(The intersection of doomerism and tech is amusingly cyberpunk sometimes.)
Actually, what’s the most useful way you’d prepare for a worldwide grid outage? This isn’t that, but sometimes I wonder if a future CME might be as catastrophic as some say.
I guess we could just start building walls of unopened water bottles in our basement…
(In my teens I saw a family friend had a bag full of food supplies. I asked someone if that was a prep bag, and they said yes. I thought they were a bit weird. Now I’ve come full circle browsing Amazon for cheap doomsday food.)
Live near a lake, stream, etc. and enough firewood to boil water.
Another example is food in winter months. During a disaster, even with winter gear, your houee may not be heated. If it is -20C inside, your body will need more calories.
If you're having to go outside to cook, to expel waste, and maybe even to go find snow to melt for water, you're going to need 3x your caloric intake.
You have to plan for worst case usage per day, not best.
OK, no. If you're running a marathon, in hot weather, you're at maybe a liter per hour. Unless you plan to run 20h marathons and the sun never sets, 5 gallon is well beyond drinking needs.
And unless you're able to exert yourself at that level at all, this isn't the "worst case", this is pure fantasy.
And if you're preparing for -20C in your house, I recommend investing in insulation, not more calories stored away. (I also question 3x, the figures I've seen point to 2x, with exertion somewhat counteracting cold)
https://www.surewatertanks.com/collections/products/products...
Another cool thing is that you can make (in a pinch, I wouldn’t recommend this over berkey filters) filters from the same type of bulkheads berkey uses attached to home-made ceramic filters. They work remarkably well in emergencies and are trivial to make if you’ve got clay and a hot fire. There’s definitely trial and error involved for getting perfect seals, and some advanced DIYers I’ve seen used glazing to create a more easily sealed rim which can have a plastic tube jammed into it for a friction fit, which then attaches to the inner part of the bulkhead.
Totally unnecessary if civilization is working but awesome if things go sideways and you’re out of filters. There might be better methods too, I haven’t looked into it for years.
If the municipal water is still functional but non-potable, a LifeStraw Max gets you effectively unlimited water on-demand for most sources of contamination.
mud or damp vegetation can be a water source.
Though disaster preparedness and water efficiency are a bit at odds. For the former I'd want to keep all my barrels mostly full, but for the latter I want to keep them empty enough that rainfall events aren't overflowing them and wasting water.
Consider: "The pumps aren't working and there's nothing left up inside the local water-tower."
Then you'd have to travel to get any appreciable amount of water before even starting to filter it.
This happened literally last month in the region where I live, and yes "the taps are dry" is exactly what happened.
The water treatment plant staff detected high levels of toluene in the river which feeds the plant, so as a preventive measure, they shut down the whole thing. It took several days until they managed to get the toluene levels in the river low enough that adding activated charcoal to the water intake could get rid of the rest. In the meantime, there was no water being pumped into the system, and once your building's water tank ran dry (the size varies depending on the building), there was no water anymore (unless you hired a water truck to bring water from a nearby city).
And that's not even the first time this kind of thing happened around here. A couple of years ago, another water treatment plant in the same region (fed by a different river) had trouble due to high levels of geosmin in the river, and they also had to shut down for a while. The result was the same, taps running dry once the building water tanks get empty.
Not to mention that pumping water needs lots of electric power. Not only at the water treatment plant, but several other places in the system need to move water against gravity, or increase its pressure.
its better to be able to sanitize required quantities on demand.
Most of the comments down thread underestimate water consumption. Depending on the climate, you'll want the following daily quantities [1]:
- 2-3 gallons for drinking
- 1.5 gallons for hygiene (can skip for a while)
- 0.5 gallons for food prep
The planning factor for military operations was 8 gallons per person per day. Water is heavy—8 pounds per gallon—and acquiring, storing, and moving it is a large effort.
[1] https://cascom.army.mil/g_staff/g3/TTD/Products/QM-How-to-Ha...
The average person needs far less than 65lbs (30kg) of water per day, which is a third of the average male weight in the US.
By medical standards humans need more like 8lbs (under 4l) per day for men and 6lbs (under 3l) for women. Less if your rationing and not exerting yourself.
Also you need to clean your home - you don't want to get sick in a catastrophe scenario.
I was on a hike that recommended 1 gallon to complete it for 5 miles round trip.
