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Whether it’s a blizzard or a nuclear disaster, Frostburg State University students are learning how to prepare for anything in the course Doomsday Preppers and Surviving the Unexpected Emergency.
“I was always interested in the idea of being prepared for any emergency,” said mathematics major Braden Ebersole, who completed the course’s first offering in the fall semester.
Recreation and Parks Management Professor Robert Kauffman, a leading authority on survival methods, teaches the freshman-level interdisciplinary course, where students learn some MacGyver-worthy techniques to make it out of any situation alive.
“Am I going to be prepared for (Hurricane) Katrina, a three-day snow storm or the Yellowstone caldera blowing up?” Kauffman said. “There’s an immense security in being prepared.”
Kauffman authored a study on what’s called “the rescue curve,” where injury, damage or loss can increase as time between an incident and an intervention increases. Some of that idle time, alone, is helped by recreation and games to alleviate the mind.
Survivalism has also become a popular plot point in entertainment of late, with shows ranging from the reality series “Running Wild With Bear Grylls” to sitcoms “The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” and “Last Man on Earth,” looking at extreme, unlikely scenarios.
In Kauffman’s class, he uses clips from “Castaway” and “Blast From the Past” among others to augment his examples of the psychological and physical effects of disaster preparedness.
As January’s snowstorm demonstrated, these skills come in handy whether stranded on a highway or isolated in your neighborhood.
Kauffman first offered the course to students in the fall and is in the midst of his second semester with the course. He plans to offer it again next fall.
Among the assignments in IDIS 150, students have to plan for short-term disasters and one-year disasters, take inventory of their food at home, design a shelter, determine how much in supplies and food they need, organize communication tools and, yes, learn how to prep for life in an underground bunker. But it’s the more likely scenarios that Kauffman really hopes the students will be prepared for.
“It is a reprocessing of your camping skills. Really, what we did is take the old-fashioned camping course and repackaged it,” Kauffman said. “The real emphasis is surviving the unexpected emergency we could be thrust into anytime, our car breaking down on the road, being stranded at a rest stop, or we just had a storm where people were stranded for three days.”
Ebersole, of New Enterprise, Pa., found the course helpful for when he goes hunting in the winter. He now makes sure he has an extra coat and supplies in his car for unexpected situations. It was a simple exercise in class that showed him why it’s important to have extra supplies.
“We pulled out everything from our pockets, and whatever you had with you at the time is what you’ll have during an emergency,” he said.
He also was well-prepared for the January snowstorm in part thanks to the class, having stocked up on enough food and supplies to make it until his neighborhood’s streets were cleared.
In a recent class, students volunteered for a hyperthermia experiment. They dunked one hand into a bucket of cold water and held a thermometer in the other. Then they watched the temperature on a thermometer drop, showing how their own body temperature was affected by having just a hand in ice water.
For more information on FSU’s Recreation and Parks Management Program, go to www.frostburg.edu/home/academic/majorminors/bachelor/bachelor-in-recreation-and-parks-management.
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