Preps, I mean. Recommended by the fedgov. Six-months of personal preparedness is an extrapolation, not an actual stated recommendation, but read on.
Via Shel comes news of a recent report (PDF) from the President’s National Infrastructure Advisory Council and the Department of (Achtung!) Homeland Security.
I haven’t read the full report yet. I’ve skimmed it and run several searches for relevant terms. I’m certainly going to read the rest. The introduction at OffGridSurvival.com (which is slightly misleading) begins:
In a new report from the President’s National Infrastructure Advisory Council and published by the Department of Homeland Security, the government is urging the public to prepare for the up to six months without electricity, transportation, fuel, money, and healthcare.
DHS is warning that the electric grid is now the “prime target” of terrorists, and says Americans need to be prepared for a power outage of up to six months. The report says that “People no longer keep enough essentials within their homes, reducing their ability to sustain themselves during an extended, prolonged outage. We need to improve individual preparedness.”
Old timers may recall that you were once a fringeoid nutjob if you did any degree of preparedness. But then, three days worth of emergency preps became the okay, even prudent thing. Because, you know, after that emergency officials would surely ride to your rescue and provide you with all the food, water, shelter, warmth, and medicine you’d need.
Then came Katrina. And other failures. Maria. Harvey.
So two weeks of preps became the thing for prudent citizens. But surely, after that much time, FEMA and local government equivalents would save the day.
Now comes this new report, whose executive summary begins:
The nation has steadily improved its ability to respond to major disasters and the power outages that often result. But increasing threats — whether severe natural disasters, cyber-physical attacks, electromagnetic events, or some combination — present new challenges for protecting the national power grid and recovering quickly from a catastrophic power outage.
The President’s National Infrastructure Advisory Council (NIAC) was tasked to examine the nation’s ability to respond to and recover from a catastrophic power outage of a magnitude beyond modern experience, exceeding prior events in severity, scale, duration, and consequence. Simply put, how can the nation best prepare for and recover from a catastrophic power outage regardless of the cause?
The report estimates that a major grid-down catastrophe could leave the nation, or large parts of it, without power and other amenities for at least two, and more likely six months — or more.
The article in OffGridSurvival.com is misleading (though only slightly) in that the NIAC report never overtly states that individuals and families should have six months of what you and I think of as preps. Nowhere does it say that anybody should store six months of lentils or gasoline or water.
It assumes that local communities (meaning governments, CERT volunteers, and others with official functions) will take a large hand in this new level of preparedness.
Yet the need for long-term individual and family preparedness is implicit throughout the report.
For once, it seems, We the Peasants are considered part of the nation and not just some herd that the real nation (that is, government) is expected to look after.
That’s a good thing.
The bad things are twofold (at least):
- For non-nutzoid non-wingnut non-survivalists, preparing for six months without modern amenities is an extremely serious challenge — one most of our neighbors can’t or won’t meet. Heck, it’s hard even for many of us.
- And if there’s really a nationwide grid-down catastrophe, there’s plenty of reason to believe that it won’t be fixed in a mere six months.
Now, of course this is just another government report, not gospel handed down from on high. Yet, when you think about it, it’s only a matter of time before some widespread catastrophe like the ones projected in the document hits us.
Maybe it won’t be in our lifetimes. How big a bet would you be willing to place on that?
Sorry to bring such non-cheery news to your Sunday and your holiday season. But I figure you might have lots of reading time in the near future. The NIAC report is 90-some pages long, but it’s written in plain English and it’s easy to get to the most relevant parts.
Happy reading.
What do they (fedgov) know that we don’t?
Are they running that scared of their own inability to maintain security and surveillance that they *expect* to be gridlocked (as opposed to just taking precautions)?
Are they going to make some disastrous move that calls for retaliation – from either foreign or domestic sources?
And who’s got all the money – or is there none left?
I asked the same questions about 10 years ago when I saw that FEMA had gone from 3 days to 2 weeks…
Were they expecting disasters to get worse? Were they admitting that they’d underestimated what it takes to respond?
Or were they saying to hell with all of us – if you make it two weeks you’re probably gonna make it anyway…
I don’t wonder if the level of foreign hacking is greater than is generally known. At any rate I can’t imagine going six months with out power where I currently live. Realistically the chances of getting through it would be not great, not without some really draconian heavy handedness by Government agencies.
We could be facing the first (and possibly last) worldwide Ebola pandemic. I can easily imagine needing to isolate for months at a time.
Lots of people seem to be living into their 90’s these days. How about 95 years of preps? I’d like to go 95 years without government electricity, government transportation, government fuel, government money, and government healthcare. Complete the job for self-sufficiency and abandon government courts, government police, government armies, and government roads.
