On Day 1 of this nightmare, the
paramount priority was barricading the entrances to the store. I have not
really had an opportunity to describe what we did specifically regarding all
the doors and such. (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. Outside of 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 as long as they are not opened from the inside.
Our store features three 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. If you
are outside, the bottom of the door hits about chest level 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, we have that truck available but we have secured the
roll up door and locked it. That area is locked down tight. 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 want
to cannibalize the CB radio from the semi and have been attempting to make
contact with the outside world with it if we can adapt a power source. We are
going to wait until things calm down a bit before venturing outside.)
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 where I worked. We blocked that one off with pallets of
product. Shipments arrive to grocery stores on pallets. Imagine a bale of
potatoes. They come five units per sleeve for a total of fifty pounds. You can
fit five bales on a pallet layer. That equals 250 pounds per layer. So, a ten
layer pallet of potatoes equals 2,500 lbs. of product. That is a lot of weight.
Much like the door barricaded with the forklift, the Produce roll up 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. The south entrance has an “in” door and an “out” door
that are both the size of a standard door. The north entrance is a large
sliding glass doors. 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.
And we didn’t just use one pallet. We
used the store’s Walker-Stacker and double-stacked pallets of products before placing
them up against the doors at the front of the store. This plan has seemed to
work pretty well so far. The doors could still be a giant liability but now
that we have them reinforced, I really think we are safer than I thought we
would be.
Things could change. If the zombies do
get overly violent and hungry, they could still smash the window or the glass
in the doors somehow but with all that weight up against it, I just don’t see them
shoving the door open. Still, it is better to prepare for the worst case
scenarios.
Once we get to a point where we can
make it outside (along with getting the CB out of the semi), we intend to park
cars against the doors so that the zombies cannot lay hands on the doors or
windows directly. Then the doors will be even more covered and secured.
With all entries blocked, I would not
say we are safe but we are certainly safer…
