What are you going to do when the lights go out?

I just finished reading Ted Koppel's work of pre-Apocalypse nonfiction, Lights Out. Koppel is worried about cyber attacks on the country's electrical grid, which is definitely a justifiable concern. Hackers with evil intent do exist; the electrical grid is vulnerable. It's a patchwork of thousands of power generating systems that's been fragmented in odd ways in the past few decades.

At the same time, it's all tied together electronically to ensure that if a generator drops off line at one power plant, another generator will come on line at another to keep the overall amount of electricity coursing through the wires balanced. It's an odd mix of super smart and super stupid -- and from what Koppel describes a lot of the super stupid isn't in the computers or the generators; it's between the ears of the people managing it all. Too many of them have an almost religious faith in the "resiliency" of the grid. In short, it wouldn't take a whole lot of effort to take big chunks of the national electric grid down and keep it down for an extended period of time, possibly many months. All it would take is a deftly targeted attack on a few of the humongous transformers that step voltage down from the high-tension power lines (the 660,000 volt ones) to more usable voltages to be distributed on smaller lines. The humongous transformers tend to be custom made for specific installations, are difficult to transport to wherever they're going to be installed, and take many months to manufacture and deliver. Somewhere along the line Koppel started thinking about the vulnerability of the electrical grid, which led to a book asking when the lights go out what are we going to do?

Koppel starts off by asking the people who should have the answers: FEMA, Homeland Security, state and local government emergency preparedness personnel. As one might expect, he encounters a lot of vague bureaucratese where terms like "resiliency" get tossed around a lot and straight answers are really hard to come by. Every so often, though, he hits someone who's honest. And what is honest? Basically, if the power goes out and stays out for much over a week in places like New York City or Chicago, a whole lot of people are screwed. Current disaster preparedness tells people to have food and water for three days. Three days! When Hurricane Sandy hit, some areas were without power for ten days. It's not that uncommon for power outages to last for a week or more, especially following a natural disaster. In those cases, though, the areas without electricity go from being widespread to just a few spots here and there pretty quickly. So what happens when those three days are up, the water's still out for many blocks around you, the bodega down on the corner has run out of everything, and people are starting to panic because it's not just a few blocks or a few square miles that are without power but multiple states?

One person that spoke with Koppel said that the immediate most practical thing to do in urban areas was to call in the military to get emergency power to the water and sewer systems. If you can get the pumps running to get water to people, they can survive fairly well while various agencies work on getting food and medical supplies to people who need them. The biggest problem would be communication -- if the power is out, the grid is down, how do you get information to people so they don't panic? It's an interesting question. The book didn't provide an answer.

Koppel did talk with people in the "prepping" movement, including some of the big names in the business. Interestingly enough, the people who supply the individual preppers aren't really set up to deal with a major emergency themselves. They don't keep a lot of stock on their shelves; people do pay attention to expiration dates so no one wants to buy old MREs. The typical MRE has a shelf life of 5 years; the better bet is to get freeze-dried food (the dehydrated crap backpackers invest in before starting to hike the Pacific Crest Trail). Freeze-dried lasts up to 25 years. Of course, so do a lot of other dry foods. Lots of packaged foods like pastas and dry beans and rice have "best by" dates on them; those dates don't mean the food is no longer edible. It just means you should pitch it and buy new stuff from whoever is selling so they keep making money. Canned goods are little iffier; a lot depends on the specific product and how it was canned.

In any case, some individual "preppers" do seem to have a decent grasp of what it would take to muddle along without electricity. Koppel spoke with one guy who lives in St. Louis who also has a rural property. The country place is set up to be off the grid -- solar and wind power, for example -- and includes features like a man-made pond that's been stocked with pan fish. The fellow who owns it would like to live there full-time once he retires; his wife isn't quite so ready to give up the amenities that come with city life unless and until it actually is a matter of survival. Nonetheless, despite having through things through better than average, the man is making some of the same mistakes that always inspire me to laugh a bit scornfully: hoarding gasoline, for example. Way too many people don't realize gas can go bad pretty fast.

Koppel also found a few people who weren't preppers at all but just through personal choices and lifestyle would manage just fine if the lights went out. Not surprisingly, they already lived in rural areas, like a rancher in Wyoming.

