How long before I can return to a devastated city?

Factual Questions
1

OK, let’s say that there was some sort of disaster and nearly everyone died. I, with a small group of survivors was left, somewhere deep in the countryside. How long would it take before we could go back in the city? Here’s some qualifiers:

[ul]
[li]There was a relatively fast-acting plague (days as opposed to months), where people didn’t have much time to get up and leave[/li][li]My band of survivors and I were either immune to whatever disease occurred or could take adequate precautions against it, so succumbing to the disease is not a concern[/li][/ul]

Hm, can’t think of any other qualifiers, so: assuming that we take the greater Chicagoland (7 million population, IIRC), when would I be able to enter the city again? I assume that we’d have to wait awhile for the awful stench to die down, but after that, there would be assorted rats, flies, other bacteria that would make maneuvering difficult or deadly. Would they [assorted vermin] stick around for years afterwards, or would they feed on each other for a short time and then disappear/starve? If most infrastructure systems (public transportation, power generation, etc.) went on until the operators keeled over, would we expect that a lot of fires, etc. would occur, or would everything grind down relatively peacefully? How far out could we expect that the highways/roads would be too clogged to take trucks (for retrieving supplies)?

Are there any other concerns we should take into account? Assuming that we wanted to move back in to the city at this point, what logistical problems would we have (cleaning up debris, clearing roadways, etc.)? Would we be better off if we stayed in the suburbs or country?

If anyone’s wondering, this was inspired by watching too many zombie movies in too short a time. Once I get this figured out, we’ll work on adding zombies to the mix…

2

Based on experience, you should *definitely * wait until the Starbucks re-open.

3

Setting aside the dead body/vermin problem, I think that one of the greatest obstacles would be toxic substances. Think of all the chemical plants, and all the cleaners and paint and solvents, etc, scattered around the city. With no maintenance, and with a great chance that things were’t shut down properly, I’m sure that there’d be pools of toxic substances all through the city.

4

Several issues spring to mind.
[ul]
[li]Zoo Animals–they would get loose, & meeting a lion in the street can ruin your whole day.[/li][li]Coyote/Feral Dog packs—Fido don’t get his Kibbles & Bits, he gets mean![/li][li]Hi Opal! she will hog all the good seats in Starbucks.[/li][li]Nuclear Reactors–left unattended? :eek: :eek: :eek: [/li][li]Ravening Zombie Hordes. Who let the Dead out? wof, woof, woof,woof-woof! Who let the Dead out?[/li][/ul]

5

If you’ve ever read “The Stand” by Stephen King, you’ll know roughly what to expect. I think your firts problem will be getting into the city, as roads will likely be completely blocked by abandoned vehicles and accidents. Your best bet would be to either hike in on foot, or to find yourself a functioning tow-truck and laboriously pull vehicles off to the side of the road.

However, I think your best bet would be to steer clear of major cities altogether. Smaller towns would quite likely have everything you’d need anyway, and would be much easier to manage effectively. Similarly, the further away from the city you are, the more likely you are to find a good-sized plot of arable land to cultivate food crops. If there aren’t that many of you, you won’t need an entire city.

6

I would strongly suspect that in such a situation, the whole city would burn. There would be plenty of things left unattended. I suppose electric fires wouldn’t be a concern for long, but some would probably break out when there’s stil power but everybody (including firemen) is dying).

And after that, in a 7 milions city, how many actual fires (candles, fireplaces, etc…) would be left unattended by dying people? How many arsonists would deliberatly start fires just for the fun, before dying?
And without firemen, you can count on the whole city being burning quickly.

7

As Bibliovore says, you’d probably find all you need in a smaller town, without the big-city problems. Bosda’s dogs would be a problem anywhere.

If you do have to go into the city, the railway is most likely to be clear of wrecks; trains don’t just fall off the tracks like a car would veer off the road, and they have a deadman switch that shuts them down nicely if the engineer stops moving for too long. If you find a train parked in your way, either move to that one or hitch up your original to make a longer one. Go slowly approaching blocked level crossings and gently push any wrecks aside.

There would certainly be fires during the plague, but I doubt that the city would be totally destroyed; see what it took for Dresden. I’m not sure Starbucks would close at all; their coffe is already burnt.

8

Wha

9

What would stop the fires once they would began, according to you?

I don’t see the relevance of Dresden. If there had been nobody to fight the fires, and they hadn’t been in a hurry, they wouldn’t have needed that much fire bombs to destroy this city.

