Monthly Archives: September 2012

Planning for the long term

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I see this as something most people get wrong (including me). We can all get by for a short time, but what about when things get really bad? Imagine you are stuck on your property for the duration, nothing coming in.  That’s a bitch, surviving for more than a year with little to no outside supply is really difficult to imagine let along accomplish.  The problem from what I see is we tend to be overoptimistic and weirdly selective about what’s needed.  I’ve seen a lot of women preppers with pantries bulging with canned food but no way to cook it, or ways to obtain clean drinking water. I’ll throw out a few examples of things that get overlooked:

  • Water collection. Absolutely the top priority, no water = end of the line. Imagine your bugging in at home, and there’s no city water. How do you get enough to drink? Assume the average adult needs 1 gallon per day minimum, not counting sanitation. Maybe there’s four of you, we’re now up to 4-5 gallons PER DAY.  It doesn’t rain enough in most places to yield this much on a regular basis, so some way to store it is an absolute must. How much? Probably a month or more, so 150 gallons. That’s three big drums, that you have to keep full.  What if it doesn’t rain for a while? Double that.
  • Water filtration and treatment.  When you open the tap, that water has been cleaned 9 ways to Sunday. Whatever you manage to collect needs to have bacteria and contaminants removed, even rain from the gutters (bird droppings, dirt, etc). Ever design a water treatment plant? Me neither. You may have to get water from some nasty sources in a pinch, so rain is actually a best-case option.
  • Heat. This is a big one. Not just heat to keep from freezing (who doesn’t live where the temp gets below 32?), but to boil water and cook. Most survival supplies need to be rehydrated, and you will likely need to cook things to supplement your diet. Bread, rice, beans, etc.
  • Light.  Even cavemen had light, you need some illumination to work after dark or to see where you are going. Not candles or oil lanterns, but an LED lamp or flashlight.
  • Electric power. EVERYTHING runs on electricity. Lamps, electric power tools, hair clippers, mixers, radios, things that are tough to find hand power equivalents for.
  • Fuel. Gasoline, LP gas, Kerosene. If you need to move via the road system, or run a generator you need gas. Kerosene runs stoves and heaters, and can be used in diesel engines.   LP gas for safe room heat and cooking.

This is just the major items, lack thereof could be lethal. BTW I’m leaving food as a separate category. There’s a bunch of other things that aren’t vital to life, but would make things damned unpleasant without them:

  • Toilet paper.
  • Soaps. Body, shampoo, laundry detergent, dish soap.
  • Toothpaste and floss.
  • Tubs and buckets. Where are you going to clean dishes, utensils, clothes, and your own nasty self?
  • Shavers.
  • Bleach. Vital to disinfecting water and other things as needed.
  • Matches. How were you going to light that burner? Flint?
  • Clothesline. I still haven’t bought this….gotta hang the wet stuff to dry.
  • Paper towels.

Response at the local and individual level

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We discussed how the larger government functions may cease to operate, or at a very basic level (perhaps just units of the US military). This will result in the following:

  • Food, specialized medical supplies, and gasoline/fuel quickly become unavailable. Most vehicle transportation is halted.
  • If enough critical workers leave their jobs, public utilities (water, sewer, and electric power) go down leaving people in the freezing cold and dark with no clean water.

Just losing the electric grid will cause this, since everything is driven by motors and pumps.  Is this too pessimistic? Maybe, but even if the effect is temporary it will be the worst thing to happen in our lifetimes.   At the very least we should be prepared to ride out this situation for a period of time, to stay alive.  Unfortunately, the majority of people do not this seriously and won’t make preparations. This leads to speculation as to what the response would be at the local and individual level.

Ideally, people would stay home, break out the supplies, and let things get back to some semblence of normality. Instead, they will likely be forced to leave in search of those fundamental items or end up as casualties. I suspect many will try to get to some relief center, if it exists.  As I mentioned in the Guns ‘N Ammo post, the lack of transpo and supply will limit how far people can travel foraging. Whether they start going door to door and/or turning violent is anyone’s guess. In any case, trouble would probably come from neighbors or those in walking distance. Here’s a few things to contemplate (and I sure don’t know the answer):

  • Would normal people start breaking into houses and killing the occupants for provisions?
  • Being armed and having some perceived authority, would the local gendarmes do this? Some of this went on in Katrina, so it’s not unprecedented.
  • Would people band together for mutual support, and would they then try to overpower other people or bands?
  • Would local government attempt to confiscate private property in the guise of the common good?

