This is our battleground. This is our sanctuary. This is our local grocery store Reason’s Foods. Even though it is spelled like “reason,” it is pronounced “Ree-sens.” We are the grocery store that all the people stop at before heading on to their lake houses and their ski boats. There are times where I wished I would have worked at Walmart or Weapons R Us but you get what you get.
I want you to be able to see our layout so you can better understand what we are dealing with.
PHASE 1: BARRICADES
On Day 1 of this nightmare, we began barricading the store but I have not really had an opportunity to describe what we did specifically. (I am still not comfortable talking about Zero Hour yet. I will but… not right now.) After a week of living in here, we are pretty confident that what we have done is working. With that being said, barricading the store was not easy but it was easier than I expected.
I know the sheer size looks difficult to defend but it is actually quite the opposite. Except for the front of the store, all of our doors are security doors which means they don’t have any handles on the outside and can only be opened from inside. And these are heavy steel doors. It is impossible for anything to break these doors down without some sort of battering ram. So, most of the exterior doors that you see on the map were secure to begin with.
Our store features 3 roll up doors that are roughly the size of your standard garage door. One is positioned for semi-trailers to back up against and sits so high off the ground that I doubt the zombies could even reach it with enough leverage to do any damage. But that is not even an issue because a semi-trailer was backed up against the loading dock at the time of the attack. So that area is secure. We didn’t know what happened to the driver but as he is unaccounted for, I can only assume the worst. (Note: Pardon the expression but we cannibalized the CB radio from the semi truck and have been attempting to make contact with the outside world with it if we can adapt a power source.)
The store uses a fully functioning forklift so we placed a couple of tons of pig iron against the second roll up door. That bad boy isn’t moving unless we want it to.
The only other roll up door was in the Produce Department. We blocked that one off with pallets of product. Shipments arrive to grocery stores on pallets. Imagine a bale of potatoes. They come in ten pound bags and five bags per sleeve for a total of fifty pounds. You can fit five bales on a pallet layer. That equals 250 pounds per layer. So, ten layers of potatoes equals 2,500 lbs. of product. That is a lot of weight. Much like the door barricaded with the forklift, this door is not moving unless we want it to. [Note for later, produce is going to be our entry and egress point for later but that is another blog entry.]
Now, the main points of concern were the three front doors and the large windows that serve as the front of the store. We believe that these zombies hunt on instinct. They hunt by way of sight, sound, and smell. So our first step was to cut off sight. We covered up all the windows using aluminum foil.
Foil is light, easy to work with, and completely blocks out the light. When we started covering up the windows, I really didn’t think we would have enough but a single roll of aluminum foil spreads out to 75 square feet. Combine that with packing tape from our office supply section and we were not even through the Always Save cheapo brand before we had all the windows covered.
Using the same weight formula as with the potatoes, you can imagine how much a pallet of pork and beans weighs. I don’t care how many zombies you get pushing on the door, they aren’t shoving the door open with – literally – a ton of dog food or soup lodged behind it.
If we get to a point where we can make it outside, we intend to park cars against the doors so that the zombies cannot lay hands on the doors or windows directly. So the doors were covered and secured.
We then double-stacked pallets of products using the store’s Walker-Stacker and placed them up against the large windows at the front of the store. This plan has seemed to work pretty well so far. I really thought the windows would be a giant liability but now that we have them reinforced, I really think we are safer than I thought we would be. Thing could change. If the zombies do get overly violent and hungry, they could still smash the windows in somehow but with all that weight up against it, I just don’t see it happening. Still, it is better to prepare for the worst case scenarios.
More later…
I want you to be able to see our layout so you can better understand what we are dealing with.
PHASE 1: BARRICADES
On Day 1 of this nightmare, we began barricading the store but I have not really had an opportunity to describe what we did specifically. (I am still not comfortable talking about Zero Hour yet. I will but… not right now.) After a week of living in here, we are pretty confident that what we have done is working. With that being said, barricading the store was not easy but it was easier than I expected.
I know the sheer size looks difficult to defend but it is actually quite the opposite. Except for the front of the store, all of our doors are security doors which means they don’t have any handles on the outside and can only be opened from inside. And these are heavy steel doors. It is impossible for anything to break these doors down without some sort of battering ram. So, most of the exterior doors that you see on the map were secure to begin with.
Our store features 3 roll up doors that are roughly the size of your standard garage door. One is positioned for semi-trailers to back up against and sits so high off the ground that I doubt the zombies could even reach it with enough leverage to do any damage. But that is not even an issue because a semi-trailer was backed up against the loading dock at the time of the attack. So that area is secure. We didn’t know what happened to the driver but as he is unaccounted for, I can only assume the worst. (Note: Pardon the expression but we cannibalized the CB radio from the semi truck and have been attempting to make contact with the outside world with it if we can adapt a power source.)
The store uses a fully functioning forklift so we placed a couple of tons of pig iron against the second roll up door. That bad boy isn’t moving unless we want it to.
The only other roll up door was in the Produce Department. We blocked that one off with pallets of product. Shipments arrive to grocery stores on pallets. Imagine a bale of potatoes. They come in ten pound bags and five bags per sleeve for a total of fifty pounds. You can fit five bales on a pallet layer. That equals 250 pounds per layer. So, ten layers of potatoes equals 2,500 lbs. of product. That is a lot of weight. Much like the door barricaded with the forklift, this door is not moving unless we want it to. [Note for later, produce is going to be our entry and egress point for later but that is another blog entry.]
Now, the main points of concern were the three front doors and the large windows that serve as the front of the store. We believe that these zombies hunt on instinct. They hunt by way of sight, sound, and smell. So our first step was to cut off sight. We covered up all the windows using aluminum foil.
Foil is light, easy to work with, and completely blocks out the light. When we started covering up the windows, I really didn’t think we would have enough but a single roll of aluminum foil spreads out to 75 square feet. Combine that with packing tape from our office supply section and we were not even through the Always Save cheapo brand before we had all the windows covered.
Using the same weight formula as with the potatoes, you can imagine how much a pallet of pork and beans weighs. I don’t care how many zombies you get pushing on the door, they aren’t shoving the door open with – literally – a ton of dog food or soup lodged behind it.
If we get to a point where we can make it outside, we intend to park cars against the doors so that the zombies cannot lay hands on the doors or windows directly. So the doors were covered and secured.
We then double-stacked pallets of products using the store’s Walker-Stacker and placed them up against the large windows at the front of the store. This plan has seemed to work pretty well so far. I really thought the windows would be a giant liability but now that we have them reinforced, I really think we are safer than I thought we would be. Thing could change. If the zombies do get overly violent and hungry, they could still smash the windows in somehow but with all that weight up against it, I just don’t see it happening. Still, it is better to prepare for the worst case scenarios.
More later…
