Disaster Prepping: Should We All Stock Up? (Mike Chappell, prepper)

Radical

Host Gabriel Gatehouse interviews prepper Mike Chappell about the practical necessity of stockpiling supplies in the UK. Chappell argues tha

Key takeaways

• Mike Chappell recommends every household maintain at least two weeks of food, water, and cooking supplies.
• The Carrington event is cited as a historical example of how solar flares (CME) can cause massive electrical grid failures.

Main topics

• Disaster Preparedness
• Food Security in the UK

Notable quotes

Everybody in the country should have at least two weeks worth of food, water and ways to cook that and stay warm.

Conclusion

The episode presents disaster prepping as a logical extension of house

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:00) This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Speaker 2 (0:09) Welcome to the Haunted Library. Have you come in search of a tale? This podcast invites you to browse the shelves and find stories that will linger long after you've left this place. From gothic masterpieces to pulpy penny dreadfuls, join me, Colin Morgan, with new episodes twice a week. Find The Haunted Library wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 5 (0:46) Hello and welcome to Radical, conversations about the underlying forces reshaping our world and the radical ideas that could define the future. What would you do if your local supermarket ran out of food for days and then weeks? Or if your water was cut off, the power went out, and not just for you, but for everyone? How long do you think you and your family, your loved ones, could survive? How long before law and order begins to break down? And what would you do then? I'm Gabriel Gatehouse. I've spent half a lifetime reporting from places where that has happened. War zones, disaster zones. But honestly, it's not something I've ever seriously considered we might have to face in this country. But my guest this week believes that we should be preparing for exactly that kind of scenario. Mike Chappell is a prepper. And I'll admit, for me, that word conjures up images of tinfoil hats and gun-toting loners preparing for a zombie apocalypse. But maybe I'm wrong. Because the British government is now urging us to stockpile food and supplies to guard against extreme weather scenarios. And the National Audit Office is telling us that our supply chains of food are vulnerable to cyber attacks and disease. So maybe Mike is right. Maybe we should all be preppers. If so, how far should we take it? How practical is prepping for most people living a modern life on a small, densely populated island? And what exactly is the threat that preppers are getting ready for? Can't we just rely on the government to sort things out for us if it all goes wrong? As ever, we'll approach the subject with an open mind and a critical lens. Speaker 5 (2:35) Mike Chappell, welcome to Radical. Speaker 4 (2:37) Hi, thanks for having me. To start, briefly, Speaker 5 (2:42) you're a prepper. What is a Speaker 4 (2:43) prepper? So a prepper is anybody who's getting ready and supplies in for any scenario that's unexpected. That can be from something minor, like localised flooding, wildfires, like we've seen, all the way up to the extremes you see for apocalypse, end of days, that kind of thing. And are you Speaker 5 (3:03) happy with the terminology? Speaker 4 (3:05) Do you like being called a prepper or do you prefer something Speaker 5 (3:07) else? Speaker 4 (3:08) No, I like prepper. I'm trying to, my whole premise is trying to get that word normalised a bit more. It's not like the doomsday preppers that people have seen on TV. So it needs to be taken away from that and reclaiming the word, shall we say. OK, Speaker 5 (3:24) all right. Well, we'll get into it. But first of all, what is your radical idea? Speaker 4 (3:30) Everybody in the country should have at least two weeks worth of food, water and ways to cook that and stay warm. We should all Speaker 5 (3:39) be preppers. We Speaker 4 (3:40) should all have two weeks worth of supplies. We should all look at our grandparents and be more like them. Speaker 5 (3:45) Why? Because two weeks will cover most disasters. Speaker 4 (3:50) I mean, if it's my family talking to me, I will tell them to get 90 days worth of food and water. Because... In 90 days' time, with no power, no sanitation, no clean water, 90 % of the population won't be here. Speaker 5 (4:04) That sounds very scary. What are you basing those estimates on? Speaker 4 (4:08) It's a ballpark figure, but it's kind of based on after X amount of days, sewage will start coming up your toilet. After X amount of days, most people's supply of this would have run out. Supermarkets would have run out and stuff like that. And at that point, whoever's left need to work together, right? It's as simple as that. But two weeks will cover everything that we've seen in our lifetime. The storms, power cuts, blackouts, all of that would be covered with two weeks worth of food that you just replenish on a regular basis. How did you get into it? Where Speaker 5 (4:44) are you from? Tell us a little bit more about yourself. Speaker 4 (4:47) So, I mean, I grew up with a family that always had 30 days worth of food because we lived in a rural part of Wales and it was 60 miles to the nearest supermarket. So doing that every week was a pain. So it was a month's worth of food every time and then you'd top up with local shops. So I've kind of always had that mentality of there's always something in. As I stepped more into the prepping world, I discovered the Carrington event, which was a giant solar flare in the... mid-19th century, and that hit Earth with a CME. What's CME? Coronal Mass Ejection. So when there's a solar flare, it has a coronal mass ejection. Very similar effects to what people see in the movies with an EMP. Speaker 5 (5:33) What's an Speaker 4 (5:34) EMP? Electromagnetic