People are generally fairly adaptable and tend to lend support for others, even in desperate circumstances.  There’s not much data on how this might play out, other than in wartime (seige of Leningrad, 1944 Holland, Germany). In those cases, a central government still existed and the country was fully mobilized with Red Army or Nazi troops in place to put down any lawbreakers.  Bottom line is now, here in the US, we don’t know.  But we can guess at some likely scenarios, then prepare to them.  Here’s my shot at it:

Emergency begins. For a short time, people behave and can carry on in a somewhat normal fashion (as in a hurricane recovery).  As food runs out, stores are looted, first in urban areas then suburbs. Grocery, convenience, home improvement, gun stores cleaned out. As those supplies are depleted, what government is left tries to setup distribution centers/shelters. People go those, there are way too many for the limited supply and they are overrun. At this stage, they either return home to scrounge or wait for relief. Neither option is workable, and thirst and/or starvation sets in.   Time frame and casuality rate depend on the situation, could be weeks, months, or years and fractions a percent to near-100% respectively.  Recovery depends on the ability to sustain a population from whatever is left.

Thinking about this makes me realize there’s no way to know what you’d be faced with, you just have to plan for a potentially long term crisis.

Public and government responses to a real emergency, past and future

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So we talked about what constitutes an major emergency, but what would happen afterwards? Frankly, no one really knows.  Let’s list some past events to see what we can glean from them.

Hurricane Katrina

In my  opinion, this was a demonstration of what would happen albeit on a small (city-wide) scale. Highlights:

  • Utter failure of local/city/state/federal responders.  Despite being limited to New Orleans and surrounding areas, it took forever for the Guard and Feds to get into the area and do basic rescue and supply operations.  Police disappeared, creating a lawless city. Keep in mind the rest of the country was not affected.
  • Non-existent/insufficient planning and backup supplies. The evacuation plan was comical, and was not implemented until far too late. Afterwards, there was no coherent plan to follow (just winging it).
  •  Reliance of the populace on “the authorities” to help them. Remember all the people in the dome with no food, water, sanitation, or medical attention?
  • Widespread looting. No cops, open season on stores.

This is the biggest disaster in memory, nothing else comes close in terms of disruption.  Because of the flooding, it was very difficult to get in and out of the city and showed how critical transportation and resupply from unaffected areas is to the crisis.

2009 H1N1 Swine Flu

This was a dress reheasal for contagion. Again, highlights:

  • Slow (excrutiatingly) response from WHO. The outbreak was in full swing in Mexico City before they showed up, and longer until they figured out what was going on.
  • Spread of the virus to the US and other places before any warnings were issued. It wasn’t until a school in NYC was infected and many students got sick did they issue a travel advisory.  By then it had popped up in multiple locations in the US.
  • Indifference to the situation by the public. I was shocked at how little people knew about H1N1 and that they might want to monitor events for their own safety.

SARS was a lot like this, it showed up in Canada before anyone really got the story.

I can’t think of any other really major events, but these have some potential to illustrate the potential response to a larger emergency. Takeaways:

  1. People will be slow to realize the true nature and scope of the emergency.
  2. The authorities may be incapacitated or spread so thin as to be ineffective.
  3. Few concrete and actionable plans, public or private, will exist to deal with said emergency.
  4. Aid and assistance will be delayed or minimal.

Golden Hordes, and bugging out

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This is one of favorite topics, the title refers loosely to the Mongol hordes that swept across eastern Europe, it’s used by some preppers to denote the supposed reaction of the US populace to calamities described earlier.  The theory is a collapse of the infrastructure will led to cities emptying out and a road system clogged with refugees and marauders, sweeping all before them (which is why you need a personal arsenal). As usual let’s look at this in detail:

  • Water. No water treament, no clean drinking water, no way to carry more than a few gallons. A day with no water you are suffering, 2-3 you are done.
  • Food. Same deal, try humping canned goods.
  • Shelter. Ever try sleeping in the open, on the ground?
  • Clothing. How far can the average person get on foot with no parka, socks, or hiking boots?
  • Weather. Try hiking in the rain, snow, cold, night, or blazing sun.
  • Disease and contagion. Accompanies refugees everywhere.

Things are not looking too good so far. Add hostile refugees, authorities, townspeople.  I noticed in Katrina and the Northridge earthquake people tended to stay put, I didn’t see a tendency to just hit the road.   Let’s assume that some make it out of Metropolis, they will not be in good shape and probably not capable of sustained suburban combat.  I’m not subscribing to the hordes idea, the odds are too high. You probably have more to fear from neighbors and people within foraging range than urban wankers. I will address this last point in a future post, as it’s fairly important.

