Category Archives: Emergency Planning

Ideas relating to carrying out emergency planning

Solar storms, the electric grid, and nuclear fuel storage

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Add this one to the natural disaster category. I’ve mentioned EMP, and stated it’s unlikely as a reason for the grid to go down but there’s actually a far more plausible scenario. If the sun spits out a giant flare, it can create a large EMP-like effect on long electrical conductors. There’s no fast rise time pulse that frappes solid state devices, but it generates similar magnitude low frequency currents. These can cause core saturation in the large HV utlity transformers, which causes them to overheat and self-destruct. This has actually happened in recent memory, and caused some major damage and outages even with the moderate levels of solar flux seen in those events.

I say moderate because there are truly massive flares that occur every 500 years or so, with lesser ones every 100. The biggest on record was the Carrington Event in 1859, this caused telegraph lines to fail and catch on fire. Another one occurred in 1921, with less magnitude but with many power system failures. Utilities are installing neutral resistors to stop the transformer failures, but in a large event the transmission lines may fail. And, having large sections of the grid down will tend to bring all the local generators down with it, since they are all interconnected. The system isn’t designed to operate in “island” mode, there’s a lot of load sharing and synchronization between all the elements. There have been cases of a single HV line going down, and taking large areas off line for days (even with no damage). It takes that long to get everything reconnected. If multiple areas are off or at partial capacity, it may take weeks or longer to get power back. Turning off power for weeks would be the worst thing to ever occur in this country, things would just grind to a stop. Think about the lack of food storage, working hospitals, fuel and water pumping, banking/finance, lighting, etc. It wouldn’t even have to be for that long, many people would be in trouble within hours. That would be bad enough, but it gets better…

It’s a little known fact that all nuclear power plants store depleted fuel rod assemblies on site. These assemblies are highly radioactive and give off lots of heat, so the utilities store them in concrete pools filled with water.  The water is needed for shielding, and most importantly to prevent the rods from getting so hot they melt and burn. The pools are packed well past capacity due to the cancelling of the Yucca storage facility, so a loss of water pumping would cause the water to boil off in a matter of days. In theory each plant has a way to add water via diesel pumps, but if this isn’t done you get a radiation leak from the meltdown in the pool. Interestingly, the storage pools are not covered with a concrete dome, they are usually metal roofed commercial buildings. So, a fire would cause the facility to vent radioactive smoke in a long plume downwind of the site.   Sort of like Chernobyl. Depending on all the variables like wind speed, direction, how much fuel was stored, how long the operator was able to add water, you could get a really horrible situation repeated N times across the country.

I can’t find out much about how likely this is, there’s very little information about how the NRC plans to add water in the event of a grid collapse. They seem to spend all their energy downplaying the likelihood of the grid shutting off, while not mentioning how to avoid it or the outcome.  So add Gieger counters, dosimeters, and sandbags to the planning list.  If you get stuck in an area downwind of a nuke site, things may be hot so it’s best to have some sort of shelter.  

I’m mostly pondering the grid outage, not so much the poly Cherynobyl. If you stop and think, it seems like something that could happen due to the lack of backups. But, maybe I’m overly pessimistic. As I’ve said, people are pretty resourceful but it could be a while to recover from that. It supports the idea of having a 2-4 week reserve, and some electric backup.

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.

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.