Pulse. Where all the electrics would go. However, a CME would be anything that's mains wired into the grid. Your phone would be fine, but you'd have no signal because the grid would be down. Now, when that hit in them times, the only thing there was telegraph. Wires set on fire, operators got shocked off the seats, and telegraphs were going without anybody pressing them and stuff like that. At the time, that's perfectly recoverable. This was caused by... Caused by the CME. Solar flare. Solar flare, which hits the CME, hits the Earth, and it caused... the geomagnetic storm and basically anything that's big enough to be an antenna, so our power cables, stuff like that, picks up these waves and just shorts it out. It is case of everything would be fried. Now, one of these went out the side of the sun a few years ago. Luckily, it wasn't earth-facing. If that had been, it would have been lights out. What do you mean? Everything would have gone off. No power, nothing. No recovery. Literally lights out. Literally lights out. Speaker 5 (6:40) Not a mass extinction event. Speaker 4 (6:41) No, no. Literally lights out. Complete blackout. It's not a case of turn the switch back on. It would have caused untold damage. So you Speaker 5 (6:49) found out about this event in, what, 1859? Yeah. And that led you into Prepperdom, or were you already kind of nibbling around the edges? Speaker 4 (6:59) Well, I already had, like I say, I would keep a bit in, but that took me down the rabbit hole. And the rabbit hole wasn't filled with crazy tinfoil hat preppers, but it was filled with NASA reports, scientists. So that got me prepping. Now, right now, that's at the back of my mind. There's so much other stuff going on and there's so much other stuff to prep for. Speaker 5 (7:18) OK, I want to get into what you're prepping for and how you're doing it. But just tell me a little bit more about yourself. You've got kids. Speaker 4 (7:25) Where do you live? I've got six kids from in the 20s to down to born a week ago. A week ago? A week ago. Speaker 5 (7:33) Are you kidding me? What are you doing down here? Speaker 4 (7:36) Commitment. Wow, congratulations. And one of the older ones has made me a grandad as well, so I'm grandad-prepper now, so there we go. I enjoy everything everyone else does. I enjoy the football. My other YouTube channel is about Sunderland Football Club for my sins. That's what I support now. Enjoy doing that. Enjoy family holidays, everything like that. Prepping doesn't take away from my life at all. I do everything everyone else does. I'm a web developer by trade, which is another good reason that I prepped because I got made redundant from that. Speaker 5 (8:08) Okay. Speaker 4 (8:09) Because AI is so much cheaper and easier for people to hire than a 30-year experienced developer. Speaker 5 (8:16) AI Speaker 4 (8:16) took your job? Pretty much. Speaker 5 (8:18) Really? Pretty much, yeah. Oh, Speaker 4 (8:19) okay. Speaker 5 (8:20) I mean, that is something that... is very much on people's Speaker 4 (8:22) minds at the moment. Definitely, definitely. And that's one of the forefronts that I'm prepping for, as well as the extreme weather that the BBC themselves have recently reported on. Speaker 5 (8:31) So you're prepping for not just sort of blackouts and stuff, but for the kind of mass jobs layoff, the jobs apocalypse. Speaker 4 (8:40) Everything. I mean, I've got better interest rates in my pantry than you will get in any bank. Speaker 5 (8:45) What do you mean? Speaker 4 (8:46) Well, I've got cans of chilli I paid 90 pence for that are still good to eat that are now £2 odd in the supermarket. OK, yeah, that is a good investment. I've got corned beef that I bought a year ago for less than £2 and is now £4.19 in the supermarket. What interest rate are you going to get that's going to give you that? Speaker 5 (9:03) Wow, that's good. Yeah, that's better than an ISA. Can I just ask, so you live in Manchester. Yeah. Do you live in a flat? Are you in a house with a garden? Do Speaker 4 (9:12) you Speaker 5 (9:12) have a bunker in Speaker 4 (9:12) the back Speaker 5 (9:12) garden? Speaker 4 (9:13) I wish. The budget does not allow it for it yet. But I have a three-bedroom, semi-detached townhouse. And yeah, so there's not much room with the kids and stuff, obviously. So I've literally converted the understairs cupboard and there's lots of clever storage ideas. That's what my channel was started for. Right. The problem I've got is there's very few UK preppers that are out in the open. There's a very secret squirrel society going on. So there was a lot of American channels that I was watching and seeing what they do. And then just kind of seeing what they get, what's our equivalent. I don't have a giant homestead like they have. So I was going like, oh, look at this space under your kickboards and look what you can do with your stairs and look where you can store water and kind of adapting it for the English model. Speaker 5 (10:00) Okay, so you've got this YouTube channel called UK Urban Prepper. UK Urban Prepper, yes. Where you sort of have these tutorials. You said that prepping is a secret squirrel society in Speaker 4 (10:15) the UK. Why do you think that is? I've had emails telling me I shouldn't do the channel. I've had messages saying, you need to stop doing what you're doing, telling everyone about this, blah, blah, blah, with actual threats to my family on there. because these people think that we shouldn't tell everyone. We should be the ones that survive and let them all perish. My theory is the more people that are ready and prepared, the less strain on society and the government and the less people we have to save. Speaker 5 (10:44) Wow, so you're getting emails from other preppers saying keep it to yourself, don't spread the knowledge. Alleged, alleged preppers. Speaker 4 (10:50) So I very much believe it's probably somebody sat in a basement and a keyboard who's never