Their stories of what it's like are so vastly different than what you would expect. Do yourself a favor: dig in and read.
"Well, unlike the majority of you (I assume), I actually lived several years in a period of savagery and killing, during which nothing - food, water, electricity, phone, clothing, sense of safety, school, the ability to go out in public, etc - was available, except during totally unpredictable, brief and sporadic occasions. "
"Ferfal" lived in Argentina during its economic collapse at the turn of the century and has a similar unique perspective. He's now has a blog but some of his early posts are here:
I think people react differently to man made disasters compared to how they react to natural disasters, people seem to band together when facing a natural disaster.
The accounts are worth reading. It sounds like people band together when facing a man-made disaster as well. He notes that prepping was useless since the preparation didn't last and everyone depended on each other anyways
I live in a rural area in tornado alley. We also live on a major fault line, so there are a few potential "big ones" that could affect my area.
I spent quite a bit of time thinking about that, trying to figure out what to do in order to be prepared for a realistic disaster. What I ended up deciding was that I can afford to help my neighbors (and whoever else may show up). I have an extensive first-aid setup, stuff to purify water, tons of trash bags, and some easy-to-prepare food. If we have a major disaster in my area, I plan to distribute as much of that as I can. For a fairly small investment I have enough stuff to keep everyone on my street healthy and fed for about a month even if their pantries are empty. No Mad Max necessary.
As an interesting side note, as part of that process I did some calculating on relative costs and discovered that you can buy enough storable basic calories (white flour, stabilized cooking oil, and sugar - no health food here) to feed about 100 people for a month for less than it costs to get a single mid-grade rifle with no ammunition (about $1000). To me, that's the best answer to the idea that being prepared means getting armed to the teeth and fighting off the ravening hordes.
I may be wrong, but I agree with the thesis of this article that people tend to band together and try to help each other in a disaster, so I built a plan around that assumption.
That's a thesis that noted survivialist Bruce Clayton developed in the early '80s or so, although he went with whole wheat, and add some salt and powdered milk for the Mormon Four plus the oil, which is needed by children for them to thrive (see more details in Nuclear War Survival Skills if interested, which Clayton recommended before any of his books).
In my world view, you're better off with "A kind word and a gun", food etc. plus the ability to restrain bad actors, should any turn up. Some just might, as seen when an EF-5 tornado roared through my home town of Joplin, MO, but tornadoes, at least, have very limited effects, you don't have to walk far to get out of the areas of destruction. If the New Madrid fault goes you've very much want such preparations already in place.
Thanks for the pointer to Bruce Clayton, I'll have to look him up. I don't mean to come across as being against having the gun - I actually agree with your "kind word and gun" idea. I just wanted to get the point out about how much relief can be accomplished with that money because I think it gets missed in a lot of discussions, and of the two it seems a lot more likely to be relevant in a real disaster to me.
Here's my recommendations from the classic era of survivalism (mid-late-70s through the '80s):
Nuclear War Survival Skills, get a PDF to see if it's interesting to you (e.g. http://www.oism.org/nwss/), get the green softcover for when the lights go out and for accurate patterns for the Kearny Fallout Meter: http://www.amazon.com/Nuclear-War-Survival-Skills-Expanded/d... (it says something about the times that Amazon is keeping it in stock, they didn't a few years ago) or from the publisher (previous link).
This is the bible of expedient nuclear war survival, everything from quick to build shelters to sprouting wheat to avoid vitamin deficiency diseases, based on many years of serious research at Oak Ridge, and tested, they'd go so far as to hand a copy of shelter plans to average American families, and then videotape them following the plan, and improve the design based on that. Vs. too many of those classic Civil Defense shelter plans drawn up by bureaucrats in the Beltway that would kill their inhabitants due to too little ventilation to remove heat and humidity.
Maybe then check out his recently published Jungle Snafus ... and Remedies, his hardcore work on survival started in WWII, and he started thinking about nuclear war survival in the mid-late '30s (sic) after learning about the idea of nuclear weapons while at Princeton (quite a few people thought and wrote about it before the details were worked out after E=mc^2 and all that, see e.g. the SF of the pre-end of WWII era).
Then Bruce Clayton's magnum opus, Life After Doomsday, get the Dial Press paperback which has annotations and comments made after the first edition: http://www.amazon.com/Life-after-doomsday-survivalist-disast... And perhaps check out some of his other works, the food for others concept was not, as I recall, originally published in Thinking About Survivalhttp://www.amazon.com/Thinking-About-Survival-Bruce-Clayton/... but you'll find it there (probably originally published in an issue of the hard to find Mel Tappan Personal Survival Letter).