For non-nutzoid non-wingnut non-survivalists, preparing for six months without modern amenities is an extremely serious challenge
Not “modern amenities”, “government amenities”. Merely invest 20% of all that money you won’t be wasting on taxes and regulatory compliance. Wouldn’t you like some nice major medical health insurance to spend at doctor-owned hospitals? A few years ago I paid $800 for 6 months of major medical insurance. If my hospital bills were only 20% of normal like the Surgery Center of Oklahoma is, my health insurance bill would be $27/month.
This report isn’t a downer, it’s fantastic news. The Wizard of Oz is admitting it’s failing to be benevolently all-powerful.
Soon enough the government’s credit rating will reflect its actual bankruptcy. When that happens the oil wells won’t be raptured away, nor the coal mines. Not the farm fields of the Midwest, nor what’s left of the fossil water under it. Not the fish, not the trees, not the beautiful mountains and valleys. Not the massive tonnage of metals already refined. The libraries of engineering books with 300 years of accumulated knowledge of how to make stuff will stick around. All the humans will still speak the same languages they did the year before. Only the government will go away.
We could be facing the first (and possibly last) worldwide Ebola pandemic. I can easily imagine needing to isolate for months at a time.
Wires don’t transmit disease. Not electric power wires, not data wires. Oil and gas pipelines aren’t a big vector, either. Shipping containers could be quarantined and tested, first outside then inside. Maybe the law enforcers from far away should not be allowed inside the gates. Merely as a plague precaution, of course, not because every little rural road crossing with a stoplight is defending freedom. Oh, no, that would be disobedient, which means immoral.
The “base target” is, and has always been, 12 months of externally unsupported existence. Above and beyond that is advantageous and recommended, but complying with that minimum standard allows options unavailable with other standards.
Why 12 months? It’s all 4 seasons. “Existence,” by the way, is not “mere survival” (although that is a prerequisite for everything else – it’s tough to “exist” or “prosper” if survival = zero), but the maintaining of reasonable life activities intended to produce continued life at greater than bare minimum standards.
Compromises, some severe, in life activities will have to be made, and planning for achieving and accepting those compromises is necessary for existence, both physical and mental. The transition will be abrupt, not gradual, easy or painless, and the more prior experience one has at the new base level the greater the opportunity for success.
I suspect the group capable of mastering that for 12 months, or longer, is disturbingly small.
Has anybody else noticed that Department of Homeland Security is just an English translation of KGB? Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, or KGB, according to internet translations, is Committee for State Security, absolutely synonymous with Department of Homeland Security.
Compromises, some severe, in life activities will have to be made
Why? This implies government, this government, any government, is a net positive in our lives, and so we are impoverished by its withdrawal. Am I reading the right blog?
The foundational purpose of taxes is not to fund centrally planned services, it is to fund the lifestyles of the nobles in their castles. Just like taxes did in Britain, whose model of elite parasitism the founding lawyers copied.
99 nuclear reactors would likely melt down without electricity to cool them.
Gee, all they would need is an electrical power generating plant that didn’t need a constant stream of trainloads of fuel. Where could they find one of those? Does html have a sarcasm font yet? There’s a reason Lucifer’s Hammer set the restarting of industrial civilization around a nuclear power plant.
And if there’s really a nationwide grid-down catastrophe, there’s plenty of reason to believe that it won’t be fixed in a mere six months.
Suppose a high-altitude nuke ruined electrical substation transformers by EMP. With the power off, fire hydrants didn’t work, and the big cities burned down in uncontrollable fires. With fuel and food transportation and sewers disrupted, big city dwellers starved and died of sanitation diseases. Well, those people are gone and the cities won’t be fixed in six months. But how are rurals affected? What do cities produce that rurals need? Obviously, without 1,500 pages/day of micromanagement in the Federal Register, rurals will be like domesticated turkeys, and look up at the sky during rain and drown.
And who’s got all the money — or is there none left?
They’ve been evading audits at Fort Knox for decades. What does it always mean when an organization evades audits? Nor is tons of that metal all that useful. There’s enough for electronics already, and you can’t make it into hip implants. What the boomers want now is doctors and nurses, and there aren’t any stored in government warehouses.
Compromises, some severe, in life activities will have to be made
Why? This implies government, this government, any government, is a net positive in our lives, and so we are impoverished by its withdrawal. Am I reading the right blog?
Yes, you’re reading one of the right blog(s).
Accomplishment and achievement today is performed in spite of government, not because of government’s enabling of it.
The internet was a creation of very early DARPA, but quickly became privatized, and now all government knows how to do is screw it up with “net neutrality”; Home Depot, Ace Hardware, Boeing Aircraft, LED lights, coronary artery stents, air conditioning, pneumatic tires, myriad other accoutrements of civilization, came about not because a Wesley Mouch or Floyd Ferris deemed them benefits worthy of federal attention but because a Hank Rearden or an Irving Schlabotnik had an idea and a passion and created them.