Not surprisingly, the one group that is well-prepared to survive off the grid for long periods of time are members of the Church of Latter Day Saints. It wasn't exactly news that Mormons in general aren't going to worry when the shelves go empty at the closest Kroger. It's official church doctrine to be prepared. Church members are expected to have a well-organized pantry with enough edibles in it to last a minimum of 3 months, although a full year is the preferred target amount. There are guidelines as to how much of what you need to have for your family size; there are instructions on rotating things so nothing ever it hits an expiration date. What was news to me was learning just how much infrastructure the LDS church has in place to back up individual preparedness. The Mormons are remarkably well-organized. The lowest level of organization is, of course, the home. Each household is part of a ward (the equivalent of a parish maybe?), wards are organized into stakes, each stake has a bishop's storehouse. The storehouse can function like a food pantry -- families that fall on hard times can get vouchers (a bishop's recommendation) that allows them to go to the storehouse and get what they need. In a widespread emergency, the storehouse is the backup to the individual homes. The Mormons also draw on them when they participate in disaster relief:  when there's a hurricane or a flood they'll load trucks with supplies to send to affected areas. In many cases the LDS is on the scene with relief supplies before the Red Cross or the government. (A small digression: Koppel heaps a fair amount of scorn on the Red Cross. In recent years it's become clear the national organization is far more interested in fund-raising than it is in doing any actual relief work.)

And how are the Mormons stocking those storehouses? Well, they have a food and other supplies system in place that's comparable to anything run by Walmart, including owning a trucking company. They have their own farms and dairies, canning plants, you name it. In ordinary times, they're selling on the open market what isn't needed to keep the storehouses stocked; in the event of a wide-spread disaster anything they grow or raise would go into the church's supply chain. I found myself thinking that maybe those nice young men, the "elders" going door-to-door trying to persuade people to read the Book of Mormon, should consider mentioning that a good way to survive the Zombie Apocalypse is by converting to Mormonism. If only they were willing to drink coffee. . . 

So what are you going to do when the lights go out? I tend to agree with Koppel that it's not a matter of If, it's a matter of When. Obviously, how grim it would be hinges a lot on which part of the country gets hit hardest and what time of the year it is. The national grid isn't actually a national grid -- it's at least three separate ones -- so it's not like the entire country would go black at once. If the power goes out in the upper Midwest in July or August, it's not that big a deal. Refrigerated and frozen food is going to spoil, of course, but the weather isn't likely to kill you. If it's January, on the other hand, and your sole source of heat is furnace that requires electricity, you've got a problem. Conversely, no power in Texas in July or August would mean no air conditioning -- and heat stroke is going to do in anyone who's afraid to open windows. Every year old people die from heat stroke in urban areas because they're more afraid of burglars than they are of the heat.

And what about simple things like basic sanitation? How do you flush a toilet when there is no water? One of things they always recommend in prepping for a natural disaster (ice storms, hurricanes, whatever) is to fill your bathtub or other containers with water before the disaster hits. Well, a cyber attack on the electric grid isn't going to give any advance warning. If you don't have a container with some water stashed as part of routine household preparedness, you're out of luck. So maybe the first step in thinking about preparing for the lights going out would be to make sure you've got some water stashed -- you can go a long time without food or a functioning furnace, but you can't survive without water.

Another canning binge begins

I thought I was done preserving foods for this year. I made a gazillion batches of pickles of various types, having made the mistake of buying a bushel of cucumbers from the local fruit stand -- I cannot grow enough cucumbers in our glacial till garden soil to count on having enough to do anything with -- so filled a lot of pint jars with cucumbers, vinegar, and various spices. I pressure canned a couple dozen pints of green beans. I made 3 batches of pickled beets. The S.O. reminded me last week that the plum trees actually had plums this year so I made plum jam. And I thought that was it.

Then I noticed the tree that has really good pie apples had a fair number of apples this year, so now I'm giving serious thought to canning apple pie filling. The tree next to that particular tree yields fruit that is quite good for jelly and applesauce. . . so, yep, there's now a whole lot of jelly jars sitting on the counter waiting to be washed.

And then there are the green tomatoes left in the garden. This was not a particularly good year for tomatoes -- we had major issues with blossom end rot; apparently our garden suffers from calcium deficiency -- but there are enough green tomatoes out there for at least one batch of green tomato pickles. The other day I stumbled across a recipe for green tomato pickles that includes jalapenos. So you guess it. I'm contemplating making green tomato pickles sometime in the next 48 hours.

