signaled that you were someone who kept a close eye on China, ignored official channels of information, brushed off snark and knew how to parse data.

Why, in the techno-futurist worldview, is disaster always near? Surely it’s relevant that the industry is built atop an earthquake zone. But there may also be something about making money in a heartbeat that predisposes you to imagine it disappearing in one.

It could be that if you spend all day thinking of ways to break a system, you realize how easily everything can be broken.

But perhaps most of all, it could be that in Silicon Valley, the best people train themselves to be happy to be surprised. There is a sense among them that the East Coast is the old world, conservative, backward-looking. But in the start-up world, discovering that you’re wrong or that an assumption is flawed is great. It probably means there’s an opportunity to make money.

Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, a group studying artificial intelligence, became a figurehead of the Bay Area prepper movement after a 2016 New Yorker article appeared in which he acknowledged amassing “guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to.”


He’s not in Big Sur today — not yet, at least. When I called him recently, he was still in San Francisco, where he has been working with his brother, Max Altman, to organize a bulk order of one billion single-use masks from China.

To Mr. Altman, the early days of the coronavirus captured a long-running tension between tech leaders and a press they view as dismissive and overly negative. “The interesting question isn’t ‘Why did Silicon Valley get it right?’ It’s ‘How did everyone else get it so wrong?’” Mr. Altman said. “One theory is that because initially it was mostly the tech industry saying this was bad, and the media seem to like to say whatever the tech industry thinks is wrong, particularly if it will get some clicks, they mocked the people raising the alarm.”

In January and February, he watched as prominent Silicon Valley investors — notably Balaji S. Srinivasan, Paul Graham, and Geoff Lewis — began tweeting prolifically about the coronavirus.

On Feb. 13, when Vox published an article headlined “‘No handshakes, please’: The tech industry is terrified of the coronavirus,” many tech preppers became incensed, convinced they were being mocked — and that the public was not listening. Much of the mainstream news coverage at the time relied on the World Health Organization and government messaging that discouraged mask-wearing and downplayed the virus’s risks.

But the tech prepper ranks grew. One convert is Ari Paul, the chief investment officer of BlockTower Capital, a cryptocurrency investment firm, who saw Mr. Srinivasan’s tweets and began stocking up in February. “I bought some nitrile gloves, a month of food, a month of water, and a few months of cash,” Mr. Paul told me, from an undisclosed rural location. He has started keeping a machete by the door, just in case.

A second is Julie Fredrickson, who recently sold Stowaway, a venture-backed makeup brand. She had become “a China watcher” out of necessity: It was where she sourced cosmetics. Because she was in the habit of reading supply chain reports, she perked up at early, disturbing reports from Wuhan. “China doesn’t shut down cities,” she said. Ms. Fredrickson was raised in the Bay Area but now lives in Manhattan, where “we enjoy showing off our water bricks in our one-bedroom and the go-bags in the couch.”

And then there’s me. For years, I watched Silicon Valley preppers as an eccentric local tribe — at best goofball hobbyists, at worst elite separatists who fantasized about leaving the rest of us behind to die.

But in January, when I started to notice preppers in an especially high-pitched tizzy about some kind of pneumonia in China, I bought some Lysol. Then some gloves, a couple masks. I found The Prepared and devoured its advice. The site’s central argument made sense: that preparing myself meant I would take up one less spot in the health care system in a crisis. I started to think about what I take for granted. It was kind of a game to play at night, trying to imagine how different parts of my world might falter and how I would stay alive.

Soon I had a prepper box. Inside was flu medicine, headlamps, sardines, gloves, goggles, duct tape, a tarp, a Vipertek VTS-989 stun gun, some whistles. Because of it, I’ve been able to mail supplies to my parents, and I’ve been able to give precious hand sanitizer and high-quality masks to friends. I ended up over-prepping, so I donated the extra to a local clinic.

I have noticed an instinct among those who first mocked Silicon Valley preppers as alarmist is now to call them smug. Certainly, some of them are. But the fact remains that they saw this — or something like it — coming a long ways off.

About a decade ago, Mr. Ramey was living in San Mateo, Calif., and working as the chief executive of isocket, an online advertising start-up. One day, after coffee with a fellow founder, Mr. Ramey opened the trunk of his car, inadvertently revealing something he referred to as his “Get Home Bag,” full of the things he might need if disaster suddenly struck. (“Basic stuff,” he said: first aid kit, food and water rations, radio, multitool, map, compass, jumper cables, a blade to cut someone out of a seatbelt after a crash.)

It was, Mr. Ramey said, the moment that made him “one of the first outed preppers” in the Silicon Valley community. “Other founders and investors started coming to me ad hoc,” he said. “And they’d say, ‘How do I put a kit together?’ And then they’d get really quiet and ask, ‘How do I get a gun?’”

Later, Mr. Ramey began working as an innovation adviser to the Obama White House. He was involved in the creation of the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental, a Pentagon project to improve ties between the Department of Defense and the technology industry — a formerly tight relationship Mr. Ramey felt had grown cold. The project has since dropped the “Experimental” label and become a permanent organization within the Pentagon. But Mr. Ramey’s experience in government did not make him confident about the nation’s ability to withstand a crisis.

“I had this wide-eyed belief that there are rooms full of smart people working on critical problems that we face, and once I got into that room, I realized just how wrong I was,” Mr. Ramey said. “They literally still ran our nuclear codes on floppy disks.”

When Donald Trump was elected president, Mr. Ramey decided it was time to get serious about prepping. In 2016, he moved from the Bay Area to a patch of land in Colorado. He wanted to get the message out.

