I’ve got plenty of wood to survive a year or more. Don’t yet have solar for my well but the snake river is a couple blocks from my house and my canal doesn’t need electricity. Septic tank will last at least 5-10 years probably more. I have a wood burning bbq smoker and pit so cooking won’t be a problem. Chickens and garden will keep me fed. Plus good neighbors with horses so I’ll do alright.
Btw I don’t know anyone who has a bucket of wheat and some honey and call it a year supply. Most of us are smarter than that. I’ve known Mormons in Los Angeles who’ve been given more than that as a wedding present.
You don’t have to grind wheat to make bread. You can make porridge. Yes, bread broken down by yeast is more nutritious. But you’re starving and all you have is buckets of wheat, you can just soak the wheat in water for a few hours and eat that. Seriously, people in disaster zones figure things out.
You know how everyone talked about how within a few days after Katrina New Orleans was a war zone of looting, rape, murder and cannibalism? Yeah, that actually never happened.
Countries have been bombed flat, and people lived in the rubble and survived. It honestly takes a very long time to starve to death. Or rather, people almost never literally starve to death, they just get weaker from malnutrition and then die from hypothermia or disease or some such.
If you’re sitting in a dark house with no job to go to because your work is shut down, you can spend a couple hours patiently grinding each grain of wheat from your bucket, gathering up a few twigs, and making a tiny cooking fire to bake your pathetic loaf of bread. If you’ve got the wheat in the first place, figuring out what to do with it to make it edible is not the problem, even if you’re in a refugee camp. Getting that sack of wheat in the first place might be a challenge though.
As for the contention that cities are only 24 hours away from food riots, that’s just nonsensical. People have kitchens, right? They have a couple boxes of cereal and some cans of soup? I guess there are some people who literally never eat anything except restaurant meals and their refrigerator has only a bottle of ketchup and some takeout soy sauce packets. That’s not your average person. Your average person is going to have some cans of beans that can last them a week. It takes a very long time for people to literally starve, as the events of WWII showed.
Wood’s not much good unless it has had at least a few months to season, preferably a year. Anyone hoping to heat with green wood is in for a rude surprise.
There’s a big difference between what makes sense as a suburban family with a woodstove that you crank up on winter weekends to stretch your heating bill, and a family of refugees huddling in a shelter.
Yes, it sucks to try to keep a fire going with green wood. You’re not going to be heating your 4000 sq foot McMansion that way. But you can get a little fire going long enough to boil some cornmeal.
Oh, completely agreed. If they can stay warm enough. How many people would even figure out to cut their 4,000 square foot house down to a small room so they have less space to heat?
Remember, 3 minutes without air, 3 hours without shelter, 3 days without water, 3 weeks without food.
[QUOTE=Lemur866]
You know how everyone talked about how within a few days after Katrina New Orleans was a war zone of looting, rape, murder and cannibalism? Yeah, that actually never happened.
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They had the rest of the US to provide a backstop for them…and it was STILL really bad. Project that over the entire nation AND Canada and you are looking at a disaster of biblical proportions. Millions would die…depending on when this all happened, it could be 10’s of millions. Let’s say this event happened during a heavy winter or a really hot summer. Consider what that would mean. Look at death tolls in Europe or the US during particularly hot or cold weather, and that’s WITH freaking power.
We are talking about nations that are continent sized with hundred of millions of citizens who are far more dependent on modern systems than at any time in human history. Bombed out Germany had plenty of folks die from disease and lack of logistics and they were better prepared for it, having a population far less dependent on electrical systems or interdependent logistics systems. There is simply no example you could name that would be remotely similar to the US and Canada both having their grids completely down for 18 months. I’ve seen disaster planning gaming at the state level with far less stringent or grim variables than that and the death tolls were still pretty nasty.
