What are the most important things to have in a disaster situation? Food, drinking water, fuel for heating & cooking, and money (assuming you already have shelter and clothing). There's also self-defense, but let's table that for the moment.
How would you get these essentials if the disaster turned out to be a long term, grid-down event? It's not as unlikely as you may think. All it takes is a strategically placed EMP, a few wrong people in charge of "the grid", or a geomagnetic storm like the Carrington Event of 1859 (or the one we narrowly missed in 2012). There's also the fact that the grid is now controlled largely by software, with different regions connected to each other via the Internet. That carries a whole new set of vulnerabilities. And remember, if the grid goes down, the Internet goes with it. The interdependence is ironic when you think about it.
Let's start with water. Whether you get your water from a well or the municipal supply, both are pumped by electricity.
Oh, you have a generator? Great! What happens when it runs out of gas or diesel? You won't be able to go to the filling station to refuel, as all the pumps today are electric. That also means no more fuel for cooking or heating. Even if you could find some way to get fuel delivered to you, at some point, the refineries will need to convert crude oil into more fuel when the local supply runs out. Refineries don't work without electricity. You heat with coal or oil? The blowers are still electric. Propane? Electric ignition and blowers.
How will you pay for that fuel (if you can get it)? ATM machines are out, and the bank won't even know your balance, as everything is kept online these days. No paper ledgers, and any back-up systems also require...electricity. Your funds are, at best, inaccessible, if not completely erased.
What about food? If you can't get to your bank account, how will you buy food? First off, you'd need cash. Card readers won't work. Everything in the stores is priced with barcodes now, and barcode scanners need electricity. The clerks won't know what to charge you without looking up the prices on the store's POS system which, surprise, needs electricity. How long would it take for the merchants to reimplement the methods they used in the pre-barcode, pre-computer days (50+ years ago)? Oh wait, they don't make old-style cash registers anymore. They're all electronic. Looks like it will have to be pen & paper accounting. A lot of customers will get desperate - fast - long before a workable trade system is in place.
I've been shopping more than once when the power went out. The conversation is always the same: "We can't do anything until the power comes back on." "But I have cash". "I'm sorry, I don't know how to handle that - the register is down". They have no backup plan. Total dependency on "the system". Many don't even know how to make change without a calculator. After a few days with no power and no alarm systems, looting is inevitable and the shelves will be empty anyway.
Forget the stores. Do you have a garden? Will it sustain you and your family? How will you water it?
Let's say you're resourceful. You can build a hydroponic garden, capture rain water, set up a greenhouse, construct a reverse osmosis water filter, and forge a wood stove (with hand tools only). All you have to do is watch a few Youtube videos and look up some horticulture data on the...oh, wait. No Internet, no Google, no information sources other than physical books that you already own.
You remember this place called a library - but most of them are mere shadows of what they once were. Chances are, the info you need, if there at all, has been scanned into a digital format, with the paper originals long gone. And the library computers are now unusable.
Cell phone communications go down about 12 hours after the grid. That's how long the battery backup in a cell tower lasts. After that, no phone calls, no texts, no Internet. There's no point in charging your phone, even if you could.
These issues are just the tip of the iceberg. We haven't touched on sanitation, waste removal, first aid, transportation, or law enforcement. Pray that you don't depend on life-sustaining medications, or need the services of a hospital.
Our dependence on the Internet is bad enough, but we've become entirely too dependent on electricity itself. I don't know of a single business that has an alternative plan to electrical dependency. We've put all our eggs in one basket. If you've ever tried to shop when the power went out, or navigate the streets when all the traffic lights are dark, you've gotten just a little taste of our dependence. Imagine if that lasted for weeks or months. Or years. It's estimated that a Carrington-Event-like storm happening today would take us 4-10 years to recover from. And the odds of such a storm hitting us in the next 10 years is 12%!
Take out the grid, and you take out everything we depend on, all at once. In our rush to embrace technology, I think we forgot to develop a Plan B.
UPDATE: I found this History Channel documentary that remarkably parallels much of what I speculated above. I found it a little spooky, actually:
History Channel - Doomsday S1E5
I dunno, seems like Ukraine has managed to do reasonably well with power delivery despite getting their infrastructure bombed monthly. I figure the US could do ok in a single-event emergency - unless you're in Texas, of course.
ReplyDeleteYes, but conventional bombs create localized damage. An EMP can take out the grid of a whole continent. A geomagnetic storm can affect the entire planet. We've only been electricity-dependent for less than a century - most homes didn't even have light bulbs until the 1930s. We haven't really been tested yet.
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