Oh, wow. Lots. I was into prepping in a big way for several years because of how fragile our grid is nationwide.
Lights Out by Ted Koppel lays out the dangers well without sensationalizing as a lot do ...including the fact that we have no means stateside to manufacture some of our huge transformers that take two years to build
and we have no backups for them. I never worried about anything including pandemics, the nuclear threat before the fall of the USSR. But a prolonged grid failure scares me because we're so dependent on electricity for everything that people would start starving after just a few weeks. There's not enough assistance (National Guard, Red Cross, Samaritian's purse) to last more than a short time for a national grid failure, and they'd never get to rural Mississippi anyhow.
We've got food for six months for 10 people, two wells (one with an electric pump, one a free flowing artesian), two stocked fish ponds (one small, one four acres) on my parents property, abundant wildlife with the means and knowledge to preserve it without freezing, dad's 1/4 acre fenced in garden and heirloom seeds for it, bee hives, a couple of pecan trees, fruit trees, blackberry bushes all around, plenty of edibles to forage on the property, lots of medical supplies including a stockpile of prescriptions, generators (gas propane, and lithium solar) appx 300 gallons propane with three gas stoves, solar lights, battery fans charged by solar, sun oven, a couple of high efficiency gassifier wood stoves with so much deadfall on their 35 acres (some of it uncleared forest) that we'd never have to cut wood. Their house, my house, a two bedroom camper and a big insulated workshop are on the property, and everything is spread out enough that a tornado is unlikely to take out all the structures. A lot of this was already in place because my dad is a retired farmer who lived through the end of the depression and afterwards the WWII shortages, and he and pretty much all the men (and a few of the women) in my extended family have hunted and fished since childhood. There are also extended outages here every few years due to tornadoes, hurricane remnants and ice storms, and rural areas are the last to have power restored.
Two things got me out of the prepper mindset over the past few years. My health and my parent's age wouldn't hold up to the hard work involved living without electricity. And I read enough PAW fiction (post-apocalyptic world) to know that you can't buy enough AR-15s to protect against everyone else who has them that would be willing to use them if they were starving. (Post Katrina, a man killed his sister over bag of ice.
) I thought for several years about getting a couple to hide away and just couldn't take the plunge. It would be very hard to use them unless my nieces (two beautiful young ladies) and vulnerable nephew with autism were here and threatened; in that case I'd probably be capable of anything but certainly don't like to think about it.
