You know, that brings up a good point. (like so many of them, you have to overlook reality when watching the shows)
With out a working civilization several things are going to happen, and we never see any of them in the Walking dead of course.
Out of control fires is the most obvious. Not just the cities, which will burn completely for the most part, but large unconstrained forest fires are a part of nature. Obviously the budget constraints mean we won’t see this, but no movie ever shows it either.
The other things, and it’s the really frightening one, is all the nuclear reactors, and cooling ponds will go tits up with out constant high level care. No cooling pond will survive with out electricity, and no reactor will last with out healthy humans caring for it. even if it was already shut down.
So not only would there be the zombie apocalypse, but a world contaminated by nuclear disasters with out end. Obviously they can’t ever show that, or make a movie about it. Far too frightening.
There are reasonable limits to storytelling and we can assume that the nuke plants were either shut down, safetied themselves properly, or are contained - at least, without too much suspension. But fires, yeah, and cumulative damage from just winter storms and so forth. The WD model is way too much “people walked away, never came back, some weeds grew.”
And the resources thing just drives me batshit. It’s so badly handled, and to no really good story, development or plot end. So they have a plenitude of many kinds of resources… doesn’t make the walkers or the wolves go away, or group dynamics any easier.
I believe that they automatically SCRAM, push dampening rods into the reactor to shut it down, if anything untoward happens.
Engineers plan for the worst case scenario, including the Zombie Apocalypse. If computer programers screw up, people lose money. If engineers screw up, people die.
One thing we rarely (if ever) see in TWD is emergency signage and posters and other crisis paraphernalia you might see from the local and federal government and aid groups if a pandemic of such catastrophic proportions arose.
Unless it really unfolds fast, and I’m talking less than a week or two. I know Rick Grimes was in the hospital, unconscious for an indeterminate period, until he woke up to a desolate zombiemerica. That’d have to be less than a week. So is that what we’re gonna see in this show? If so, the population will dwindle down to what we saw in the first season of TWD well within the first season of this show. Then we’ll just have another TWD clone?
I figure they have plans for that, but what about all the cooling ponds? Without tons of cold water circulating through, they’d boil the water off, contact air and there’d be explosions & meltdowns.
I think hydro dams would be a far bigger problem - they need to have the water levels managed to keep the stress within limits, and to keep water from cutting around the ends or other low spots, and in a year or two, they would start failing in spectacular ways. An awful lot of big dams and lakes are on rivers and courses that run right through cities within a few dozen miles.
Well, in a post-ZA world, river freight isn’t going to be a big issue.
I guess dams could be safetied by setting the bypasses at some moderate level and locking the controls. It would wreak havoc with many things including wildlife and flood control, but, y’know, it *is *the Zombie 'Pocalypse.
I should feel ashamed that my first though is what Joan Rivers would look like as a zombie (being mostly plastic), but then again if she was still alive she’d be the first one to make it.
