The water pumps don’t work because there is no power. You can’t drive the food into the city because there is no gasoline available. The farmers can’t even produce it because their machinery isn’t working because of these problems.
I think you are either trolling or have not really thought about this.
Right. So if it’s in a well sealed tank without any included air, that shouldn’t be an issue.
Saturated aliphatic hydrocarbons are not especially reactive, among themselves anyway. Though standard gasoline does contain some aromatic and unsaturated components, and some of those may polymerise over time into heavier molecules like waxes which don’t work so well as a motor fuel.
And as you say, if there is ethanol as a component, that introduces oxygen and may catalyse other reactions which degrade the usefulness.
All said, though, I’m a bit sceptical of claims that well stored gasoline degrades all that quickly?
But I am not a professional organic chemist!
Kill me now. I don’t want to live in a world without bacon.
If you found a single fully loaded railroad grain car on a siding somewhere, with a hand grinder that would be enough wheat to feed a hundred people for months. An actual silo would feed a community for a couple of years. My only concern is that I don’t know if such grain is fumigated and if so how to make it safe for consumption.
Most of the ready data I’ve found online about a nuclear attack on the USA is outdated because it was originally based on pre-SALT II levels of Soviet/ Russian armament and presumed a ~6000 warhead attack on the continental USA. But based on targets and expected fallout patterns my conclusion was that almost everywhere east of the Mississippi would have been screwed. Like you would have to not actually be caught within a fireball radius AND be underground breathing filtered air for at least a month after the explosions stopped.
You quoted the very last part of my response. Just before that I said “Yes, it would collapse the global supply chain and cause great hardship and pain. Many would die, especially those who are dependent on modern medicine for day to day living.” I was responding to another poster talking about a ‘The Road’ type apocalypse, and drawing a distinction between that, extremely dire scenario, and the one I proposed for the purpose of this thread, where the power grid goes down. Yes, it would be bad. But there are levels of badness.
And as for your statement " there’s no way that a society without electricity & modern technology could grow & transport enough food to keep 8 billion people fed." Yes, I agree, there certainly is not. Because one society, one supply chain alone, does not feed the entire population of the Earth. Different societies would come up with their own solutions to a global power outage.
Look, I am no Pollyanna. If anything, I run pessimistic by nature. But humans are a resourceful, creative species. Realistically, if the internet and / or the power grid collapsed for some reason short of a devastating catastrophe along the lines of a full-out nuclear war or asteroid strike, we would figure out workarounds until such time as we were able to get the infrastructure patched up and running again. There would be terrible hardship and many would die who otherwise would not have, but 90% of the population dead within a year? That is unreasonably pessimistic.
Here’s a link some may find interesting: an account by a Bosnian who lived through what was effectively the breakdown of civilization in the city he was for a time trapped in. Fascinating read.
Raw grain, even if well milled and stored, is only marginally edible. All that cooking is going to be hard.
I presumed it would be ground into flour (by hand if necessary) and made into bread; or at least porridge.
Sure but cooking will be really hard for more than a couple meals a day. Fresh water and fuel aren’t going to be easy day after day, even if the flour hold up. Feeding a hundred people/day on cornmeal is not going to last.
Why isn’t there power?! It just says “entire power grid” in the OP. Gas generators and renewable resources still work independently. You told me there are 100 million people still left. Someone will hook up a solution by the end of the week. You can’t just say “nope, nothing works no matter what” and you can’t simultaneously say there are a ton of people to fight for scraps but nobody around to fix anything. That’s just cheating.
Why is the power grid down and why can’t it be brought back online? Why is the SPR suddenly gone? Why aren’t any of the safeguards and stockpiles we have for this scenario available anymore? If you handwave that, then of course it all collapses, but that’s plain and simply cheating the hypothetical.
And don’t forget to nixtamalize the corn first.
I think the problem here is that some of us are talking past each other because the exact nature of the ‘Apocalypse’ is insufficiently clearly defined.
Well, I suppose you’re right. I tried to define it sufficiently, but that’s the nature of hypotheticals, isn’t it? No matter how rigidly you try to define the scenario, there’s always wiggle room. That’s why I don’t usually participate in hypothetical scenario threads, much less start them.
I started this thread in response to the “something else to worry about” thread which concerned the outdated, janky nature of the internet infrastructure and how fragile it actually is. There were several responses to the tune of “our entire global supply chain, communications and financial networks are internet-based. If the internet went down, we’d all be completely screwed”. Which I thought was unduly pessimistic. So I started this thread to see how prepared you all thought you’d be if not only the internet, but the power grid completely failed, but you’re otherwise unharmed and in no immediate danger.
But the thing is, the reason why the power grid failed would be a huge determiner of how fucked we would actually be. If it was some sort of equipment or connectivity failure, things would suck for awhile but I’m confident we could patch things up and get back to some semblance of normal before too long. But if the root cause was an asteroid strike or nuclear war, then we would be screwed.
Absolutely. I’m not knocking you! As you say,
People seem to be making various different assumptions about this, which obviously lead to different scenarios….
There is a surplus of usable pots and pans. It rains here. After the initial die-off, there’s enough water, so long as the survivors boil it. Wood from abandoned houses is an excellent fuel, and with that reduced population, they can supply themselves with fuel for cooking from cutting down trees, and then maintaining coppiced oak groves. You don’t need to know how to do that in advance, as the oak roots grow back, the technique will be obvious. The knowledge of “how to cook porridge” is not rare or exotic.
My meds run out in a year, and I’ve shot guns on one day of my life, with friends, because it was on my bucket list. I’m not one of the survivors. But will humans survive a permanent failure of the power from around here? Yes. I’m sure that some humans survive here
I put 4. We have 18 acres with running water, fertile soil, and lots of wildlife. We also have 17KW of solar panels, an AWD EV, and lots of cordless tools (including a chainsaw). I am also pretty heavily armed. This is a VERY agricultural community and could be self-supporting pretty easily. That said, I need a battery bank for the PV array to be useful without a grid connection or I’d have to creatively hot-wire it. If I have electrical power I have refrigeration, heat, cooking and transportation. I can weld. I can mill lumber. Short of complete societal breakdown we might be ok. Figuring out bio-diesel for the tractor would be nice.
I’ve repeatedly heard that treated lumber is a toxic fume hazard.
And once upon a time, eating one’s shoes when starving was a trope because shoes were made of naturally tanned leather; now the tanning process typically uses poisonous chemicals like chromium. Every reference in my dated Boy Scout manuals to waxed cardboard is obsolete now that cardboard is plastic coated rather than wax coated. And drier lint can be a good fire starter but not if the lint is completely from polyester clothes.
Technology and the march of progress has definitely undercut a lot of survival advice.
The pressure treated lumber used in wet places is, indeed, toxic. It also costs more than plain lumber. Most of the frame of most houses is not toxic, it’s just wood.
For that matter, my house was built before pressure treating lumber was a thing. There are lots of older buildings around here. But we had a lot of work done a few years ago, and none of what they used was pressure treated.
25 years ago when we built a sandbox, we were advised to use pressure treated lumber so it wouldn’t rot. I didn’t want to use toxic wood where my kids might be eating sand, and also, didn’t think it would be tragic if the sandbox rotted away as the kids outgrew it. And in fact, it was terrific that i never had to actually remove the sandbox, it just went away.
Typically only building lumber meant for outdoor use is treated. Lumber for indoor framing and such is not.
A friend of mine bought a circa 1929 house and in the process of doing some restoration he had to pull out some of the subfloor. We used to have fires in his backyard, and that 70+ year old (at the time) oak scrap burned very nicely.