10

Well, assuming that the plague didn’t affect rats and such, you are going to see a population explosion in vermin. All those dead bodies to feed off of…<ick>. Eventually a nes ecosystem will establish itself…one not necessarily condusive to humans. I doubt fire would take out an entire city, but you wouldn’t want to hit the inner city anyway…no resources there. All of the distribution points are in the suburbs. Skip Chicago and find warehouses/truck stops outside of town to do your scavanging in. Zombies are afraid of Peterbilts, anyway. :smiley:

11

The point I was trying to make is that it takes a lot of simultaneous fires to get together and make a firestorm. In the OP’s scenario, the plague would last several days, so any individual fires would likely be spread out both in space and time. Certainly many buildings (and even whole blocks) would burn, but I doubt there’d be enough going at once to take the whole city.

12

For some idea you could google Pripyat, Ukraine which in 1986 was home to 45,000 people one day and then completely deserted the next. … It is a Town next to the Chernobyl plant sealed off by barbed wire. Moss and brush are growing on the sidewalks the houses are rotting out.

Good pictures if you can find them – good descriptions of an industrial town +15 years after desertion. It has been followed every step of the way from '86 to now.

13

I suppose I’d want to go back to the city to pick up some stuff from my apartment, not to stay (after reading the responses, I agree that hanging out in the country would be the best bet).

But I still wonder: 1) How long would it be before the meat dropped off of the corpses and the smell went away? I’m assuming that would take the better part of a Chicago summer, so would I be well-enough off to give it a year?

  1. What would the lifecycle of rat population be? I assume that with all the decaying bodies, they’d be in heaven (as would the flies) and have a massive population expansion, but then, when the rats ran out of food, they’d be food for the flies, but what then? I imagine that the pigeons would be out, but there would still be seagulls going in the Lake. I’d certainly want to make sure that I didn’t show up when the rats were ravenous and looking for any food there was.

  2. The toxic substances is a good point, too. I suppose I can’t do anything about those (I hope the nuclear plant at Zion has some decent shutdown protocols as do the various other power plants around the city).

  3. What problems would I have with sewers that get clogged and won’t drain? I imagine that the pooled water will eventually evaporate, but if it rains, I’d probably be looking at floating around. I imagine that that would be a major concern for bacteria.

Hmmm, I suppose I’d just have to stay in the country and take up fishing for fun.

14

I saw a documentary a few years ago about the people who went back to live in the city. Most are chornicly sick but still work and live fairly regular lives…in a ghost town.

15

The problems that will pretty much drive you from the city initially in the order I see them.

  1. Firestorm. Yes it’s going to happen in an abandoned city, and fast. As others have pointed out gas cookers, barbecues, cigarettes, candles and so on will all contribute to numerous spotfires even if the electricity goes down instantly. If the electricity only goes down when the furnaces run out of coal or gas then that could be several hours or several days of unattended irons, stoves etc. Add in car accidents, deliberate arson etc. and in a city of several million that’s a lot of fires with no control. Even if they aren’t enough to contribute to the number of spot fires needed to a firestorm ash will soon remedy the problem. Buildings scatter burning ash far an wide. That stuff will ignite other buildings. Expect the central city area to burn hot and wide.

This initial problem will blow itself within a week or two at most.

  1. Fly borne Disease. Within a week in summer there will be an explosion of flies feeding off the corpses. Rats aren’t a big problem provided they aren’t allowed to crawl over your food. Flies are a problem because they will crawl over all your food. The risks of disease are high, and without sufficient water to wash your hands and crockery it’s even higher.

With a few precautions this problem can largely be circumvented altogether. Make sure you live on canned food and boiled water the whole time you are there and the risks will actually be fairly minimal. It’s actually fairly hard to catch diseases directly from flies. Minimise this even further by wearing safety goggles with a complete fit and a dust mask so that flies never come into contact with the eyes, mouth or throat. Wash as frequently as possible with an antiseptic soap and always wash your hands before eating, smoking etc.

Within one summer the problem will largely correct itself and within 2 years the problem will be very small.

  1. Thirst? Have you planned for what you are going to drink in the city? Can you bring in enough water with you? Some water towers will still allow some buildings a water supply but be aware that with sudden plague taps, automatic urinals and automatic garden sprinklers will all have been left on and all reservoirs will probably be drained within a week.

This problem will never go away.

  1. Building and infrastructure collapse. Fires are going to damage buildings and make them unstable. Without regular maintenance building foundations will decay as will bridge. This problem begins with the last fire and ends wen the last wall collapses. Its not going to be perfectly safe to drive through any high-rise area since vibrations form the vehicle or simply bad timing could see a building collapse on you.

