The age of disaster prepping is here

Something unusual happened in Britain the other day. The government tried to do something and it worked.

So many people raced to follow ministers’ advice to stockpile three days’ worth of essentials in case disaster strikes that supermarket sales of tinned food soared by 40 per cent. Wind-up radios sold out at survival kit shops, along with water purification tablets.

I know one man who got a radio and another who bought enough jerry cans for the nine litres of water that one person apparently needs for drinking over three days, plus more for washing and cooking. At home, my husband started asking if we had any working torches (unlikely), cash (no), or a first aid kit (not as such).

In the office, people talked about the horrible taste of tinned chickpeas and used the word “prepping” without irony.

All this struck me as odd. When the government issued almost exactly the same preparation guidance two years ago, I remember precisely no one I knew mentioning it, let alone acting on it.

This might have been because the 2024 advice came out in a late spring week in May, when thoughts turn less to meltdown than Majorca.

This year, it came just as thousands lost power in the first vicious winter storms, against a backdrop of a scorching summer, interminable talk of Vladimir Putin, cyber attacks and the seemingly endless wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.

We are, as it were, totally prepped for prepping.

As the week wore on though, something else became clear. The resentments and frustrations that boiled up at work during the pandemic may pale if we ever have to use our stockpiles.

“Who has room in their flat for jerry cans of water?” a colleague asked when I mentioned I had been looking on Amazon for said items. “You’ve got a garage?” another exclaimed when I haplessly mentioned this was where I planned to stash my stockpile.

Suddenly, I was taken back to the early months of 2020, when it began to emerge that people at work led very different lives that had largely gone unnoticed before.

The dawn of working from home revealed some of us had second homes in the country with oak beam-lined studies and Nasa-level wifi, while others had to juggle a dodgy connection with flatmates at a shared kitchen table.

Back then, though, we did all have electricity. In prep-world, it is easy to imagine those who can keep working because they had the wherewithal to slather their home with solar panels and big batteries, and those who cannot.

Speaking of solar panels, tense times may nonetheless be a boon for one marginalised class of worker: the net zero dad.

For reasons I struggle to explain, men of a certain age and type, left unattended in the office, will happily spend hours discussing the relative merits of battery inverters and vehicle-to-grid charging systems.

This naturally leads to ridicule from colleagues who do not know the difference between an air source and ground source heat pump, and have no plan to find out. But, cometh the hour of the blackout, we will hear who is laughing last. Unless, of course, a net zero dad is also responsible for any type of business continuity planning. This work of making sure an organisation can manage in a crisis has always been exasperating.

I still remember the day many years ago when some sort of incident caused an evacuation at the Financial Times. I was in a group of news editors who sped across town to a “continuity centre” where a bank of computers was waiting to help us put out the paper. Alas, a number of us arrived without things such as the requisite login passwords, which put a dent in the continuity process. I have never since forgotten how easily the best-laid schemes can be undone by the human factor.

Some will undoubtedly be more prepared than others.

Other governments have been showering their citizens with disaster preparedness guidance for years and, compared with the United Kingdom’s simple instructions, a lot of it is bracing.

Norway’s advice runs to 20 pages. The “emergency pantry list” in the Australian state of New South Wales includes nearly 50 items, including long-life cheeses and a thermometer. The US checklist suggests a whistle and a fire extinguisher. In Ireland, citizens are told “use fresh food and food kept in fridges first”.

I hope it all works and, better yet, I hope we never need to find out if it does. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2026