Compromises, some severe, in life activities will have to be made; if the SHTF severely enough, you won’t be able to order a replacement well pump gasket over Al Gore’s InterTubes and have Fred Smith’s FedEx deliver it in 2 days, so you’ll have to make your own. Got any gasket material on hand, or will you have to substitute half a day’s work by cutting one from your kid’s construction paper and waterproofing it with a Crayola? You scrounged 2 gallons of gasoline, but that missing 8MM X 1.25 nut securing the cutter bar to the chain saw isn’t replaceable by a quick trip to Home Depot because there’s no Home Depot anymore, you got a spare among those coffee cans of stuff in the basement, or will you have to start cutting firewood with a hand saw and hatchet? Sears and Montgomery Ward haven’t published catalogs for 15 years, newspapers are dying daily, and no one’s had a phone book for a decade, so what’s the emergency substitute for toilet paper now?
Rest assured if we find ourselves in that sort of pickle government won’t be our savior but our enemy; it’s almost completely that now, the transition from nearly insufferable burden to fully vindictive nemesis will be short and quickly accomplished.
if the SHTF severely enough, you won’t be able to order a replacement well pump gasket over Al Gore’s InterTubes and have Fred Smith’s FedEx deliver it in 2 days, so you’ll have to make your own.
The story genre of horror is when the fictional world has been declared by the author to not be understandable by study and experiment; the genre of science fiction is when it is. I’m not following your science fiction worldbuilding in the paragraph above. It reads to me like you’ve declared things irretrievably broken because that is your plot. Like the story _The Road_, or the weather/solar problems in _The Matrix_, or HotColdWetDry. I also think there’s a Santa Claus fantasy aspect where government employees can continue to work without having to collect taxes to support their operations with food and fuel.
There is no SHTF now that everyone has guns. Above a certain amount, chaos invented by government reduces government power more than citizen power. If the dollar is hyperinflated, citizens will use something else for money, and that money stream will be harder to tax because it won’t go through the banking system. If the police in New Jersey go door to door raiding for magazines, then those police will be killed in the first week. THEN how will New Jersey governments regulate and tax when they have no enforcers? Government vs. any large fraction of the people is always a bluff; government can only do acute hurt to 5%.
Fundamentally, I read you as repeating the claims from _Leviathan_, but that book has no experimental evidence supporting it. Please explain in military battle terms how a government can strongly oppress a similarly-armed population which outnumbers it hundreds to one. The only way it works is if the control mechanism, a brain computer virus called collectivism/self-loathing, is installed in individual brains by government schools. But the collectivism computer virus is being rejected.
Government attains legitimacy by dominance challenge. A ridiculous fantasy counterfactual like Heaven/Hell, Leviathan, PeakOil, or HotColdWetDry is pressed into your personality by force of peer pressure. Then they lead you around with it like it was a ring through your nose.
In this conversation, the counterfactual I’m focusing on is SHTF. Please explain to me in small bite-sized steps exactly how we get from here to Mad Max. I didn’t see the green of farms in the background of Mad Max, or farming slave labor. What did the bad people eat after the first month when the canned food ran out? More Santa Claus economics again.
I can’t speak for Unidentified Victim, but s/he certainly didn’t go anywhere near Mad Max or Santa Claus territory. Nor did UV defend government as a savior; very much the opposite.
S/he did, however, make some very strong points about vital goods that will become unavailable if the grid goes down.
I claim the persistent and systematic inability to order a replacement well pump gasket is congruent with the fictional world of the movie Mad Max. In comparison, the real world gasoline delivery pipeline break in Alabama with the 250K gallon spill was just a tiresome hassle for a week. Everybody knew it would be repaired and ordinary commerce would resume. Whereas, the Mad Max fictional storyline is that ordinary commerce would not resume for many years.
If UV wants to argue that ordinary commerce will not resume for many years, then let’s hear the concrete details of that argument. Otherwise it’s just fictional population-stampeding. “grid goes down” Cue dramatic movie intro scene-setting. Stop. It’s just a moving picture. Turn up the lights. Interrupt the movie suspension of disbelief.
When freak Winter ice storms in Montreal overweighted electrical cables with ice, it crumpled almost half the high tension wire towers, and the electrical grid went down. The grid stayed down for almost four weeks for some neighborhoods. I knew someone living there in a powerless apartment. Mad Max did not happen. What actually happened is that residents drifted into school buildings in the afternoons to share human community, light, power, heat, water, and hot food. Wow, that’s boring. Wouldn’t make an exciting movie. No zombies, no mass murdering bandits, no ending of civilization, no _The Road_.
Last comment, I promise.
Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot (henceforth A,B,C,D,E, F) are all companies making well pumps. None dominate the industry but all sell enough to be profitable and stay in business. Pump designs among them are similar but not identical, so only a few parts cross over between pumps of different manufacturers.
The economy takes a dive, activity declines 10-15% (The 1929-1941 “Great Depression” was an approx. 25% decline. Worldwide Civilization did not grind to a halt 1929-1941 – Ford and Buick still made and sold cars, farmers still farmed, the famed DC-3 from Douglas Aircraft flew for the first time in 1935, etc.) That’s a long way from living in caves, wearing animal skins and roasting rabbits over a fire to eat.
A 15% economic decline makes A’s debt position untenable, they go under; F is in Germany (“globilization” was what everyone wanted….) , they lay off 10% of their workforce, stay in production, but air delivery from Europe is curtailed from daily overnight to 2-day 4X/week; D cuts back production 15%, pushes older workers into early retirement, stops manufacturing the 20% worst sellers in their pump line.
If your pump was made by A, you’re hoping one of the other 5 absorbed their product line, or at least bought their parts stock for 5 cents on the dollar, otherwise it’s new pump time or make parts yourself. If your pump was made by F, gaskets and seals are available, but thanks to decades of just-in-time delivery, not stocked and available locally, it’s now 2 weeks for parts delivery from Munich (just like it was in 1965). There’s a pump dealer in Pittsburgh who stocks parts for Bravo pumps, yours is a Bravo and USPS still delivers every other day so you’re in luck, your toilets will be flushing again in 3 days.
You’ll notice this problem was solved without involving an AR-15 or meals from Mountain House, and your snowshoes in the shed were never touched. The neighborhood grocery store was still open, but 6 days/week instead of 7, and they don’t always have fresh grean beans, but have never run out of the canned version. The electricity that powers your now rebuilt well pump never stopped flowing to your house.
In other words, the S has hit the fan, but it’s “Hard Times” – very hard times for some – rather than a Stone Age Apocalypse, and Mel Gibson’s movie character is still just a character, not a how-to documentary; dimes get spent rather than dollars, and nickels are counted closely. Family adventures are conducted around the cable-less TV and wood stove with books, board games and DVDs instead of a weekend at the ski resort. Carpooling to work is the new norm because gasoline is still available, but not as plentiful and it’s 45 cents a galllon higher now.
I understand that some deeply desire that apocalypse, have built their future desires around the promise that it’s coming, and I don’t deny that it’s one of the many, many civilizational possibilities we face. There is a big difference, however, between “possibility” and “probability.” Humans are an extremely adaptable and resilient species; our history confirms that. It’s prudent, no matter what one’s beliefs, to have that AR-15 and some shelves of Mountain House entrees, not to mention a Plan B, and a Plan C, for well water “just in case,” but there’s a great difference between evaluating conditions and taking a reasonable business risk and betting the rent money on the ponies.
I have not one, but two ARs, and some Mountain House, but I have a lot more canned and frozen food than freeze dried, and the money I could have spent on an underground concrete bunker went into what I hope are inflation-resistant and more secure than average retirement investments. What I might spend on a cable bill goes instead into work and recreational clothing, the funds for a week at a resort in Jamaica instead pays our share of half a dozen family camping weekends in the Appalachians, because my family and friends are the people I most enjoy spending time with, and if “Hard Times” ever do descend on us, family, friends, varied life skills, adaptability and resilience are the things that will not only get us through it but allow us to prosper.
But that’s just me. If someone wants to watch Mel enough times to recite the dialog from memory and wear out shovels digging the bunker, I’m certainly not going to offer any criticism because in the end, it’s all a personal choice allowed within a free society. And, it’s that free society that I see most at risk.
So we have two scenarios. Scenario one, “SHTF”, with properties:
“Compromises, some severe, in life activities will have to be made” / “SHTF” / “The transition will be abrupt, not gradual, easy or painless” / “the more prior experience one has at the new base level the greater the opportunity for success” / “have to make your own [water pump gasket, and gasket material, because rolls of blank gasket are not available in any store in town]” / “missing 8MM X 1.25 nut securing the cutter bar to the chain saw isn’t replaceable by a quick trip to Home Depot because there’s no Home Depot anymore [or any store in town with metric hardware]” / “vital goods that will become unavailable if the grid goes down”
And scenario two, “less than Great Depression”, with properties:
grid actually went down for weeks in Montreal in Winter / “The 1929-1941 ‘Great Depression’ was an approx. 25% decline” / can’t find replacement gaskets for a 20 year old pump / “gasoline delivery pipeline break in Alabama”
I think the Affordable Care Act and other grants of monopoly to medicine have actually produced “less than Great Depression” for healthcare. We’re living in it.
I do not think “SHTF” is reachable in the US. Rural Americans are not going to tolerate a Venezuela situation.