Even in normal times, with a functioning power grid, the Emergency Alert System is on fairly shaky grounds:
They’ll do another test this September and we’ll get to see if things have improved.
They sure do. Back in 1999 after the Rouge powerhouse explosion, Ford was operating its stamping plant (to supply unaffected plants) after the course of the weekend using these. Giant, semi tractor trailers that were just giant diesel generators were connected to the buss and powered the lines and emergency lighting.
Similarly the rich along Lake St. Clair (in the Gross Points) like to outdo each other at Christmas time with their decorations. If you go by in the day, you can see similar mobile power supplies powering the whole thing.
And of course the military has tons and tons of smaller scale versions of these.
There are simply not enough of these emergency power generators to power the whole country, or even come close. Supply power to critical infrastructure in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, or critical portions of New Jersey’s infrastructure after Sandy? Sure. Everything? Not even close.
If the grid went down, I doubt the government is organized enough to get diesel fuel to resupply all the hospitals’ emergency generators’ fuel tanks before they run dry (in probably a day or two). I’d give them a standing ovation if they could keep even half the country’s hospitals continuously supplied with emergency power for two weeks.
Every American living space I know of could double its capacity. I live in a studio apartment by myself, and yet could probably fit 3-4 people in here if it came to it. It wouldn’t be pleasant, but if they’re family, there’s no option not to do it. Once you’ve dealt with all the people who have family outside of the cold zone, there’s probably not many people left to relocate.
Tell everyone in the main square and tell them to tell everyone else. The whole world is 6 degrees of separation from any one individual. Getting the word out to everyone in a city should be eminently do-able if you can just get the information to a few dozen people. Post some flyers around town, and your seed expands even more.
You do realize that there were ways for news to spread before the invention of the phone?
Landlines may continue to work without power, I might also note, though you need an older receiver.
I think that’s wishful thinking. Your phone call gets routed to a data center somewhere that’s running on backup power with enough diesel to last a day or two at best, then it shuts down. The phone systems are swamped with people attempting to make calls, and most of the people you’d want to call have cell phones, or VoIP phones, not land lines with old no-external-power-required receivers. If power is out all over the country, you have about a snowball’s-chance-in-hell of being able to pick up a telephone and successfully place a call to one of the handful of people you’d like to speak with. If you do manage to get through, you should know that you just won the telephone lottery, and most people won’t be able to successfully place a call to the people they want.
Two little pressure cookers blew up in Boston a few years ago and people swamped the cell networks there, to the point that there were initially rumors that the government had shut down phone networks intentionally. One fairly consistent experience in disasters, from 9/11 to Katrina or Sandy, or the Boston bombings, is that our communication networks can’t handle the load those events generate, even when the power stays on. There’s no chance that the network would handle the traffic during a national power outage.
In a large-scale power outage, I’d have no interest in being the mayor’s errand boy, and I doubt I’d do whatever the message said if it did manage to reach me. I don’t think I’m alone in that, but YMMV. “Bring all your food to the skating rink so that we can divvy it up equally” or “hey, tell everyone you see to come to the Super Dome, it’s going to be really great there, we’ll have water, we promise.” Would you go?
Not to mention that after a few iterations it would be so garbled and rumor-laden the whole exercise would be useless. I lived through the '89 Loma Prieta quake. I was a lot younger then, and quite a distance from the epicenter, but even then, we got more than our share of stupid fear-mongering rumors and hysteria. And that was just one decent-sized earthquake. We knew help was on the way, from all over the country. A national blackout would be 1000x worse.
Here is an interesting special the National Geographic did called American Blackout 2013: - YouTube
My takeaway from it is that lots of people behave stupidly and irrationally during emergencies.
That’s not what I was suggesting. Set up the ice rink as the supermarket. If that’s where one goes to buy food, then yeah, I’d go there to buy food. And if I met someone who didn’t seem to know that the skating rink was where all the fresh produce was being sold from, I’d certainly tell them to head that way.
I suspect that people would settle down in something less than 18 months.
After a day or two there’s not going to be any more food to sell in most cities in America. The truck drivers that would normally bring more are going to be at home with their families, not risking getting Reginald Denny’d on a long-haul trip hundreds of miles from home, for a company that can’t deposit their paycheck into a bank they can’t withdraw money from.
We couldn’t live in cities … all the food has to be hauled in … no electric pumps for fuel or water … no sewage treatment … no lights, hell, people will burn everything down.
Let’s take Chicago … the people would have to leave and migrate out into the countryside, on foot no less … 10 million people foraging will strip the local environs clean. Now imagine this for dozens of cities … not pretty.
