‘Ready to kill zombies?’

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 12/03/2012 (5143 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In a makeshift classroom on the main floor of a Wolseley-area housing co-op, 10 ordinary-looking Winnipeggers settled into two rows of seats, placed notebooks on their laps, and began preparing for the Apocalypse.

Well, perhaps not THE Apocalypse, in the Judaeo-Christian sense of the term. In another sign that survivalism has entered the cultural mainstream, two Manitoba wilderness educators have started offering city-dwellers a class on how to prepare for the disastrous aftermath of a catastrophic natural disaster or some unprecedented form of civil unrest.

“So is everybody ready to kill some zombies?” joked co-instructor Dwayne Logan on Saturday morning at the start of Urban Survival and Disaster Preparedness, the class the Souris-area farmer has put together with Laura Reeves, a wild-edibles specialist based in Gardenton.

Over the course of eight hours, Logan and Reeves imparted McGyver-like lessons such as how to create makeshift sleeping bags out of scraps of plastic and newspaper, turn old tuna cans into oil lamps and build a water purifier out of an empty soda-pop bottle.

The soft-spoken pair also offered matter-of-fact advice about more disconcerting matters, such as the best way to improvise weapons capable of gouging the eyes and ears of a would-be attacker, the most efficient way to trap neighbourhood rodents and housepets for their meat, and how to blend into the background of a devastated city to avoid being robbed by looters.

As extreme as that may sound, recent worldwide events have demonstrated the services many city-dwellers take for granted — water, electrical power, policing and grocery stores full of food — can fail extremely quickly due to exceptional catastrophes, Logan said.

“A lot of people think the government can help them no matter what happens. (Hurricane) Katrina proved that wasn’t the case, as even the most powerful country in the world was unable to help its citizens,” he said.

Although he and Reeves said they put together the course primarily to help Winnipeggers prepare for short-term disasters such as power outages, ice storms, and blizzards, they also see the value in planning for an event that lasts much longer. A simple highway closure due to a flood or civil disobedience, for example, is capable of disrupting the retail grocery supply chain, they said — most city-dwellers only store several days or weeks of food in their homes and apartments.

“If the power’s out for two hours, you obviously aren’t going to go out and trap your neighbour’s cat,” Logan joked. “But it’s probably a good idea to know where your flashlight is and have some sort of portable stove for cooking when there’s no gas or power.”

The actual spark for the urban-survival course came from participants in their wilderness-survival classes. “They kept asking us, ‘So what do we do if we’re in the city?’ ” Reeves said. “You actually have more to work with in the city.”

Winnipeg, however, is actually better positioned to deal with disasters than most other North American centres. This city shrugs off blizzards and river floods that would overwhelm many other cities and also has plans in place to deal with tornadoes, ice storms, chemical spills, power outages, airplane crashes, train derailments, gas explosions and windstorms.

But in the event of a sudden disaster, most citizens will be without help for three days. The city’s emergency preparedness plan calls for residents to take care of themselves for the first 72 hours.

After that, citizens can expect an official response to kick in. Logan and Reeves, however, said they remain concerned about what could happen after an emergency drags on for several months.

“Some people think preparedness is something that interests only paranoid, crazy people,” said Logan, insisting his own survival education has led him to eat better, become more fit and waste less overall.

“I want this to improve your life,” he said.

bartley.kives@freepress.mb.ca