Why does it have to be within the next 48 hours? Because in the midst of the canning binge, I'll also be prepping the Guppy to hit the road. The S.O. has the bunk-over-the-cab area done -- insulation in place, a new sheet of paneling tacked up to replace the one that was there (that cheap paneling doesn't survive being pulled off very well) -- so I am now free to finish packing various supplies and making sure nothing's going to bounce around too much when we pull out of here on Saturday morning. Today is Wednesday. That gives me basically 3 days to indulge my atavistic desire to fill a metaphorical pantry. I may have to make another trip to the produce stand, though, because it just hit me I haven't made apple marmelade in a long, long time. I think I need to buy some oranges.

And you thought birthers were nuts

A friend mentioned the television series "Doomsday Preppers" and I could not resist checking out the web site. Once again, I found myself being amused by the paranoid fantasies of a group of gullible loons. What is it about us Americans that makes us so prone to irrationality? Where does our enormous faith in the wonders of technology come from? And why do some folks keep falling for con men  marketing "survival gear" that's overpriced and of dubious value?

Example: the web site includes a quiz that scores you on how likely you are to survive a doomsday scenario. "How much water do you have stored?" strikes me as a reasonable question. Everyone, regardless of whether or not they're anticipating the end of the world, should have some emergency supplies in the home, especially some safe drinking water. After all, if you live in an urban area and for some reason water stops coming out of the tap, you could be screwed pretty quickly. But shouldn't you also be prepared for having to purify water? I'd be encouraging preppers to invest in a few gallons of bleach, some water purification tablets, or a backpacking water pump/filter just in case the bottles of clean water run out. After all, if an actual apocalypse happens, Coke is going to stop bottling Dasani.

In any case, it was a question on which we scored low. We've got less than 5 gallons stashed. We don't worry much about water when we've got our own well and still own a functioning hand pump. That part of the quiz also asked about food stores, like stashes of meat and flour, but totally overlooked beans. How can anyone take a survivalist show seriously that doesn't include dried beans in its lists of must-haves? Dried beans are the ultimate survival food. Properly stored, they'll stay edible for decades, unlike flour (which can go rancid and/or easily become infested with weevils) or canned goods. I've cleaned out old people's pantries where there were some older canned goods (both home and commercial) hiding in the back -- those bulging cans and lids were definitely scary.

On to another question: do you own a 4-wheel drive vehicle? Apparently if you've got a nifty SUV with 4-wheel drive, your survival chances go up. Right. Like owning a Jeep is going to help a lot when the zombie apocalypse happens, I-75 out of Atlanta is bumper to bumper stalled traffic, and all the surface streets are a snarled mess. If you live in an urban area, you need to think about surviving in that urban area because there's no way to guarantee you're going to be able to get out. Again, of course, not a problem for us. Urban preppers may fantasize about their bug out cabins out in the boonies somewhere; we already live there.

And then there was the weapons question. . . apparently, the more guns and ammo you have hoarded, the better. Bizarre. Just looking at it logically and assuming long term social chaos, complete with looters and worse, what you really need to be doing is mastering relatively silent weapons (bows, bolos, slingshots, atlatls) because the first time you fire a gun, you've both spooked the game and drawn attention to yourself. No doubt there's something very machismo in the fantasy of bravely holding off a horde of would be looters, but in a real survival situation, the lower your profile, the better. You don't want to find yourself defending your own personal Alamo; you want to be invisible.

Besides, arrows are reusable. Bullets aren't. Sooner or later the ammo will run out -- and unless reloaders have also mastered the art of making gunpowder, their complex technological crutch is going to turn into just so much scrap metal. Instead of hanging out at the firing range playing with Bushmasters, the semi-savvy survivalist is going to be at home practicing making slings and deadfalls and channeling his or her inner Robin Hood. Of course, it's a lot more fun to go the range, talk tough with your fellow preppers, and fire off a zillion rounds at human-shaped targets than it is to think seriously about the need to someday hunt very quietly for squirrels and rabbits.

We definitely flunked the weapons question.

I think Hank Williams jr is pretty much of an ass, but I do like this song -- I wonder how many of those would-be preppers even know what a trot line is?

 

Not exactly an urban homesteader

It's almost harvest time on the patio, and about all I can say about this year's results is it's a good thing we don't have to rely on our container gardening for survival. I managed to kill most of the plants by going on vacation for a little too long ("mummified" would be an apt description for what greeted me when I returned from Michigan in June), and the sole pepper plant to survive has managed to produce a grand total of six, count'em, six peppers to date. It bloomed a lot, but all the polinators were apparently far too busy up in the mimosa to bother with a mere pepper plant at ground level.