The other two major intellectuals of the era were Jerry Pournelle, see his two relevant novels coauthored with Larry Niven, Lucifer's Hammer and Footfall, and Mel Tappan, start with his Tappan on Survival: http://www.amazon.com/Tappan-Survival-Mel/dp/1581605099/
The obscure and now very expensive used Bad Times Primer by C. G. Cobb had insighs, especially on survival on a budget, I didn't find anywhere else at the time (there is of course the new wave of "prepper" thought and literature that's no doubt worth checking out that might cover things like that): http://www.amazon.com/Bad-Times-Primer-Complete-Survival/dp/...
Finally, Total Resistancehttp://www.amazon.com/Total-Resistance-H-Von-Dach/dp/0873640... is the manual on sane armed resistance and such, commissioned by the Swiss Non-commissioned Officer's Association, very Swiss vs. USSR invasion and '50s-ish, it's not written by wild eye idiots. Much updating and thought is required, of course, but I would start with that foundation, and for best reading quality, track down the original hardback, I think the publisher reproduced the paperback edition from it.
For modern works, I'll only note The Modern Survival Manual: Surviving the Economic Collapsehttp://www.amazon.com/Modern-Survival-Manual-Surviving-Econo... since it's written from the author's experience of a less than total collapse in Argentina. See also people's writeups of the much worse collapse and warfare in post-Cold War Yugoslavia.
Thanks again, this looks like a lot of good stuff. I've actually read Lucifer's Hammer (several times if I'm totally honest), I had no idea he was involved in that.
I think you are over-pricing the cost of that rifle. A used, good condition, .30 caliber semi-automatic hunting rifle can be obtained for $300-$500. At least that's what I paid for my deer rifle, a 742 Remington. Granted, buying brand new would run you into that $1000 dollar range, but I've always been of the opinion that you should let some other sucker deal with manufacturing defects and the huge initial depreciation.
That being said, a firearm that you don't practice with isn't much good either. If shooting was as easy as the video games and movies make it look...
Good points. I was originally comparing the food to retail for a mid-level AR-15 because that seems to be one of the most common choices for a defensive rifle. You're definitely right that you could get something very capable for a lot less.
However, a hunting rifle like the 742 Remington isn't necessarily going to have the tolerances to allow sustained firing that a proper AR-15 pattern rifle will allow (I'm sure many of them made for civilians cargo cult that detail).
On the other hand, a lot of this is scenario dependent. Bruce Clayton advised using the metric of "how many firefights do you think you can survive?" as a guide for how much ammo to store. I myself, if I expect a scenario to be survivable and am by myself, prefer something like a bolt action Scout rifle in .308/7.62 NATO used in shoot once and scoot mode. My evil black rifle in 5.56 NATO (which I'll note requires something better than FMJ ammo to be effective) is reserved for situations where I want to make the best account of myself and/or are with other people in a mutually defending scenario.
That investment will yield a lot in loyalty. You'll have 100 people looking out for your interests, which are now their interests. "Winning hearts and minds." That seems a lot more valuable than trying to play Omega Man. In fact, start shooting people and you are going to generate nothing but vendettas, and eventually you'll have 100 people out to get you. Spoiler alert: The Omega Man dies at the end of the movie.
All of this is just blowing my mind today. Who knew the "apocalypse" was just another 1-percenter meme, and that the self-styled "free-thinkers" walking around believing it -- including me -- were actually engaging in the most craven, compliant subservience against their own interests!
> Who knew the "apocalypse" was just another 1-percenter meme, and that the self-styled "free-thinkers" walking around believing it
Interesting thought, that's never occurred to me before. It does seem strange now that you mention it that everyone expects their neighbors to turn into flesh eating monsters when the lights go out though, particularly when there's so little evidence to support the idea. It would be interesting to trace it back to its roots to see how it got started. Maybe it's an ancient holdover from the Bronze Age Collapse.
Living in the Yukon we sometimes talk about what would happen to most "city folk" if their world fell apart with no supermarket and electricity.
Most of us hunt our own meat, grow our own vegetables, build our own cabins and get our own firewood. Tons of people up here are already living entirely off-grid.