Uhuh…the government will save us! But how, exactly? How will they be able to cope with their own infrastructure issues to know that your refugee camp needs wheat? How will they get it to you? How long will it take them to get basic services up and running in even the core areas, let alone the more rural ones? How would you cope with your dark house and your bucket if it was freezing cold or broiling hot? How would you cope with your diabetes or whatever you need meds for without refrigeration or logistics complex logistics systems to get you all those things you need? Even if we make the ridiculous assumption that Americans and Canadians have a can do spirit and can get their bucket and fish you are basically saying that only the healthy people are going to be ok for the duration of however long it takes the governments in both countries to organize enough to start tackling such a mammoth issue?
As I said, the people alive during WWII were far less dependent on electricity or complex logistical networks than we are today. Most living at that time could remember when they didn’t HAVE electricity or cars. As for everyone having food in their pantries, even if we assume that’s true in the aggregate how much food are we talking about? And what about potable water? Is the food they have in a refrigerator? How long will it last? A couple of days? This all assumes, of course, that not only do they have food but they have food they either don’t have to cook or they have some means to cook it. But it’s moot anyway, since without power and logistics whatever food they have will be gone in a week at most…then what? We are talking about the US and Canada having no grid for 18 months, coast to coast. Even if, by some miracle the rest of the world rallies and ships us everything we need instantly you aren’t going to be able to get it everywhere in a timely enough manner to prevent millions from dying…and this is IF the weather is nice, not too hot, not too cold and no big storms or other nasty things are happening (such as, oh, that big ass fire happening in Canada).
The optimism shown by some posters is endearing. But naïve.
Again, look to Hurricanes. Local events that we know are coming.
For a Country wide event of loss of the grid electric power -
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Communications will be down almost immediately. It won’t matter if your cell phone has power. What battery back up that is available at cell towers and diesel generators at net com centers is not going to mater much, as the system will be overwhelmed.
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Within a week, road networks will also be overwhelmed and gridlocked. Mostly from cars that are out of fuel, and can’t get any. The US has ~150 days of fuel in emergency supply. They won’t be able to distribute it in an meaningful way.
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Your friendly local Emergency Operations Center Director (EOC). Will be overwhelmed, with little communication, or transport.
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Hospitals will also be overwhelmed. As soon as their back up generators run out of fuel…
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Neighbors will realize that they should keep the food in their pantry for themselves. Some may be able to set up local sharing resources communities. Hunting, gardens and such won’t help much, but may be a start. That IMHO is your best bet. Of course, if you’re in a city, that won’t work.
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Water in cities will become the new gold standard. As will bullets, those used out the end of a barrel and those for trading (this will be true for rural areas as well). Water and waste won’t be as much a problem in rural areas.
Conservatively, 30 million dead.
The old-fashioned banking system might eventually be rebuilt, but it’s going to take a while for your local bank to be able to figure out what to do with a check. In 2016 a check is simply a paper debit card, and just as useful as plastic if you take away the communications system.
I didnt say *one *bucket of wheat…
I don’t think any amount of wheat and honey would do. You can’t survive for long on bad bread and mead.
I’m replying only because I’m not ready for this thread to end. I used to watch Revolution and the early threads on IMDb were great with everyone speculating about how it would really be if all the lights went out and electricity didn’t work anywhere. But now all those threads are gone. And I’m a sad panda.
I know this thread isn’t, what would happen if all the lights went off everywhere and never came on again, but even hearing what it would be like if all power was off for 18 months is a fascinating topic.
I think that all the civil war re-enacators and the renaissance fair junkies, and prairie days players would be in heaven, since they’d be like gods in a world where the majority of the population has no idea how to live like it’s 1822.
Of course all the death and rioting and looting and criminals trying to rob you wouldn’t be cool, but still if you’re one of the few people in the world who knows how to handcraft swords or make bullets from scratch (if that’s even possible), this post-electric world could be a great opportunity for you.
Though less so if it’s all only going to be off for a few months then everything goes back to normal.
This entire thread is laughable ignorant and filled with opinions from people whose experience with off-grid survival extends only to roasting s’mores over a campfire in an KOA. Everybody here whomhas actually had to survive without modern conveniences for more than a few days of well-provisioned backpacking or a particularly harsh snowstorm, raise your hands.
MREs are not ‘fine’ in the best of circumstances, and speaking as someone having survived on them for weeks on end, I can attest to they’re not being suitable for extended consumption.