I’m sure there is a method to the madness of 8 gallons per person that isn’t easy to see. There is a lot of rounding up with the military also.
The way to allow for extras is to store water for a longer length of time. If recommended value is two weeks, and it is in my area, then a month is a good buffer.
It never occurred to me that people needed this spelled out, but I guess it's simpler in most of the world where 1L = 1kg.
The other kind of people who know about the weight of waters are people with campers / trailers and people with fish tanks in their apartments. The maximum allowable size for a fish tank in the middle of the room is not that much.
> It never occurred to me that people needed this spelled out, but I guess it's simpler in most of the world where 1L = 1kg.
It's easy in gallons and pounds, too, if the correct gallon is used: 10 pounds per imperial gallon of water, by definition.
These are all things which are generally known to Americans. But HN has an international audience, for whom "gallon" is presumably somewhat vague.
You already have the equipment for that. Your existing hot water heater stores enough drinking water for a month at least, probably more if you ration carefully.
But that's not really disaster-relevant, no.
55 gallon rain barrels can often be found subsidized and therefore cheap.
Keep a bunch of camping iodine drops around and you are set.
I've taken to trying to have a minimal set of 4 one liter steel water bottles hung in the closet (grab + go) all the time. So convenient to be able to "just grab some water" on the way out the door, and is the start of a solid emergency prep station.
At least in the US, water jugs are generally very flimsy. An attic is likely to have wide temperature variations throughout the year, and leaky water jugs up there could cause some expensive damage.
We do get power failures, so it's mostly been for some garden watering, and being able to flush our toilets during an outage. We're on a well, and the pump needs 220v. I suppose I could get a better generator too, ours only does 120v.
Especially as an autotransformer it's pretty cheap (should be about 50$).
Flame King Refillable 1LB Empty Propane Cylinder Tank
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00MM3GCVO/
It offers some nuanced controls e.g. to avoid overfilling.
If you understand pressure Regulators and can hook up a BBQ, [is it really] more risky than skydiving
Edit: Switched a safety assertion to a question
1. The propane they are manufactured with is carefully dried, but propane out of bulk tanks is not. The single use tanks have thinner walls with less corrosion protection because the high-end propane doesn't need it.
2. The safety over-pressure valve on those tanks has similar design constraints and may corrode shut with un-dried propane. Sometimes people damage those valves while refilling.
3. It's easy to overfill those little tanks such that high temperatures can cause over-pressure problems. Due to (1) and (2) the built-in safety measures for refillable tanks cannot be assumed.
I was questioning if that risk is meaningful, or if it is like a prop 65 warning on every building you enter, and most products you purchase.
Googling around I was able to find 1 death associated with refilling a DOT-39 container [1], which is scary shit. However, it seems to be caused by a poor coupling, refilling inside, with an ignition source. This could have happened with any container including a certified refillable one.
https://lni.wa.gov/safety-health/safety-research/files/2016/...
If I really need to go light I'm carrying isobutane canisters or using an alcohol stove.
It should be noted for other readers, that it’s processed oats that have been treated with steaming and an extended heat treatment that are safe to eat as is. That said, “overnight oatmeal” is still not recommended.
The steaming and heating steps allow oats to be shaped, modifies the flavor, kills the many possible pathogens present (like ecoli and salmonella) and deactivates enzymes that would cause spoilage.
Truly raw grains should not be eaten. For example in the US the biggest danger of food poisoning from eating raw cookie dough, typically comes from the flour not the eggs. Incidentally, simply baking flour does not render it safe until moisture is added: https://ag.purdue.edu/news/2021/04/Home-kitchen-heat-treated...
I should also add that things like dry kidney beans contain toxins that need to be soaked and heated to boiling for a sufficient amount of time to destroy, otherwise even just a few can cause severe intestinal distress.
That's not what the cited article says. Instead, it says:
“But it’s not that simple in flour because Salmonella is more heat resistant when moisture is low. We still need more research data to confirm how hot you’d have to get the flour or how long you’d have to hold it at that temperature to make the flour safe to eat.”
You said "baking does not render flour safe". The article says we still need more research about "165 degrees", and does not even say baking flour at 165 degrees is unsafe. In other words, it could render it safe, we just don't apparently know.