Clarke was wrong

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. -- Arthur C. Clarke, 1961

Clarke was wrong, at least in part. If you've never seen a technology before, maybe it's magic. If you've lived with it your entire life, it's invisible. It's become as natural and immutable as the air you breathe or the ground you walk on. It's been black boxed and is ubiquitous to the point where you can't imagine living without it. You don't think at all about what's involved in making a device or what it takes to keep it running -- it's just there, always has been, always will be. You also become incapable of imagining alternatives.

I've been thinking about technology more than usual this weekend. I just finished reading a post-apocalyptic novel in which the author failed to escape the device paradigm, and a fair number of the talking heads on television kept falling back on that same paradigm coupled with technological optimism -- the idea that if we've got a problem, we can always solve it with technological innovations. Can't win the war in Afghanistan? Build more drones. Gas prices too high? We'll just start sucking oil out of shale. What we have is what we have to have, and there's no sense trying to escape that paradigm . . . or so the mindset seems to be.

It's not just novelists and pundits that are so thoroughly embedded in 21st century technology they can't see it anymore. So are survivalists and various back to the land types. I read various survivalist blogs for the fun of it -- some of them can provide a lot of laughs. It's amazing how many people are out there who fear a coming apocalypse, life in a Mad Max- or The Postman-type world, but seem to think "living off the grid" consists of buying a generator, as if there's always going to be a service station where they can go to refill the gas cans.  If they do think about building up their own private stash, I always wonder just how many realize just how quickly petroleum products, particularly gasoline, go bad?

I'm thinking about gasoline in particular this morning thanks in part to The Passage. One of its real howlers, a classic must suspend all disbelief moment, came when the protagonists were salvaging a Humvee from the base at Twenty Nine Palms to use to get to Telluride. Keep in mind those Humvees, their assorted parts, and their fuel have been sitting in a desert for almost 100 years. You know what you call 100-year-old gasoline? Varnish.

Gasoline consists of a mixture of complex hydrocarbons, some of which are highly volatile (which is why gasoline is a fuel, those vaporizing volatiles combust easily). Highly volatile means they evaporate quickly. If the unused gas in your lawn mower goes bad in a few months, what are the odds that the gas in a fuel tank anywhere is still going to be good a century from now? (There is a reason the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is a stash of crude oil; as soon as you start refining petroleum, the various products, like gasoline, start breaking down.) One of my favorite laughable moments in post-apocalyptic fiction, both written and on the screen, occurs when Our Hero/Heroine leaps into a derelict car or truck, a vehicle that's been sitting abandoned on a street or in a garage for multiple years, and fires it right up. The scene they never show occurs a few seconds later when the engine seizes from the bad gas and our Hero/Heroine gets eaten by zombies.

With a few rare exceptions, none of these fictionalized futures ever include nonmotorized transportation, e.g., bicycles. (The more serious, reality-based survivalists do think about bikes; there's been a fair amount of discussion on some blogs about the best choices for a bug-out bicycle.) If novelists and script writers do eliminate the cars, they seem to assume the alternative has hooves and eats oats.

Personally, if I were paranoid enough to think like a survivalist, I'd make sure I had a really good bicycle and the gear that went with it (panniers, for example) to use in a bug out situation. It's a lot harder to get trapped in a traffic jam if you're on two wheels weaving between the cars (or, even better, have escaped the jam by doing back roads and side streets on those two wheels). I'd also be learning to work with tools that were low-tech and had as few hard to replace parts as possible. I'd be memorizing episodes of the Woodwright's Workshop and buying all of Roy Underhill's books while practicing food preservation methods popular before canning was invented, e.g., salting, smoking, and drying meats. Instead of worrying about where to stash my hoard of ammo, I'd focus on mastering an atl atl or using a bolo because sooner or later the bullets are going to run out, and, while reloading is theoretically possible, making your own gunpowder isn't as easy as MacGyver made it look.

I'm not sure just what all I'd hoard. I know what I'd pack to survive for a month or two, but forever? Spare ax handles for sure, because they'd be a pain to have to carve;  a lot of kosher salt (good both for preserving food and slaying zombies); zillions of canning jar lids because they're something where once they're gone, they're gone; and a stash of books I always meant to read but just haven't gotten around to yet -- although I'm not sure even an apocalypse would help me read Ulysses.