He felt more than ever that all Americans should prep. But first, he had to reckon with popular perceptions of the prepper type: rural, deeply conservative and paranoid to an extreme, readying their bunkers for a nuclear sneak attack or the Book of Revelation.

“Just to figure out how to put an earthquake kit together, you had to listen to someone talk about how Hillary Clinton was going to steal your children,” Mr. Ramey said.

He wanted to make the prepper scene more welcoming to a cosmopolitan cohort — urban, liberal, concerned about climate change and social instability, afraid the Trump administration would exacerbate problems or bungle a crisis.

At first, Mr. Ramey put together advice in shared Google Docs. When that got unwieldy, he started The Prepared and brought on Jon Stokes, one of the creators of the tech news site Ars Technica. “In my own circle, there was a sense of a kind of rupture where something was widely not expected to be possible suddenly happens,” Mr. Stokes said, of the election of Mr. Trump. “And, you know, people were just like, well, maybe the world doesn’t work the way I thought it works.”

Mr. Ramey describes the audience for The Prepared as “rational preppers.” They are people who like to calculate risk and see prepping as a bit of a game. The content, Mr. Ramey said, inevitably attracts anti-vaxxers, but moderators try to keep them off the site, mindful that their tribe is put off by unfounded conspiracy theories. Many of Mr. Ramey’s readers preferred to prep inconspicuously, not wanting to seem kooky or paranoid to friends and neighbors.

The coronavirus changed that, and took prepping mainstream. The Prepared has quadrupled its staff, from three to 12. Investors include co-founders of LivingSocial, Square, the creator of Google AdSense and Coinbase, as well as early executives at Facebook and Twitter.

There is irony to this, of course. Prepping is required in part because technology helped make America’s economic infrastructure so efficient. Grocery stores adopted just-in-time delivery systems perfected by Silicon Valley. Hospitals would keep only a few days of extra gear.

“Prepping is really a decision to take the slack that we’ve ‘optimized’ out of the system and put it on your own balance sheet,” Mr. Stokes said. He’s riding out the pandemic on a farm near Austin, Texas. “I have the slack in the form of solar panels and batteries on the electrical grid. And I have grocery store slack. I have medical equipment slack.”

Even as layoffs hit start-ups, many see the chaos as an opportunity to build.

Investors have been hunting for start-ups that might evolve around the pandemic. One prominent social network executive told me that the virus would bring five years of change in five months. Doctors that had resisted telemedicine are now peering at moles on Zoom. Schools that were skeptical about online courses are streaming lectures. Offices of all kinds are settled into fully remote work. Demand for online grocery shopping is overwhelming.

The list is endless. Movie theaters have completely given way to home streaming; gyms to video and fitness trackers. Maybe even failed 2010s trends like virtual reality will revive.

If even more of the American economy accrues to Silicon Valley, these changes could accelerate the biggest danger the “rational preppers” fear: revolution-level social strife. Inequality breeds instability, they argue.

“You’re seeing more awareness,” Mr. Ramey said. “The billionaire class are saying, ‘Yeah, you know, hey guys, we can’t keep doing this. They’re going to come for our food.’”

And so as affluent urban preppers ride out the coronavirus crisis — perhaps with their wealth intact, or even enhanced — they are increasingly aware of a new danger.

Danielle Morrill, an entrepreneur who sold an analytics start-up in 2017, is an investor in The Prepared. She recently moved from San Francisco to Denver, where she has more space and is getting deeper into prepping.

“I find it kind of empowering, and it’s a little taboo,” Ms. Morrill said.

“I’m not some O.G. prepper,” she added, “but after this, I’m already thinking — what do I have to prepare for next?”

‘A very challenging situation’: Prepping for wildfire amid COVID-19 – KSBY San Luis Obispo News

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What if California faces a disaster during the coronavirus pandemic?

Local fire officials are hopeful that the spread of COVID-19 will taper off soon but the outbreak has already forced CAL FIRE SLO to make some changes.

“It’s caused a whole new wave of thinking of how we’re going to react to that,” said Josh Taylor, CAL FIRE SLO Assistant Chief.

Aircraft is back at the Paso Air Base after going through Winter maintenance in Sacramento.

“We are getting prepared for any fires that may start this week,” Taylor said.

And, nearly two dozen seasonal firefighters have returned, ready to go.

“We were taking temperatures asking questions to see if they had symptoms of COVID-19 and we had to practice social distancing at our training center in Los Osos,” Taylor explained.

The disease has delayed inspections of fire-prone properties in San Luis Obispo County but fire officials say people should be clearing that defensible space now.

Over the past few years, the state has experienced some of its deadliest and most destructive wildfires ever and it’s required big numbers of firefighters to travel throughout California or come from other states to help.

“We don’t want to have a COVID-19 outbreak in our fire camps,” Taylor said.

Another concern is preventing the spread of COVID-19 at evacuation centers that house families and others uprooted from their homes.

“We’ll open more shelters if that’s the direction we have to go so that we can have less people inside each shelter,” said Scott O’Connell, Central California Red Cross Regional Disaster Officer.

The Red Cross will check temperatures at the door with volunteers wearing personal protective equipment.

“As soon as COVID-19 really hit this area, we were already pivoting to how are we going to do this,” O’Connell explained.

The San Luis Obispo County Office of Emergency Services is also nailing down a plan.

“Obviously, if we have two different incidents going on at one time that’s going to make for a very challenging situation,” said Joe Guzzardi, San Luis Obispo County Office of Emergency Services Manager.

With the recent history of wildfires in the state, CAL FIRE no longer refers to a specific period as fire season but instead, transitional and peak staffing.