I became a survivalist in the late 1970's. I've always been concerned that civilization was too fragile, with too many ways for our technical world to get hammered...with too few people who really understood how to fend for themselves without someone delivering their pizza, water, electricity, gas, and taking away their sewage.
So even though I run a successful business and live in and amongst modern society, I've always had a safe room, massive stores of water, large stocks of food, seeds, and ammo for my arsenal here in rural Alabama.
I've always paid attention to news in far-off places that might give me a heads-up that an impending catastrophy was about to change my lifestyle, etc.
But I can say without hesitation that the predictions and claims above for this thread are hogwash. Mere hype. Mere words used to spool up the adrenaline in all who come in contact with them, no doubt from someone who is massively bored with his or her own personal life.
You can search FR and find that I likewise was telling this same thing to the Y2K fanatics back in 1998 and 1999. Back in the 1980's I was saying the same thing to the nuclear war fanatics of the day on CompuServe.
There are several types of survivalists. Some feverishly hope for a disaster so that their stores of "wealth" make them mini-kings in a brand new post-catastrophy world. These are the types of people who are the most susceptable to such thoughtless scare tactics (as in this thread).
Treat this sort of hype as mere fiction, for your reading enjoyment only. Most of these sorts of authors are so isolated from the greater world around them that *you* will know about any impending disaster before they do.
And that, my friend, epitomizes irony.