We all agree, our biggest problem would be lack of gasoline to run chainsaws, and none of us really has a solution to that. Cutting firewood by hand would be doable, though it would be a full time job to get enough for the winter. A decent size house will burn through roughly 10 cords in a single winter.
On the flip side, things like this[1] play out in severely rural areas. It always annoys me when people in rural areas paint a picture of how much "better" it is to be living there.
That story is not at all representative of the rural US in general.
Rural Alaska is a very, very different place with a different population and a different culture where survival and resources are a real, daily concern.
Most of the rural US has easy access to running water (parts of the West may be an exception) via a well, and real law enforcement is plentiful. Which is not to say county sheriffs aren't mostly crooked, but it's generally a genteel crookedness as opposed to "yeah rape is OK" crookedness.
lol. Really? People really think this is common? I just don't know what to say. It's not like that at all.
Look, generally speaking, people are decent and have morals. The vast majority do. Shocker I know, but it's true. Most people aren't racist, homophobe, rapist assholes. Doesn't matter where they live.
Sorry, but the parents post still has legs. Given a percentage of the population are in fact rapist assoholes and the fact that rural areas are naturally more private with more opportunity for occurrences, I will suggest there's good reason to believe there are very likely more occurrences of rapes that have a increased percentage of unreported incidents, which I will attribute to and increase in shame/fear (hard to be anonymous is a town of 600 people) and a lack of resources/convienance (multiple calls with no action and no rapekits on hand).
Seriously, from age 16 to 30 all I dreamed about was getting away from the city and moving into a rural cabin. Then I did and learned the truth. These days I'd sooner gouge my eyeballs out with a spoon.
City folk here. I may not fit your mold because I grew up on a dirt road in rural Maine, but I think you might find the Yukon got a whole lot more crowded. I can do all those things too, just not here. I'd make my way north. I can't imagine I'd be the only one.
How about dealing with mosquitoes/flies?
I've talked to people who know what it's like living on the land in Siberia (ie. like the Yukon - permafrost and swamps) and it's a life threatening issue. You can't have any skin exposed so traditional methods of dealing with it involve things like greasing your face and using natural repelants. Again.. doable but very unpleasant and it makes it very difficult to do things in the summer.
A friend from Sweden told me that they have a family (regional?) tradition: Get out in shorts and a shirt only at a specific time of the year (not too many mosquitoes yet or when they are very young?) to get bitten as often as possible as a measure of immunization for the rest of the year.
That's...a lot of wood. This is all hardwood, seasonsed for a year? How large a piece of property would you need to sustainably re-grow that much wood indefinitely (wood growth rates in the Yukon are slower than in more temperate regions)?
What is the R-value and ACH [1] airtightness at 50 PA of such a house? I've been researching using two feet thickness of Pittsburgh Corning FOAMGLAS with an airtight building envelope that conforms to PassivHaus airtightness standards, and comparing the capital outlay of that with the anticipated opex cost savings. But I live in a far more mild climate than the Yukon, so my payoff period is measured in many decades.
Also, trees are small and take years and years to grow. I have no idea how much land you'd need to make that sustainable, but it would be absolutely huge! I'm thinking hundreds of acres.
Ten cord of pine in a winter must mean you have things buttoned up and insulated pretty well.
I grew up in Maine, and it's pretty common to go through 8-12 cord of rock maple, beech and ash in a winter. A lot more BTUs in that than pine, but a lot of houses are drafty old farmhouses... We only used pine in the fall and spring when we needed a quick fire to drive out the cold in the morning and heat up the hot water.
Yep, chimney fires are a very real concern. A couple of houses burn down every year because of them. We sweep ours once a month, there usually isn't much build up.
It depends if you have a new wood stove with a catalytic combustor and good thermostate or not. Usually we keep it around 18C (pretty low).
When it's past -40C outside, I jam six of the biggest logs that will fit through the door of the woodstove in every ~6 hours. I even set my alarm for the middle of the night, otherwise it will be too cold in the morning.
My grandparents' old house (~100 years old) has two rooms - an entrance/storage with a stove for cooking and a living room.
The living room has the heater - a very interesting contraption, it's basically a stove that heats up the whole wall and a small bed, no smoke/heat is wasted.
Well in -20 degrees winters, water freezes near the windows (single glass) and entrance door. Inside it's about 15 degrees tops, but since you can sit on the heated bed, it's pretty livable (tho not by modern standards I guess).
My grandmother still prefers it over the bigger new house.
