Since Russia invaded Ukraine, sparking the first war in Europe in decades, everyone in the developed world has begun to rethink the risks in their lives. Many people are taking action to secure their family’s future. Some are even buying bomb shelters. Demand for bomb shelters has gone up, according to one manufacturer, Rising S Company, by 6900% since the invasion. VICE reports:
For the first time in five years, Gary Lynch’s company is so busy that he needed to leave his office to go help his employees in the field.
His company sells steel bunkers and bomb shelters.
The general manager of the Texas-based Rising S Company had to help install a 1,600-square-foot model, which goes for a touch over $300,000. He told VICE News during his lunch break at the local Taco Bell that his company received over 700 inquiries recently, in a time frame where they typically would have received about 10.
“On Thursday morning, when we started seeing the nuclear threats, the phones started ringing immediately,” said Lynch. Some of the people who called were people who were already considering the need for a backyard bunker, and the Ukraine conflict is what finally pushed them over the edge. A good chunk of the inquiries, Lynch said, were pretty frantic.
“There’s the people who don’t know (what to ask); they’ve never looked at (bomb shelters) before,” said Lynch. “They’re the ones that are calling and asking, ‘Will this protect me from nuclear fallout?’, and we have to tell them ‘Well, no, it’s not going to protect you from that, from a direct hit from a bomb.’”
The threat of the Russian invasion of Ukraine becoming a conflict between the world’s two biggest military superpowers has many people thinking about what has felt unthinkable for a generation: a nuclear war. And for some who are frantically searching to ground themselves in uncertain times, they’re turning to something most people wouldn’t normally describe as “calming”—doomsday prepping.
Europeans are stocking up on iodine tablets (a Google Trends search shows near-vertical growth on that term in late February), and YouTube is suddenly full of “experts” giving advice on how to prepare for the end of the world. Those in the “doomsday prepper” community say their community has been growing for years, with climate change, a global pandemic, and the general “end times” vibe of the last several years. But it has accelerated in the past weeks.
John Ramey, the founder of the prepper website The Prepared and a former Obama White House adviser, said the community has doubled in the last few years and pointed to a pre-pandemic FEMA study that showed the number of American citizens preparing for some sort of disaster increased from 3.8 percent in 2017 to 5.2 percent in 2019.
Ramey said most of the folks who’ve been in the community for a long time aren’t the ones worked up. Neither Ramey nor Lynch said he thought nuclear war was imminent, but they’ve both been taking calls from people worried about it.
“The top search terms on our site have been war and nuclear-oriented things like iodine, nuclear, and even EMP,” said Ramey, referring to electrical magnetic pulse, which happens after a nuclear detonation. “So it’s clear that this is on people’s minds and that there’s a group, a portion of people, that are riled up, and concerned about it.”
Since Russian dictator Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine last week and put his nuclear deterrent forces on “high alert”, the subreddit r/preppers has been inundated with “Questions from New Preppers.” On Facebook, people are reaching out to groups like “Prepping for Beginners” or “Doomsday Preppers Worldwide” with questions about what food to stock up on, how to make sure they have a supply of drinking water, and so on.
Action Line: It’s never too late to start, but remember that you can’t save the world in a weekend. Focus on what you can do. For starters, the most important thing you can do for your family is secure a supply of water for emergencies. Click here to download my special report, Emergency Water Storage: How Much, Containers, Purification & More. I’ll help you get started on keeping your family safe.
