Doomsday Preppers: Janet Spencer

Up next is Janet Spencer from Helena, Montana. She’s in an interesting situation because her husband has absolutely no interest in her preparation activities.
Since she’s right down the road from the Great Falls nuclear base, she figures that would be a high-priority target. Sure, maybe in a conventional push-the-button, Cold War superpowers-type nuclear war. But the way I see it, if anything’s going to get nuked these days, it’s probably going to be some rogue state attacking a regional neighbor after a situation has escalated out of hand (Israel v. Iran, Iran v. Pakistan, something like that).

She says that “preparing for disaster is the only safe and sane thing to do.” I would generally agree, but I think that the really important thing is the way one prepares, or the form one’s preparations take. Hoarding buckets of food and water in the basement is fine and all—they will allow you to physically survive—but to what end?

Mrs Spencer’s living arrangement is pretty weird: it’s not like Bradford Frank’s wife who doesn’t believe anything major will happen but still goes along on their family bug-out; this lady’s husband doesn’t even support her at all. Although frankly, I can’t really blame him. Her strategy walks a very fine line between clever and completely neurotic. Her mattress rests on a bedframe filled with canned goods and boxes of pasta, with sticks of candy squeezed in wherever there’s room; she takes great pride in taking apart a hollow interior door to fill the cavity with dozens of soup packets.
She makes an effort to get others involved somehow, showing one lady how to build one of those ‘faraday cages’ the solar flare/EMP crowd are always bringing up.
The ‘experts’ advice—as usual—is with consumption in mind; they tell her to buy a Geiger counter.