My main point is that in a catastrophic scenario, you can definitely do with a lower interior temp, even 10 degrees...
Would it be important to make the house more fuel-efficient? Super-insulating might return 10X the sweat investment. Also living in tight quarters - heat half the houses. But I don't see independent Yukonites doing that. (Yukonians? Yukonoids?)
Insulation is already big up here. Keep in mind when I say winter, I mean November->March where the high for the day won't be more than -35C, and the low is -40C.
Many Yukoners would have to band together. Newer homes in downtown are electric heat only, they always start to really worry when the power is out for more than a couple of hours in winter (happens all the time)
There is a German housing technology called "vacuum house" where instead of heavy insulation you build an airgap with a pump, creating low air pressure. Windows need to be shut and you need double doors (like an airlock) to avoid heat loss. Obviously it needs central airflow with heat exchanger as well. This creates a house that only needs the power for the pump and the heat exchanger instead of heating / cooling. Body warmth and cooking is enough to make up for the loss you have in winter. The little power you need can be created with Solar cells on the roof.
To me it seems like the future - if there's a drawback I don't really see it. Mass produced such a house minus the solar cells shouldn't be much more expensive than your average American house with air conditioning. The whole structure can be very light, so earthquakes shouldn't be an issue either.
Why arent't we all building this? Is there some problem I'm missing? Is energy simply too cheap to bother?
Thank you for bring this technology up. I wasn't familiar with it, but now I'm going to research how it works. I have a lot of questions about how it works in practice (structural considerations, materials, cost, etc.), but conceptually it makes sense.
Useful for extra-planetary construction, too, though I would be surprised if the idea isn't already used to some extent.
most of the plants and things were thing of building on don't have atmospheres, so most of the heat loss is radiative? I don't think an airless gap would do much to reduce it.
Gasoline is inherently unstable and turns into a gummy, plastic-like substance after only a few months. Although there are off-the-shelf fuel stabilizer additives available, the max lifetime is only around 2 years.
Diesel fuel is subject to the same problems without special additives and precautions.
Surprising how many people don't know this. All those "everyone will be killing for gas" posts are ridiculous since gasoline will expire a few months after a global catastrophe.
Propane and isobutane seem to last well over 5-7 years (particularly if in unopened canisters), and anecdote suggests they will keep for over a decade. The limiting factor is how leaky the canisters and particularly valves are, given that they're gaseous and not liquid.
Pretty sure biodiesel isn't a reasonable option - the extra bulk and mass to make a safe diesel-style engine would make a chainsaw unbearably heavy. Plus you'd have wicked problems with fuel gelling in cold weather.
Alcohol is possible - but it'd probably be a considerable overhaul. Most stock saws really don't want to run on gasoline that has any ethanol mixed in, although you can use E10 if you have to. And really you should be using at least 89 octane, if not the 91 high-grade stuff.
Chainsaws are also all pretty much two-stroke, so you'd have to keep a stock of the mix-in oil, or you're going to destroy your crankcase and pistons. Also, unless you want to burn up your saw bar and chain, as its whirling around at thousands of RPM, you need to have a good stock of either actual bar and chain oil, or, in a pinch, regular 20/30 wt engine oil.
Also biodeiesel is unusable in the winter. It freezes (waxes) long before regular diesel, which is around -30C or -35C. Diesels up here in the winter are trouble.
The one thing this article misses, I think, is that all of these scenarios are temporary and local. If an area is devastated by an earthquake, there's still a food supply chain in the outside world, aid supplies and workers will eventually start trickling in, and generally you will have some support (if limited and fragmentary) to help you pull yourself back up to a "modern" living standard over weeks and months.
If a complete societal breakdown should occur--the traditional global-nuclear-war apocalypse, a major governmental/infrastructural collapse in a large, developed nation, etc.--things get rougher. People may start off being civil and helpful, but modern urban society is utterly dependent on food grown on farms spread across thousands of miles and distributed via high-tech infrastructure. If that stops for long enough, in a large enough area, then people start to get hungry, and things start to get really bad.
I still find the article heartening in general. Disasters on that scale are not terribly likely in the modern world. Still, it's worth considering.
