Apocalypse now? In US and abroad many are prepared
From the outside, Jerry Erwin’s home in the northwestern US state of
Oregon is a nondescript house with a manicured front lawn and little to
differentiate it from those of his neighbors. But tucked away out of
sight in his backyard are the signs of his preparations for doomsday, a
catastrophic societal collapse that Erwin, 45, now believes is likely
within his lifetime.
“I’ve got, under an awning, stacks of firewood, rain catching in
barrels, I’ve got a shed with barbed concertina wire, like the military
uses,” he told AFP.
He and his wife also have also stockpiled thousands of rounds of
ammunition and enough food for about six months.
“Several years ago I worked on paying off the house, replacing all
the windows, and just very recently, I’m proud to say, we’ve replaced
all our exterior doors with more energy-efficient ones, with as much
built-in security features as I could get,” he told AFP.
“Plus I’m going to be adding some more structural improvements to the
door frames to make it hopefully virtually impossible to take a
battering ram to them.”
Erwin and others like him in the United States and elsewhere see
political upheaval and natural disasters as clear signs that
civilization is doomed.
“We’re hitting on all cylinders as far as symptoms that have led
other great powers to decline or collapse: resource depletion, damage to
the environment, climate change, those are the same things that affected
other great societies,” he said.
AFP |