But I've noticed a disturbing trend. A lot of people now have "continuous" pump/tank setups. A little pressure tank the size of a 20lb BBQ propane tank, just to allow for pressure stabilization, and a weaker pump. I guess cost is the motivator.
Sad, really.
Definitely sad.
This. When trying to make provisions for even modest disruptions, you quickly realize how herculean a task it is to be truly prepared. Unless you're already a self-sustaining farmer with a well/water source and other resources or (ideally) billionare-bunker capable, you can see how prepper-ism becomes a lifestyle beyond prepping for a relatively short period.
Making a choice between living life as it currently is and being prepared to survive indefinitely is a hard fork in the road.
- water purification/iodide tablets - Sawyer mini (life straw works too) to filter the water - rations - camping stove, white gas, waterproof matches, lighter - I may or may not have a firearm and may or may not bring it when me and my non-white partner go camping in eastern Washington/forks .... - Tanked water heater for potable water - fire extinguisher (granted I leave that in the car when camping) - poop bucket - solar panel+back up battery, assuming they survive any issues with the storm. I'm hoping a townhouse has enough barriers to protect against radiation given I keep the camping gear in the basement
I should probably print out some maps of things like resoviors, ports, and other critical infra/services in my area at some point.
Be on a government payroll and have the skills necessary to repair the damage.
https://old.reddit.com/r/preppers/comments/11tblpp/found_it_...
https://irp.fas.org/congress/2008_hr/emp.pdf
It's referring to a fictional story in that quote, but the scientist says that 90% is accurate for the real world if that scenario were to happen. Pretty chilling.
It's not especially noteworthy .. to those of us that also grew up away from large connected services - you have your own sewerage, generators, mail, drive | walk to town to pick things up.
Currently I'm "mostly" off grid - I have internet connection, a well, leach drains, solar + wind (electric) + wind (mechanical mill), etc and live in a rural community with a lot of people older than 60 who also grew up off grid.
Reads more like a self-written personal home page than an encyclopedia entry produced by independent volunteers.
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/role-of-s...
It is easy to make that longer by keeping extras of stable food they normally eat. I like to keep extras of everything I use regularly. Which really helped during the pandemic.
But the other factor is, some people literally only eat pre-made food, which often a large portion consists of frozen things. I've been in some homes, mostly single people, which have no flour, rice, oats, etc. No real raw materials, such as eggs or butter. No canned food. Maybe a jar of peanut butter and a loaf of bread, and a package of processed meat in the fridge.
The rest are frozen things like prepared chicken wings, and so on.
What I wonder is, what are the percentages of people in these situations?
20%?
If something like that happens but sustained long enough to cause a mob to loot the store (which the media would of course amplify), it wouldn't be long before there was widespread panic.
It's not the CME itself that terrifies me, but the knock-on effects.
But the vulnerable side then becomes the power grid and Internet backbone. Part of a resilient disaster plan would be to allow ACH and other payment traffic to take priority if we were relegated to a low bandwidth connection. If we cannot transfer money, we will collapse, plain as that, once panic over food security sets in.
An EE friend said that we do not have enough transformers to replace if a critical number of them fried. Substation level components could be a huge bottleneck if we had another Carrington event.
Or something similar.
EDIT: Wow, I know HN wears rose-colored glasses when looking at the past, but come on, people. We didn't hallucinate the antimaskers, antivaxxers, and thousands of protestors deliberately ignoring stay-at-home. I worked with a health official who had her home picketed because she dared to involve herself in health policy. It's only been a few years and y'all are in denial already.
The only disagreement I think is in the definition of community. We could either say that community is just, like, our extended circle of acquaintances; we’ve all got one and it isn’t very robust against disasters. Or we could say that a resilient community is some deeper thing on which people can lean in a disaster, but which needs to be carefully tended to, and most of us lack.
The latter is, I think, what the original poster meant.
I think maybe you're thinking of a different definition of "community connections" than the parent poster. It's not _literally everyone around you,_ but the people around you that you trust and support and who will support you. Get as many of those as you can, as high quality as you can.
It's beneficial even if the world _doesn't_ go to shit, too! =)
I'd rarely met the neighbors before then, but COVID really brought everyone together.
Though I lived in a pretty liberal and well educated area, not many anti-vaxxers around where I lived.
Community resiliency is a natural instinct it seems. Rebecca solnit's "paradise built in hell" is a fascinating read on the subject.