Alarmingly, one of the biggest breakdowns in ancient times, at the end of the Bronze age, now seems to have given rise to the 'sea people', a band of refugees that roamed and pillaged. There was a chain reaction of famine, revolution, refugees spilling over to neighbors who also had a poor crop, more famine, more revolution. In an expanding circle of fire, most known civilizations fell in just a few years and produced an enormous army of armed refugees. They only stopped when Egypt armed everybody and killed them all. Even then Egyptian society was so disrupted (by arming civilians, seeing their god-kings bleed, fragmentation and slow rebuilding) that it took a century to have a unified government again.
I see some parallels in our modern world. We have a slash-and-burn air-assault style of war that leaves millions homeless and infrastructure in ruins. Refugees are mounting alarmingly. At some point, they'll become 'sea people' and we'll all have a hard decision to make.
When I think of "Apocalypse" I'm thinking something a little more permanent than an earthquake. As long as there's an end in sight (i.e., it will eventually be going back to normal) people are going to act a lot differently. It's when it truly looks hopeless that I'd expect to see the movie style looting and violence.
One summer in the early 2000s there was a blackout along the whole west coast, I was in Palm Springs where the temperatures that time of year regularly exceed 110F. The water filtration shut off so all the city's water was declared possibly contaminated and the gas pumps were off so if you needed gas to get to water there was none. People realized the last clean source of water was bagged ice and started forming mobs banging on the locked doors of convenience stores. I saw people siphoning other people's gas. Basically all hell broke loose. The kicker? The power was only out for 6 hours. When people are scared it doesn't take long.
I think an apocalypse[1] will bring out what's in people not their best or worst just what they really are. I think of the apocalypse as being the big dark[2] that allows you to see people's true character.
As to survival kits, I tend to think that combining the standard survival kit for winter in the northland with the basics a person would take deer hunting and fishing would probably go a long way.
1) short term disasters are a bit different but a lot of madness tends to hit - see all the rioting in mini-disaster scenarios
2) Character is what you are in the dark. - Dwight L. Moody
Having to redo my 72 hour bag recently I ended up on a bunch of survivalist websites. (Mostly http://offgridsurvival.com/ ) They all have this tendency to start reasonable, and then go off the rails into crazy town. You'll have some good reviews of legitimate things you'd want like flashlights solar power radios, cooking stoves, knives, multitools, stableized food and the like, and then it goes into gasmasks, trauma kits for your "everyday carry" and of course guns. Lots and lots of guns, oh and bullets in common calibers for "ballistic wampum".
The subculture paints a world of black helicopters, and roving gangs of George Soros funded Black Lives Matter cannibals, ISIS EMP attacks, Supervolcanos, and so we're going to have to secretly leave cities by shooting our way out to our hidden mountain cabin ("Never tell anyone where your redoubt is. That's basic opsec.") Oh and along the way you'll may want to hand over boxes of ammunition to strangers for needed supplies.
The thing is though, I totally get it. It's a problem. How long can you hold out with resupplies? How can you pack this better? How can you reduce weight? It's an engineering problem. The right wing conspiracy theories and and that up it neighbor is just waiting for the right moment to kill, eat you, and your skin into a jaunty hat is just absurd wish fulfillment fantasy.
Yeah, it's unfortunate that the (clinically) paranoid survivalists, that honestly have good information to share from a survival perspective, often have paranoid political beliefs.
Just like anything in life, you need to separate the good information from the bad... thank god for people that are "different". :)
Of course most people will be civil. Its not 'most people' that would be at issue in an apocalypse. In the examples given, the 20,000 soldiers had 'little to do'. In part because the presence of 20,000 soldiers is a calming influence?
Initial looting isn't the only public order issue. Its desperate people when supplies run low, taking what they need to survive from other desperate people.
What about situations like the last plane out of a war zone with a limited number of seats? I think people tend to become less charitable then? Or if scarcity really hits?
I remember specifically an issue in Europe a couple of years back where a series of snow avalanches was destroying hotels and killing people (in the alpes, I think - hotels had been built in illegal places). Roads were blocked and the only way out were helicopters. Supposedly there were some ugly displays of selfishness around getting on the helicopter first.
Their stories of what it's like are so vastly different than what you would expect. Do yourself a favor: dig in and read.
"Well, unlike the majority of you (I assume), I actually lived several years in a period of savagery and killing, during which nothing - food, water, electricity, phone, clothing, sense of safety, school, the ability to go out in public, etc - was available, except during totally unpredictable, brief and sporadic occasions. "
A collection: https://www.metafilter.com/137458/In-war-not-everyone-is-a-s...
My Favorite: https://www.metafilter.com/78669/What-if-things-just-keep-ge...