Run for the Hills

ED: This is BackStory. I’m Ed Ayers. I hate to break it to you, but the Mayan Long Count calendar is set to end on December 21st. There are some who think that the world will end with it. It’s hardly the first time Americans have seen signs of apocalypse. In the 1930s, one of those signs was FDR.

MATTHEW AVERY SUTTON: Here was a guy, who, at the Democratic National Convention of 1932 got 666 votes. And, of course, 666 was traditionally the sign of the Antichrist.

ED: So let’s say in the end of the world does come, how do you prepare for it?

BRIAN CAMDEN: Well, a tsunami, what you generally do is you calculate the elevation of the land versus the size that the clients think that the tsunami will be.

ED: And for those making the predictions, how have they felt when they’ve gotten it wrong?

JOHN GRIBBIN: I’m really pleased that, you know, a million people didn’t die in 1982, because we were right.

ED: A history of doomsday in America, today on the BackStory. But first, some history in the making.

PETER: Major support for BackStory is provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and by the University of Virginia.

ED: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is BackStory with the American Backstory hosts.

BRIAN: Welcome to the show. I’m Brian Balogh, 20th Century Guy and I’m here with Ed Ayers–

ED: 19th Century Guy.

BRIAN: And Peter Onuf is with us.

PETER: 18th Century Guy.

BROADCAST ANNOUNCER: Let us face, without panic, the reality of our times. The fact that atom bombs may someday be dropped on our cities. And let us prepare for survival, understanding the weapon that threatens us.

PETER: In 1951, the United States Office of Civil Defense produced a video explaining the dangers of an atomic bomb. It was called “Survival Under Atomic Attack.” It talked about radiation and heat.

BROADCAST ANNOUNCER: People caught in the open as far as two miles away suffered flash burns.

PETER: It talked about the dangers of falling buildings. And then, it told people how to protect themselves.

BROADCAST ANNOUNCER: The first job is to look over your own home for shelter possibilities. If you live in a private home that is well built, the cellar is the safest place to be.

ED: Lots of people built their own shelters. The end of the world could happen at any minute, and people wanted to be prepared. Well, as it turns out, for the doomsday minded, it’s time to hunker down again.

BRIAN CAMDEN: In probably 2005 to 2010, the Mayan calendar 2012, shelter was probably the most predominant product we did.

BRIAN: This is Brian Camden. He’s the owner of a company in Virginia Beach called Hardened Structures. They build a lot of intense fortifications for the military, you know, things like bomb-resistant airplane hangers and stuff like that. But they also get requests from regular people here in America who want to build their own shelters or fortify their own homes for an apocalyptic scenario.

PETER: And now there’s this new scenario, the one Camden mentioned. It’s the thought that when the Mayan Long Count calendar ends on December 21, 2012, it will usher in the end of the world. When people caught wind of it, well, Brian Camden was the guy who was going to keep them safe. Problem was–

BRIAN CAMDEN: No two clients really agreed, or had the same understanding of what 2012 would entail. Even the experts themselves argued about what would happen. Some were the methane gas exploding. Other ones would be massive solar flares. Other ones firmly believed that a tsunami would wipe over the United States.

BRIAN: A tsunami. Now are you prepared to protect against a tsunami?

BRIAN CAMDEN: Oh, yes. A tsunami is fairly straightforward.

BRIAN: I’m sorry. So you see how naive I am about fortified structures.

BRIAN CAMDEN: Well, a tsunami, what you generally do is you calculate the elevation of the land versus the size that the clients think the tsunami will be. Let’s say it’s about 1,000 foot tsunami and the elevation of the land is already at 500 feet, so you would design it for a 500 foot load.

But even with that, you must assume that the water will never recede. So you have to have self rescue supplies within the shelter itself. And any shelter that’s the designed for submersion has to have a CO2 scrubber and an oxygen machine in it.

BRIAN: Camden has fortified homes for all kinds of “end of the world” scenarios, homes with sniper positions and non-lethal gas systems meant to fend off human threats. Shelters designed to operate off grid in cases there’s a contamination in the water supply, or power plants go down. And I asked Camden, how bad can things really get? What is the most apocalyptic vision that any client has been concerned about in your 20 years of work? And again, we’re talking about the home building, retail side of things, the non-governmental.

BRIAN CAMDEN: I would have to say it’s the belief that the 2012 Mayan scenario will release the methane gas within the Earth’s crust and cause the entire earth to suffer severe fire for any given length of time. That was probably the hardest to try to mitigate, there.

BRIAN: I can imagine. Did you succeed in that, in your opinion?

BRIAN CAMDEN: No we did not. Only because the design solution for it, which required a deep earth bunker with separate air and all that, was beyond the budget of the client.

BRIAN: They could have done it if they had the resources.

BRIAN CAMDEN: Oh, well, yes.

BRIAN: You’re a can-do guy, Mr. Camden.

BRIAN CAMDEN: Oh, yes, yes. The level of protection is only governed by the size of the budget. It doesn’t matter to us, the Mayan calendar, WMDs, terrorism, economic collapse. One we can figure out what the threat of that scenario is, what are the assets to be protected, and the threat levels, from that point on it’s engineering and physics.

ED: So in this episode of BackStory, what we hope won’t be our final episode, we are toasting the end of the world. We’re looking back at Americans throughout history who have predicted doomsday.

PETER: From religious zeal to scientific miscalculation, fears about the apocalypse seem to ebb and flow throughout history. We want to figure out when they spiked, and why. Some of these predictions fall flat on their faces, but others, well, they’re a little more complicated.

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