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By Root 655 0

but fairly typical suburbanite. Visualize him in or near a big city close to where you live. He is unprepared for a crisis. He has less than one week’s food in his kitchen. He has a 12-gauge pump-action shotgun that he hasn’t fired in years, and just half a tank of gas in his minivan and maybe a gallon or two more in a can that he keeps on hand for his lawn mower. Then TEOTWAWKI hits. The power grid is down, his job is history, the toilet doesn’t flush, and water no longer magically comes cascading from the tap. His wife and kids are panicky. The supermarket shelves have been stripped bare. There are riots beginning in his city. The local service stations have run out of gas. The banks have closed. Now he is suddenly desperate. Where will he go? What will he do?

Odds are Joe will think: “I’ve gotta go find a vacation cabin somewhere, up in the mountains, where some rich dude only goes a couple of times each year.” So vacation destinations like Lake Tahoe, Lake Arrowhead, and Squaw Valley, California; Prescott and Sedona, Arizona; Hot Springs, Arkansas; Vail and Steamboat Springs, Colorado; and the other various rural ski, spa, Great Lakes, and coastal resort areas will get swarmed.

Or, Joe will think: “I’ve got to go to where they grow food.” So places like the Imperial Valley, the Willamette Valley, and the Red River Valley will similarly get overrun. There will be so many desperate Joe Six-packs arriving all at once that these areas will degenerate into free-fire zones. It will be an intensely ugly situation and will not be safe for anyone.

The Linchpin: The Power Grids

The level of severity for any survival scenario will be tremendously greater if the power grid goes down (“grid down”) for a period of more than a week. Consider the following:

If there is an extended grid-down scenario . . .

• Most towns and cities will be without municipal (utility) drinking water.

• There will likely be huge outflows of refugees from cities.

• There will possibly be mass prison escapes.

• Virtually all communications will go down. Telephone-company central offices (COs) do have battery backup. These are huge banks of two-volt deep-cycle floating batteries. But those batteries will last only about a week. Backup generators were not installed at most COs, because no situation that would take the power grid down for more than seventy-two hours was ever anticipated. (Bad planning, Ma Bell!) Thus, if and when the grid goes down, hardwired phones, cell phones, and the Internet will all go down. When both the power grid and phone systems go down, law and order will likely disintegrate. There will be no burglar alarms, no security lighting or cameras, and no reliable way to contact police or fire departments, and so forth.

• There will be no power for kidney-dialysis machines or ventilators for respiratory patients, no resupply of oxygen bottles for people with chronic lung conditions, no resupply of insulin for diabetics, etc. Anyone with a chronic health problem may die.

• Most heaters with fans won’t work, even if you can bypass the thermostat. And pellet stoves won’t work at all.

• Piped-natural-gas service will be disrupted in all but a few small areas near wellheads.

• There will be no 911 to call, no backup, no “cavalry coming over the hill” in the nick of time. You, your family, and your neighbors will have to handle any lawlessness that comes your way.

• Sanitation will be problematic in any large town or city. Virtually everyone will be forced to draw water from open sources, and meanwhile their neighbors will be inadvertently fouling those same sources. With the grid down and city water disrupted, toilets won’t flush and most urbanites and suburbanites will not dig outhouse or garbage pits. A grid-down condition could be a public-health nightmare within a week in metropolitan regions.

Chains of Supply: Lengthy and Fragile

When I give lectures or do radio interviews, I’m often asked for proof that we live in a fragile society. Here is one prime example: The kanban or “just-in-time” inventory