Problem can be avoided by avoiding high rise areas of the city, Stick to the outer suburbs.

  1. Other diseases. As the corpses decay they will atomise and become wind-borne particles carrying bacteria. This problem will be ongoing but will largely vanish within 5 years. It will be more dangerous indoors where sunlight isn’t at work and dust is undisturbed. Most water supplies will be contaminated by corpses, even large reservoirs. Boil all water thoroughly.

Minor problems.
Contamination. Chemical tanks and silos will rupture over time. However the real risk is small because such storage facilities are rare and substances like sarin aren’t stored in such a manner. Steer clear of chemical plants and industrial areas permanently and the risk is slight. Nuclear power plants have automatic shut-down protocols. They would be one of the safest places to be.
Feral animals. Yeah they exist but honestly dogs and coyotes aren’t a major problem for a humans and never have been. They mostly fear us. Rabies could be a problem, but not really greater than it is already. Arm yourself with a shotgun if you’re worried and the problem becomes negligible. Animals will mostly die within 3 months as the food supply vanishes.

Rats. Rats don’t eat people. The biggest threat from rats is having one shit in your food and getting a nasty disease. Eat canned food while in the city or cook it very, very well. There’ no reason to assume a bubonic plague outbreak in city rats more than the arts at your country base so it’s not really a factor.

Sewage. This will only be a problem with very, very heavy rain and then only in low lying areas. Without active pumps any areas where the sewers are below the treatment plants will find the pipes filling and liquid bubbling to the surface. Sewage is no more problematic than rotten corpses. Stick to the same techniques I outlined for dealing with flies and the problem is avoidable.

Stay tuned for chapter 2.

16

The problems that you will face if you move back into the city 2 years down the track when the corpses have vanished.

Water. You still have no water and no way of getting any. All reservoirs will likely have drained. The maintenance of water supply in Chicago is a fulltime job for dozens, probably hundreds, or trained personnel. You and you band can forget it. If you really want to move to the city you’re going to have to find yourselves some water tanks and rig them up under some downspouts.

Food. Most cities are built on prime agricultural land. That’s why people settled there. It’s not foolish to want to grow food in a city but first you’ll need to get rid of some buildings and re-invigorate the land that has had a building sitting in it. Better off staying in the country.

Sewage, Yeah well that’s like water, but harder. You’ll need to arrange your own. You can;t

Clearing roads. This actually isn’t a big problem. I assume you can find a bulldozer and it’s not that hard to push a car with a dozer. This has been done often enough in war when supply columns are bombed and block roads. With a D9 you could clear a road of stalled cars at a good 10kms/hour. A couple of days should clear a path of vehicles right into the centre of a city.

Cleaning up debris. You’re not going to do it. It’s a job for experts if you don’t want to bring the whole lot down on your self. Why would you want to anyway? If it’s on the road find a way around it. If it’s no then there’s no point clearing it.

Building collapse. This is an ongoing problem. Buildings will continue to decay and catch fire until they all fall down. Not much you can do about it beyond avoiding the high rise areas as much as possible.

Fires. Another ongoing problem, and not just building fires. Cropland, suburban lawns and parks will rapidly become grassland and savanna. Without management cattle and sheep will mostly perish leaving huge amounts of fuel. By the 5th year every summer will see fires sweeping into the city from the surrounding countryside. Suburbs will vanish completely the first time this happens as the fire runs across abandoned lawns and sidewalks and catches on doors and leaf filled guttering. Such blazes will stop only when they reach the concrete and asphalt of the inner city. This IMO is the biggest impediment to ever living in a city again. In small towns lawns and commons can be kept low by using grazing animals and burned every year. Fires can be controlled. In a city this is not possible. The area is too large. Once every house in a suburb burns you have your firestorm. The only way to deal with this problem would be to every day deliberately burn a few more unused houses in a 5 mile radius around where your colony has established until all are gone. That should protect you from the inevitable conflagration. But once again it would be easier to find an appropriately sized town or adjacent towns to house your population and leave the city to its fate.

17

That all depends - on weather, inside or outside, how much scavengers eat vs. a body in an area that’s harder for them to get into…

In the summer, in an open area, a corpse can be reduced to a skeleton in under a week. In the winter, with no heat, it will remain frozen and unrotted for weeks (but rats will still nibble). There’s a place called The Body Farm in Tennessee where they study this very question.