If this goes on for 18 months I’d think we’d see a pretty serious level of die-off
A lot depends on why the power goes out.
Terrorists bomb generating stations or key points of the grid? Bad enough, but if you can get a power source of some sort going your radio or TV may still work (depends on power requirements - my radio takes a lot less than the TV), your vehicles will still work, your cell phone will still work, you might be able to power a small refrigerator…
If it’s a massive EMP or Carrington Event then a LOT of modern electronics will be permanently fried. That means you’d need a tube-style radio, your cell phone is a paperweight, most modern vehicles are junk. If your power generator uses any sort of computer you’re also screwed.
For example - we have a solar panel at my house that can charge a cell phone, power a small refrigerator/cooler, a light or two and a fan… but an EMP would destroy the electronics built into the system. There are probably some electricians out there who could find a way to work around that, but they’d be few and far between compared to the hordes of people out there.
A friend of mine is doing pretty well financially, so he’s constantly looking for ways to spend money.
He recently had a mega generator installed alongside his house. It starts automatically when the electricity goes out and is sufficiently sized to power his entire home. The generator, along with his tractor, gave him an excuse to purchase untaxed farm diesel so he has a tank for that.
I’d head for his place. We have a 4,000 watt generator in the garage that can be plugged into the house. We’ve never bothered using it. Our occasional one or two day outages are an excuse to use the fireplace and snuggle by candlelight.
Reading these responses, I go back to the OP, and wonder how exactly we are all defining “survive.” I interpreted it as the US surviving as a political entity. And I think there would be a pretty good chance of that occurring.
If you mean the US population surviving without considerable inconvenience and likely considerable loss of life, that is far less likely.
I cannot begin to crunch the logistics, but if the US prioritized sites near power sources (hydro would continue generating, no?) The only problem would be distribution) and farm to population/manufacturing (probably via barge/RR) you would have some significant resources upon which to expand.
I guess the issue of support from our allies is another question. Hell, look at how much goodwill we squandered after 9/11. I don’t see why England, Germany, or even China or Russia would invade us directly. The certainly might take steps to lessen our strength worldwide, but that doesn’t mean our nation wouldn’t “survive.”
Would the US break into “regions”, to make recovery easier? Possible, but I doubt it.
Let’s go with a big Carrington Event … where any copper or aluminum wire longer than a foot is vaporized or oxidized. Every generator and motor are trashed, all the wiring in your house is gone. Imagine the steel towers used to distribute the electricity melt down, wooden utility poles catch fire and burn away. Sure, the solar panels might survive, but there’s no electrical wire north of the Rio Grande. The tube radio may work, but there’s no one transmitting.
“How to Speak Spanish” books will survive, I’d suggest reading them in a hurry.
The OP is a hypothetical … whatever the cause, the USA and Canada have no electric grid for 18 months … I say 100,000,000 dead, easy
Never happen that way. A Carrington Event that large would trash things world-wide, not just in the US. In which case we are all screwed and global population drops by 80% rather suddenly and violently.
If we follow the OP and call it terrorism taking out substations, then we are much better off. De-grid where possible, rebuild from regional generation. Still going to be a lot of death and destruction, but not “wipe the slate clean” stuff.
Since that person on the radio is likely to be my wife… yeah, I’d go.
It’s a very long story, but she’s a volunteer who could be called on by the local police or by FEMA in an emergency. She’s a ham radio operator with police dispatch experience in her background. She has been trained at the actual location FEMA would be using.
Question: Why do you think car batteries will die? Did people lose their keys when the power went out, or are you sticking by the idea that gasoline cannot be pumped using backup generators?
Yes, I believe most gas stations will be closed. The few that remain open will be overwhelmed. I responded back in post #25.
Yep, and once they go dry, I wouldn’t be expecting many if any deliveries to them.
You do know that we were able to keep track of money before the invention of the computer?
If the food production and shipping business was profitable before the collapse, it should be after the collapse. No one might know how much money there actually was in the company accounts before everything went to hell, but a company check, handwritten, would be accepted by a bank. A guy who delivers new dollar bills to banks would accept a check from the Federal government. Both he and the food shippers would accept the new dollar bills from the bank, in exchange for the checks, and the banks would accept the checks from the presumed-to-be-financially-secure shipping company and Federal government.
There’s more physical labor involved, because everyone will want cash instead of an account balance that their credit card can debit from, but (as pointed out previously), there will be a lot of people who’s jobs have to be put on pause until the power is back up, so filling that demand shouldn’t be hard.