I recently attended a public information meeting about the Cascadia Subduction Zone, and preparing for The Big One. It was a government CERT meeting and university sponsored. What stood out for me was:
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[li]Prepare with ordinary long-term foods (canned, freeze-dried, dry goods, etc). Rotate your emergency stock regularly with new purchases and eat the old stuff in regular daily living. The emergency, high-calorie food bars are crap. Your stomach will revolt.[/li][li]Hygiene is critical. Poor hygienic practices will kill you faster than having no food in a catastrophe. Must have two-bucket sanitation.[/li][li]One gallon of water per person/pet per day. Minimum three weeks supply.[/li][li]If you live outside the 30-mile I5 corridor (15 miles either side of I5), there will be no attempt at repairing infrastructure (roads, bridges, power, natural gas, water, sewers) for at least two to five years, minimum. In less populated areas outside of the TMZ (they borrowed the phrase) the likelihood of any infrastructure repairs, ever, is highly unlikely. Vast areas of eastern Oregon and Washington are going to be abandoned completely of any infrastructure support, repair or restoration.[/li][/ul]
Cool, thanks. (and everyone else, too)
I need to brush up on it a bit more, (and no - definitely not a natural disaster) but from what I remember about the '77 NYC blackout (which I’m not sure how close to “catastrophic” one would define that event), looting was taken to a whole new level. The following year the goofy film “Blackout” was made, which I gotta see - maybe use that as a research starting point.
Judging by the fucking idiocy of the 2011 Stanley Cup finals - best avoid Vancouver. XD (from Victoria, got no problem buggin’em).
Watts and King riots weren’t (ha…about to say “tea party”…guess that phrase can’t be used any more) a mellow Cat Stevens-y mocha-by-the-fire sort of thing.
The Moisin is but the Sauer is German manufacture [going by the SN on mine it was made in 1937, it is one of the first types with all the fancy bits that later got left off to make manufacture faster and less expensive. The P.08 was manufactured in 1917 according to that SN.
Fair enough. What I was trying to say was how do you enforce that social norm without weapons. It wasn’t the concept of a revenge killing that deterred people. It was the fact that people had the means to carry out that killing. Any law/regulation/social norm is worthless without the means to enforce it. I doubt even the worst collapse would lead to a Mad Max world but bad things would happen and people would have to figure out how to deal with them in the absence of the old systems.
I suspect that people would self-organize and create new systems.
New York has had a couple blackouts since then and we’ve managed to not tear the city apart.
M1 is a fine choice, as long as you have a ported gas plug, or a honking supply of M2 ball ammo. Get the Ported gas plug and any supply of .30-06 is now fair game for the rifle. Otherwise, you risk the danger of a bent operating rod using off-the-shelf commercial hunting ammo.
Unfortunately, survival comes down to situation. Preparing for all situations can be tough. How I’d be able to survive following an EMP is completely different from one following an earthquake (unlikely in New Hampshire), hurricane/tornado (more likely, but not as devastating where I am in NH), nuke (screwed regardless, I’ll be bathing in the fallout), or social collapse (this is the one I expect to be most likely, probably combined with an EMP).
For the most part the electronics will be useless as the grids and communication infrastructure they rely on will be gone. My general neck of the woods is too densely populated to properly fortify or expect to make self sufficient. I can’t afford to keep a pre-electronics vehicle available for emergency use. My only hope is to hole up and survive on our supplies on hand; Shotgun, M1 & AR-15 close at hand, pistol on my belt and hope they don’t get me first… If I survive the initial wave of chaos, scavenge for whats left in the ashes.