Our dependence upon electricity is so intrinsic to modern communications, transporation, and logistics that we have no real appreciation for how these systems would fail without a regular source and distribution infrastructure for it, which is all the more ironic for how rapidly this dependance has occurred e.g. in the last century since electrification has become the norm. The notion that centralized production of electrical power could be replaced by generators and emergency solar panels is risible to an extreme. The replacement of transformers damaged in a Carrington event would likely take around a decade, notwithstanding other impacts (inability to maintain communications and manufacturing infrastructure).
Stranger
I have.
MRE are *fine *for survival food. Better than a bucket of hard red wheat.
I always preferred MREs to the hot food option some idiot Army cook brewed up, even if I’d been on them for an extended period of time. They’re also an amazingly calorie-packed meal: an MRE doesn’t feed you for a meal; if you aren’t doing hard labor, an MRE will provide enough sustenance for an entire day. And they don’t require any real work to turn into food, unlike your bucket.
All that being said, I’d guess that the US would lose at least half of its population without power for 18 months. After a couple of weeks without power, most people would be entirely without food or water, and be raiding stores. You’re into functional zombie apocalpyse territory there, and our governments aren’t equipped to forestall it for even a third of that length of time.
I had to do without electricity for several months as a child. It’s not that bad at the scale of a single family. For a nation? It would be an adjustment but there are other mechanisms of power for machinery and a lot could be done IF the urban centers didn’t become too chaotic. That said we are a heavily armed nation and chaos can be dealt with.
World War II was an example of a motivated US with regards to production. Yes electricity is important but even before electricity massive industry was possible.
You underestimate the complete dependence of modern American life on electricity in every capacity. While it is true on a family or even villiage level mechanisms for addressing a loss of freely available electrical power could be used, at a societal level the loss of electrical generating capability would be devastating to both the economy and standard of living. Most people today have no conception of how to live without electricity available at the flip of a switch, and we certainly don’t know how to run modern support systems such as communications, water processing, et cetera without ready access to power from the electrical grid.
If the United States lost the ability to generate and distribute electricity upon demand, it would cease to exist as an industrial nation and would likely fragment into regional states. This isn’t a hypothetical; we can see from Africa where colonial powers and the NGOs which followe them attempted to build industrial-style education and medical systems but failed to build or maintain the necessary infrastructure, and how those systems utterly failed and the buildings abandoned because of the inability of the native population to maintain them without electricity, parts for maintenance, and so forth. We regard the US as ‘naturally’ being a self-supporting industrial state, but that is the result of a confluence of the ready availability of natural resources (many near depletion) and some happy accidents rather than an inevitable condition. A reversal of fortune following a devastating attack on the elecrical infrastructure of the US is far from unthinkable, and in fact many experts have conceived of it.
Stranger
You and I agree Stranger. It would be beyond a mess. My conservative estimate of 30 million dead is probably way off.
The US has plans for hypothetical scenarios. I’d love to see what the ‘plan’ is for something that the OP suggested.
Didn’t FEMA send truckloads of ice to NOLA after Katrina? What a great idea.
Oh, here we go - FEMA To Melt Ice Stored Since Katrina - CBS News
:smack:
I suspect in an event such as this for 18-24, or longer, months the tables would be completely turned on who survives better.
The wealthy would be the worse off. Their money won’t be buying much when everyone else is working their ass off just to survive. Plus they have the least skills needed.
It’s the average folks living out of the cities who will survive this in the least miserable way.
What would survive a massive EMP or CME? I believe I’ve read that the military has hardened equipment. How extensive could that be? Do they just build faraday cages around all their electronics? Could you do that for a fighter jet? What about underground sites? Would they be protected?
The initial shock would be the worst. The initial looting and rioting would be bad and a lot of people would die simply due to the worser angels of our nature. How quickly things get stabilized probably depends on the military’s ability to deploy and resume control. Once people see that someone is in charge and they’re not completely on their own, you’ll probably start to see co-ops form and pockets of normalcy will start to reappear.