Despite his shoebox Manhattan apartment, FDNY firefighter Jason Charles has somehow squeezed in $10,000 worth of doomsday supplies — enough to survive hurricanes, devastating floods, a second pandemic and, if things really go off the rails, the end of the world.
Charles has never actually experienced a life-altering catastrophe. But that hasn’t stopped him from preparing for one. Thirteen years ago, after reading William Forstchen’s “One Second After,” a novel about a post-apocalyptic America, he decided the apocalypse was probably worth preparing for.
Now, Charles is ready for just about anything. Well, almost anything.
“Those are things that you just hope don’t happen because there is no preparing for it. You know, being sucked into a black hole, we’re all pretty much dead,” he told The Post.
His preparedness has even made its way to YouTube, where he runs a channel devoted to doomsday prepping for other New Yorkers, recently posting a video in which he called AI’s threat to humanity “the most asinine thing going on right now.”
“We’re developing a God AI that is undoubtedly going to destroy humanity and the entire world,” he said in the video.
Still, Charles is preparing for the worst.
He’s made the most of every inch of his apartment, adding shelves and filling closets — and eventually renting a storage unit — to accommodate a year’s worth of supplies, from freeze-dried food to a water jug and a solar power generator.
If and when doomsday comes, Charles will have handheld radios to help him communicate with others. If cell phone signals are still up, he said he will try to text whoever he can — and hope for the best.
As for the rest of his apocalypse stash, he’s keeping that under wraps.
“If you’re serious about prepping, you’re gonna make room for the food that you need and not the crap that you can’t use during the apocalypse,” he pointed out.
Across the country, preppers like Charles are bracing for an ever-expanding list of threats — from hurricanes and pandemics to cyberattacks, AI gone awry and economic collapse — stockpiling food, water and gear they believe could keep them alive when modern life grinds to a halt.
But while Charles is preparing for catastrophe on a grand scale, North Carolina resident Carmen has a very different threat in mind.
She started preparing for disasters about a decade ago, after moving with her family from the Plains to hurricane country.
Carmen, who’s in her 40s, calls herself a “Tuesday prepper” — not someone expecting the world to end, but someone preparing for “that random but inevitable day where something bad happens but you expect to eventually recover from it.”
As extreme weather became a growing concern, she started researching survival strategies and stockpiling supplies.
Her first step was modest: a “disaster box” filled with a couple of days’ worth of food, extra batteries and other essentials. Feeling safer from the worsening natural disasters elsewhere, she let her guard down.
That changed in September 2024 when Hurricane Helene tore through the region, leaving Carmen and her family with little information about the roads, no GPS, no maps and no extra fuel for their car.
She never wanted to be caught that unprepared again.
That’s when the real prepping began.
While most of her family remains “less interested,” Carmen has doubled down.
“My goal is for my household to have the food, water, power, and other supplies to be self-sufficient through a crisis like that, which both protects us and allows humanitarian aid to be directed to people who need it more,” she told The Post.
As a result, she has stored water, long-term food buckets, a deep pantry stocked with canned goods, a solar battery system and both indoor and outdoor gardens.
Kansas resident Abigail no longer thinks prepping is for “the crazies” after she decided to become one two years ago.
After tensions ran high during the 2024 presidential election, the 36-year-old began fearing that the country could eventually descend into a geopolitical civil war.
“I’m afraid of a nuclear attack, or a cyber attack on the electric grid, or even a high-altitude EMP which would absolutely cripple the US and render it nearly defenseless to a ground invasion,” she told The Post.
Two other threats have fueled her anxiety: extreme wealth inequality and climate change, leaving her with what she describes as a “persistent feeling of impending doom.”
“I have two children and I am terrified for their future. And the one thing that is impossible to ignore or escape — global warming is very real and most likely won’t be able to be reversed. I believe now that the human race won’t survive another 100 years. I think we’ll be lucky to make it that far,” Abigail said.
So she’s trying to prepare for whatever comes next — starting in her own backyard.
Abigail has built a garden with various veggies and has enough freeze-dried food to feed her family of four for a couple of months while steadily building her supply of dehydrated and canned goods.
“Most of my tax return went towards prepping supplies,” she told The Post. “I purchased a small power station with a solar panel for charging things like phones and flashlights a year ago. When I got my tax return, I bought a larger power station with two 200-watt solar panels.”
Her stockpile also includes first-aid supplies, hygiene products, menstrual cups for herself and her daughter, wool socks, window insulation, an electric heated mattress pad, gardening and home-repair books, rain barrels, solar-powered flashlights and lanterns, water-storage jugs and a four-terabyte hard drive packed with how-to PDFs and other books.
For Abigail, prepping isn’t simply about accumulating supplies. It’s about building the skills — and the community — she believes will matter when “sh** hits the fan.”
“My friends, some of them feel as if we are totally and completely f***ed no matter what we do, and so haven’t bothered to prepare for anything at all,” she revealed. “[But] I firmly believe that if or when things get bad, each person’s likelihood of survival will depend on the strength of their community.”
That emphasis on preparedness as a practical, learned skill is shared by Larry, a 70-year-old Navy veteran, who retired in 2002 after 22 years of service and sees prepping as an extension of the skills he learned in the military — as well as a matter of common sense.
“The basic premise of prepping is like being a Boy Scout or a Girl Scout,” Larry told The Post.
While some folks are bracing for nuclear EMPs, economic collapse or even the zombie apocalypse, Larry is preparing for a more immediate threat: extreme weather.
Like Carmen, his family was affected by a hurricane — and he never wanted to be caught without power again. So when he built his new home, he installed a whole-house generator and reinforced it with plenty of cinder block.
He’s got food and water covered, too.
“We have a well, and we have septic,” the Navy vet told The Post. “And with the generator backup, then my 400 gallons of fuel — even running 24/7 — we would probably last a week and a half to two weeks.”
Larry is essentially already living off-grid, as he depends on solar and his Tesla batteries for his home, claiming his electricity bill is only $15.
The Boomer insisted he is ready for anything as his supplies list consists of pantries full of food, freeze-dried meals, five-gallon jerry cans — containers to hold water — and weapons, lots of them.
“What I have is I have at least one pistol and one rifle in the most common calibers. That would be a ‘22, ‘45 and a nine millimeter,” he told The Post.
Larry also has an AR-1556, 12 gauge shotgun and an M14.
“That’ll pretty much take down a moose,” he said.
For Roman V. Yampolskiy, Ph.D., an associate professor at the University of Louisville’s Speed School of Engineering, these various kinds of preparation are worth taking seriously.
“The strange thing is not that some people are preparing. The strange thing is that civilization is building potentially transformative technology while doing relatively little preparation for failure,” he explained.
He believes the concerns driving preppers aren’t necessarily irrational — they’re a matter of “sensible preparation.”
“Doomsday preppers may look eccentric, but diversification against low-probability, high-impact events is standard risk management,” Yampolskiy said. “Governments do it. Corporations do it. Individuals probably should too.”