The decision to stay put or flee is commonly refered to as “Bugging out/in”, and  is another popular topic for preppers.Most prefer the latter but the former has its adherents. Which is nuts, IMO, for the reasons I listed. There could be a scenario that required evacuation, but I am hard pressed to imagine what that might be. We’ll cover this later.

Guns ‘N Ammo

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Guns seem to be a major preoccupation with preppers, to the point of fetishism. I agree it’s important to have one or more, but they may be less important than you might think. Here’s some reasons why:

  • Your house/trailer/apartment isn’t set up to repel a coordinated assault by armed soldiers. Poking a rifle out a window is going to get you killed. No sandbags, trenches, revements, etc.
  • You need to be invisible to live. This means staying indoors by day, not walking around or blasting off rounds at the occasional wanderer. Firing attracts unwanted attention and can be heard for miles, esp. military rifles.
  • You are unlikely to use them to hunt as a primary food source, unless you live in a remote area with lots of game.

You need them as a last-resort option, as point defense but I can’t see anyone doing a lot of shooting, or at anything but close/mid range.

Let’s look at the other common assumption; the riff raff is armed and I need to protect my home:

  • Said riff raff is unlikely to be organized, packing any quantity of ammunition, or in clip/mag form, capable/willing of sustaining a high rate of fire, or willing to risk death. They will likely leave for easier pickings if resistance is found.  This isn’t the Waffen SS…
  • Riff raff has to travel on foot, though hostile territory, with no supplies, just to get to you. No food, water, or resupply. Once they exhaust their ammo, they are in trouble.
  • Riff raff has no idea which house will have a defender, or what the layout is. Every house is a potential death trap. Urban combat is the bane of all soldiers, just ask a veteran. There are lots of guys who got killed or wounded in Iraq/Afghan looking for insurgents in built up areas.

I’m not seeing the case for putting resources into 25,000 rounds of 5.56,  an AR-15, an illegal M-60 , etc. Empty sandbags and a trenching tool is a better deal.

The Big One…aka SHTF, Zombie Apocalypse, epidemic, EMP, etc.

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I really wanted to talk about this topic first, as it drives any planning or preparation. I suppose it’s part of human nature to obsess about the end of the world, and to scare yourself silly worrying about all kinds of threats to civilization. Some are mose likely than others to suffer from it, but most people think about from time to time. Let’s list them, according to current popularity:

EMP

Definitely the top concern of many preppers, and many ignorant government officials. EMP is short for ElectroMagnetic Pulse, a previously obscure nuclear weapon side effect that has gotten plenty of press as the existential threat to humanity. I won’t dwell on the basics, but EMP is produced by any nuclear blast and is maximized by detonation in the upper atmosphere. It creates an electrical surge that can damage wires and electrical devices over a wide area. It is a real effect, and is a concern but tends to be overrated in terms of the actual effects and likelyhood. So how would this happen in the first place?

Terrorists

According to popular thought, terrorists obtain a warhead and somehow manage to get it optimally postioned over the US midwest at 200,000 ft and set it off.  This creates a large EMP event that destroys all power distribution systems and electric devices in the country. No power, no spares, no way to bring the grid back and the SHTF.

Problems with the theory

  • Getting a device over the US without NORAD (or whatever the new acronym is) noticing. There are only a few ways to get a warhead to 200,000 ft; ballistic missile, air launch, or inside a satellite. All are tracked by radar nets, and all can be intercepted with current and projected missile defenses. You can bet Sammy is watching all of these very carefully, as there are X-band systems in place to do this. It’s been sort of quiet, but I see notices of deployment of THAAD and the other systems to cover CONUS. So just attempting this has a low probablity of success, IF the Air Force has a reasonable shootdown policy.
  • Achieving crippling damage with a single device. From what’s publically available, the effects of a single burst are highly dependent on yield, height, weapon design, and most importantly the vulnerablity of the electrical/electronic systems.  Fiction has every electric thing in the entire country fried, but reality would different. No one really knows what damage would be incurred, but it’s a safe bet that many devices would survive, or be repairable following the event. Bottom line is no one really knows how effective this type of attack would be, due to the difficulty in modelling it. It’s impossible to test it, obviously, and designs are getting better because of European electrical immunity requirements.  Lighting used to take out a lot more stuff, but burying power lines and including ESD/bypassing has improved that.  People are resourceful and would be working their ass off putting thing back on line, and yes there would be parts.
  • Death Wish, anyone? Strategic assets would survive (missile silos, aircraft, subs, ships) and would leave full retaliatory capability in place, and it’s a fair assumption we would find out the source of the attack. This event would be a nuclear attack on the US, and I doubt any constraints would be in place as far as responding.  No one would be marching around protesting US foreign policy afterwards, it would be Full Hammer Time.