With this senario, you may well have more dead things than the current population of scavengers can eat, at least for awhile. Post-feeding frenzy, the scavengers will likely canbalize each other.

And, by the way, you forgot cockroaches. They’ll be joining the rats and flies in the feast.

My admittedly limited understanding is that American nuke plants are set up to shut down in a failure. Of course, who know what will happen after they’ve been sitting for years… However, even at Three Mile Island where you had a real mess the containment building actually did contain the problem.

There are at least six working nukes in the Chicago area. Things could get interesting.

Water will be very contaminated - as well Lake Michigan and the local rivers since that’s were the run-off from the rotting corpses will go (try to find a house with a well. Of course, then you’ll have to problem of getting the water up from underground…)

Chicago sits very low - the area was originally quite swampy and in many places still is. Streets will tend to flood after rains and will become essentially open sewers. If you’re living in a suburb, choose a house on relatively high ground - there are several roads named “Ridge” in the area, because they sit on one. Those houses are much less likely to flood. Or consider living on just a second floor.

Downtown, there’s a lot of substructure to fill up with water, first. Building basements, subway tunnels… the underground Loop HAS flooded before, it was in the mid-90’s… but you don’t want to be downtown because of the rotting corpses, lack of food/water supplies, blocked streets, possible bits falling off the skyscrapers, etc…

A rowboat or canoe might be a wise investment.

While we’re on the subject of sewage and bacteria - household chlorine bleach is an effective sanitizer, and there should be a lifetime supply of it sitting in bottles all over the place.

Except on the southeast side of the city, and into northwestern Indiana - there are MILES of tank farms, several refineries, underground pipelines … a gas line rupture makes a heck of a fire, and they do happen. In fact, there have been two this spring caused by lightning strikes that penetrated deeply enough to ignite pipelines.

When the city burns (and it will) you want to stay UPWIND - aside from spreading fire, a lot of the smoke will be toxic from burning plastics and chemicals.

The entire Chicago area can described as “low-lying”. It already floods on a regular basis - it would only be worse under these conditions.

18

As others have said, I wouldn’t go into the city except for supply runs.

As far as water is concerned, you might be able to rig up a filtration system, but your best bet would be to locate yourself near a natural spring. An ideal place would be somewhere like Hot Springs, AR, where the spring water filters down the earth for 2000 years before being propelled to the top in an instant by the volcanic thing.

19

Not quite. There is a LOT of water in the Chicago area - the problem is DRINKABLE water. As I mentioned, the big Lake and the local rivers will be contaminated from run-off from the city. Eventually they’ll run clean again, but I have no idea how long that will take.

Chicago’s water problems are often the result of too much water rather than too little. If you can find a way to deal with cleaning up your drinking water supply you’ll be OK - distillation comes to mind, if you’ve fuel to run a still. Or a solar still (you’d have to build a couple dozen, but it’s not like you’d have to fit it around a 9 to 5 office job). And, as you pointed out, there’s always rainwater. Chicago’s reservoir is Lake Michigan - it was here before we were, and will be there long after - and water towers are used as much to keep up water pressure as a storage facility.

How are you going to get gas into the bulldozer when the pumps at the gas station are no longer working because the electricity is gone?

Then again, in my case if I wanted to get into the downtown area I’d gas up a Cessna and land it in Grant Park. That’s no more improbable than bulldozing a path through the concrete canyons, I’ll be exposed to less falling debris, and I won’t have to spend days getting in and out. Sure, after two years the weeds will be a little high and I may need clear a little bit of park to get the plane out, but it’s not like you’ll have mighty oaks rising from the lawn there in just two years. This is, of course, assuming I can find suitable fuel in a tank I can gain access to that hasn’t blown up in any of the local wildfires.

Or take a boat along the shore of Lake Michigan - you’ll avoid a LOT of road aggravation that way, and you can just pull up to the shore at Grant Park or the museum campus. Climb over any cars on Lake Shore Drive and you’ll be instantly in the heart of the Loop.

Nope. Here in the Chicago area we get grassfires every year. You won’t have to wait 5.

Yep, I agree. After a few years, when things settle down, you might “mine” the city for building materials or canned food, but you don’t really want to live there.

20

Yeah but gas isn’t toxic in it’s own right so it’s not what I was talking about. We were discussing direct contamination from spillages rather than smoke,Toxic smoke will be a problem from any large fire.

Well I didn’t know that, but the gain we aren’t talking about Chicago specifically, just a typical Chi sized city.

Your best bet would just be to get a rainwater tank, surely? That way you aren’t limited in where you can live.