Milton Torres had a comfortable life working as a biomedical engineer in Chicago. Then he started worrying about Planet X — a theory that a collision or near-miss with a planetary object would wreak chaos here on Earth. Like many believers, he thought the end times were coming in 2012. Earth survived, but his suspicion that some kind of cataclysm is coming — and that the powerful will not be there to protect the rest of us — still nagged at him.
One day he did the unthinkable. He left everything behind — his job, his urban, middle class lifestyle — and moved to a bunker outside of Edgemont, South Dakota. Family and friends were shocked.
Today, he's several years into outfitting his bunker, part of the old US Army Black Hills Ordnance Depot complex, outside the ghost town of Igloo. The Army built the earth-covered domes during WWII to store munitions. A private company now leases the structures as survival bunkers.
"I've traveled to so many other States to look at other survival places," says Torres. "But people my skin color and the way I look don't do good in certain locations. So, this video popped up on YouTube about a bunker."
"I listened to the video and there was the owner talking about how he's having a festival. So I'm like, I'm going to go to South Dakota. So I drive to South Dakota to the festival. And instantly, all the people that came there initially, I think it was like seven of us, we became the pioneers."
The transition has not been easy. "You're going to lose so much more than you're going to gain. I lost so much more than what I have gained but what I've gained is more important than everything I've lost. What I've gained is my sanity, my spirituality, my being, who I am."
Probably the most popular approach to preppers, to the extent they are thought of at all, is to dismiss them as wingnuts, cranks or ignoramuses. That may be changing, if only slightly, in the COVID-19 era, at least as regards toilet paper. We normals have seen some supply line disruptions that, if not catastrophic, have revealed some fragility in the systems we need to survive.
Even in less eventful times, Milton Torres isn't easily dismissed. He is educated and seems quite sane. He doesn't spout the tropes of any political brand, if anything he comes off as apolitical. He does display a lack of trust in power in general, in the idea that when the proverbial hitting of the fan happens, the authorities will have your back. Some of his paranoia seems reasonable. He assumes that in extraordinary situations, human organizations can fail.
"If we get a solar flare, or EMP from whoever. There, we're fried. Is your government going to really help every single individual that doesn't have electricity? No. So at the end of the day, you better start preparing for yourself in case something happened and you're not dependent. You're not the only one. The government has the 340 million. They're not just going to protect you."
"Our parents or grandparents, they used to be hunter gatherers, right? We're not hunter gatherers. You're depending on going to the grocery store, depending on that supply chain that could be broken down so easily as we found out."
Torres says that people are starting to understand him in the COVID-19 era.
"I think what [COVID-19] did was... it helped the iffy people. The people that just don't see it now, I believe they're at the if mark. The iffers are like, 'Oh sh*t, okay, let me look into these guys.' We'll eventually get there. But it may be too late. The iffers might have a fighting chance."
He says some are even giving the prepper life some thought. "They all want to come now. They all want to come too, but they'll never make the move."
He gets them too. "Sometimes I wonder why I do this. I wonder like, what am I doing? I'm a Puerto Rican man in a bunker in South Dakota by myself. What am I doing? What am I really doing?"
Despite the doubts, he seems pretty committed. He believes something is coming, and he wants to be ready.
"There's a change coming in the world. And that's what's going to make everything balanced again. There's no compassion. There's no love. There's just hate. Everyone wants to take or be above you. No one wants to look at each other as equal. They want to be above you."
"People don't want to let go of the way they were brought up, the way they were taught. I had to change my own mindset when I got into this. I think we were all fed a lie our whole life. And now once you understand you've been fed a lie, how do you fix that? And that goes into maybe doing things for yourself, for your family, for your friends, people that really care."