Point 3 assumes the Rational Man theory is in place, but that may not be relevant. Consider Pearl Harbor, 911, Korea, the invasion of Russia, and Gulf War 1/2. These all fall into the “what where they thinking?” category, so maybe we can’t rely on getting killed as a deterrent. But even so, barring a full scale laydown attack by a major power EMP is either less likely or not as horrible as portrayed.

Attack by a major power

A way EMP could be really bad is if an enemy does a Cold War special and launches enough specially designed weapons to overcome BMD and blanket the US with very high levels (>200,000 volts/meter) of EMP. But we’d all have bigger things to worry about at that point….as in a full-scale exchange (see nuclear war).

So I give this a low probability of occuring, and not worth installing EMP hardening on your house, bunker, or stored assets.

Zombies

Yes, really. There are people who actually believe zombies will appear after some unspecified infection and will roam the earth in search of food. I blame the movie industry for this, and not worthy of further comment.

Economic collapse

This rivals EMP as the primary raison d’etre of preppers. I haven’t given this any thought specifically, as it falls into the general emergency category. I suppose it could happen, and if it did it would put a lot more importance on long range planning. Assuming some economic collapse occured, it would tend to play out over months and years and create the need for near total self-sufficiency. This is a lot different from the usual prepper creed of “got my year’s supply of guns, gold coins, and beef jerky”.  Given the latest news on Greece, Portugal, and Spain, plus the open season on the value of the dollar by the Fed, I’m giving this a higher probablity that I normally would in better times. Still, collapse? Man that’s hard to imagine.

Civil Unrest

This could be a consequence of economic collapse, as it’s hard to imagine anything else motivating people to leave their homes and go on a massive nation-wide crime spree. Would things ever get bad enough to have widespread civil unrest in the US?  Given the number of privately held firearms it would tend to be limited. Most people in the suburbs and rural areas would bust out the gun collection and keep the riff raff at bay, but cities may be at risk.

Natural Disaster

See Civil Unrest, but this one is more likely especially in a region versus the entire country.  Remember Katrina? I’ll reference this later, but it showed on a very small scale what SHTF looks like.

Pandemic

This is the original reason I got re-interested in preparedness.  Recall the H5N1 scare of 2004/5, this has a VERY real chance of occuring. It hasn’t gotten much press recently, but we have the 2009 H1N1 event as a sample of what’s in store should a pandemic break out. It’s interesting how a pandemic doesn’t have to be particularly lethal to cause a major disruption in our lives, just bad enough to keep people from going to work. No workers, no services and things grind to a halt until it subsides or people get over their fear.

Nuclear War

The original SHTF  Classic. Regardless of what the peaceniks say, the threat of a nuclear war is not zero. Getting rid of our arsenal may actually make it more likely, given the advances in BMD. I won’t spend a lot of time talking about it here, but there are a number of ways an exchange could occur:

  • Intentional launch by a minor power (think Pakistan) against a local rival
  • Accidental launch by a major power (including rogue elements in the military)
  • Intentional attack by a major power

This plays out as bad to very bad, since the outcome is at best radioactive fallout/global cooling and at worse the levelleling of all major cities and wide areas of intense radioactivity.

I give this a low probablity of occurance, see EMP.

Volcano eruption/Asteroid strike/Gamma burst

I included this just for completeness. It’s in the Natural Disaster section, but could happen. Very low probablity.

Why Day366?

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This blog is intended to be a resource for people who are interested in emergency preparedness, with a focus on long term strategies. The title “Day366” refers to the idea that it’s great to prepare for a year, but what happens on day 366? There’s a lot of discussion and awareness of the subject lately, due to TV shows about preppers and fictional accounts of apocolyptic events. There’s also a lot of misinformation, myths, and plain nonsense about what would happen in various scenarios and how to respond to those events. One of they key aspects of preparedness is planning, but how do you plan if you don’t know what is going to occur? I’ve seen many blogs and individual posts about people stocking up for the Big One, but very little though on what exactly what that is. If you are going to prepare, it makes sense to spend your time and money on the right things. Otherwise you may end up with a false sense of security and be as bad off as doing nothing at all.

I’ve modified my view of preparedness over time, mostly by thinking through the various scenarios and reading other people’s posts. It’s definitely a work in progress, you can’t really ever say “yes I’m good to go”  unless you live in a Swiss mountain bunker with 0% reliance on the outside world. Most of us are stuck with a finite budget, time, and space so it’s even more of a compromise. But hopefully we can make enough of a plan to achieve the end goal getting ourselves and our family through a disaster. That’s what counts.

This is good place to stop the introduction, and move on to the first post.