Channel Surfing: \'Doomsday Preppers,\' After the Hurricane

Next time a storm or some other calamity leaves you with a refrigerator full of spoiled food and an empty stomach, you should probably not make your way to Plato, Mo., in search of sustenance. There's a 15-year-old named Jason there who has made himself a baseball bat studded with nails â€" a “maceball bat,” he calls it â€" and he sounds more than eager to use it on you if you make a grab for his canned tuna.

That's right, “Doomsday Preppers” returned to the National Geographic Channel for its second season on Tuesday night, and Jason was one of the earnest, rather frightening preppers the program introduced in back-to-back episodes. Don't worry, though; you may never get close enough to feel the wrath of his maceball bat. He might shoot you with one of his guns first.

Of course, thanks to Hurricane Sandy, millions of people on the East Coast have fre shly experienced some of the traumas these preppers prep for â€" loss of electric power; fuel shortages; lack of food; even looting. So there was perhaps some renewed interest in the excesses of the doomsday preppers, each of whom is expecting a different type of calamity: economic collapse, nuclear war, biological attack. Are there things these people do that might be relevant to a heavily urbanized zone like the New York area?

Well, certainly having some canned food and bottled water makes more sense than ever, but it's hard to imagine millions of New York apartment dwellers having the capacity to store hundreds of gallons of water and gasoline each, as some of the preppers do. (Most seem to live in areas like Plato â€" population 109 â€" where land is plentiful.) And the prospect of everyone in New York owning a huge cache of weaponry is just plain terrifying.

One of the families profiled Tuesday, the Bryants, another M issouri clan, are actually preparing for Sandy-like weather: They're afraid of a series of catastrophic tornadoes. And their segment did raise an interesting question: How do you prepare to have an adequate supply of insulin if family members are diabetic, as is the case with the Bryants?

Another place you don't want to head next time there's a disaster is Nashville, because you might run into Big Al, who's also profiled Tuesday. He did not seem to have a studded baseball bat, but he did have a country song about prepping. Based on the excerpts in the show, it's a particularly bad country song, which is saying a lot. (Sample lyric: “You might wish you had a gun when you can't call 911.”) Imagine being stuck in this guy's bunker for six months with no entertainment other than him singing it over and over.

But seriously: What prepping have you done or thought about doing since Sandy? And are these doomsday preppers visionaries, or menaces?