What would a group that gets cheap and or throwaway groceries and feeds homeless do in a Fit-Hits-The-Shan or End-of-World scenario?
You’d have to hope some heavily agricultural minded types would be friendly to you and your labor potential.
If there are functional societies elsewhere in the world, then help in the form of food could be on its way. The question is, will it be distributed efficiently to the people who need it? Something like Food Not Bombs could respond quite effectively to such a situation.
Primarily volunteering with them creates two things that are basically the most important things in any emergency:
1. Knowledge of who to talk to and where to go when shit hits the fan
2. Established practices of organization
If community resources are scarce, and you have a FNB cohort in the community, you have a group of people with lots of practice stretching out food, preparing it, and redistributing it to many people. Again I recommend solnit, she wrote about this exact thing happening in one of SF's earliest devastating earthquakes.
The other upside is when the State turns up to fuck your community efforts up (like they did in SF, or Louisiana after Katrina) you also have a group with established methods of peaceful resistance. They probably already have clout with the local State enforcement group: the SFPD have gotten to the point where it's basically impossible to get them to harass FNB because of years of softening individual officers to the cause.
Edit: I see now you mean, practically speaking, what actions could they take.
Well in a place like NYC I have no idea. Probably there would be huge issues with famine. Realistically the first thing everyone should do is get the fuck out of that city lmao.
I don't know if SF would be so bad. There's also groups like Food Not Lawns trying to get people into growing their own food. If their efforts continue to be successful we can have closer to home food supply chains. As for convincing people to share, for some reason that isn't all that hard. When capitalism and its disincentives fall away, it seems people revert to our basic evolutionary advantage of social bonding and organization.
Not to mention all the dry goods stashed in stores throughout the city can be stretched pretty far by the people who have practice at it. If FNB minded folks can redistribute from the stores quickly enough they might even be able to get to the meat and etc to turn into jerky etc - hopefully they'd abandon veganism in an actual emergency. Knowing them, probably not lol. But if I'm there that's what I'm doing.
Others have written on the plight of cities in anarchy, and I don't think it's quite so doom and gloom. "Conquest of Bread" was the OG and I think it still holds up.
But the locations were primarily Boston and San Francisco.
* Have solar installed on your home. Have some spare disconnected inverters, maybe even a couple of uninstalled panels.
* Grow some of your own food in a garden.
* Have good relationships with some of your neighbors.
* Know how to do stuff yourself, have some tools and building materials in your garage
* Have a bicycle
* Have a method to purify water
None of these things are bad ideas anyway. Just don't be absolutely reliant on just-in-time purchasing of life necessities and know enough to be able to figure stuff out on your own. More or less just go on an overnight backpacking trip once in a while without buying prepackaged everything and you'll be pretty good.
This will get you a handful extra meals, assuming the ideal case where everything was fully grown, harvested, and preserved before the incident. It's one thing to have a village harvest & jam cycle for the seasons, it's another to need to be prepared for the situation to change overnight, all alone and with only a home garden to work with.
You're better off using the money, time, energy, etc. to buy provisions that are immediately and near-permanently useful without the variability, climate sensitivity, and labor intensity of gardening.
And also, gardening is a high quality activity for you and your family at any time. It feels good eating a little bit of what you've grown, and there are lots of things that are either not possible or rather expensive to buy but simple to grow.
Even the grid is probably fine if it's unplugged from transmission.
Both sparks from shorts and excess heating of conductors are possible ignition points.
n.b. I have not look at the paper.
I'd be very surprised if anything naturally occurring in a forest would be long and/or conductive enough to be a problem even during very strong geomagnetic storms.
It does seem plausible that you could get fires as a result of electrical sparks off of long conductors (transmission and communication wires, pipelines, fences), such as with the Carrington event (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetically_induced_curren...).
Simply surviving something like this, provided you can rely on the grid coming back eventually, is mostly just hunkering down. The water requirements here are referring to what is needed to sustain activity. I was also a logistics officer for a combined arms battalion and the water needs of an infantryman fighting a war are quite a bit greater than a family hunkering down in their house. Drink whatever non-perishable liquid you have, slowly, and it will take at least a week before you dehydrate. If you're not already anorexic or some kind of extreme endurance athlete, it's going to take most people at least a month to starve. You won't have a pleasant existence, but as long as you stay in place and don't try to do anything, you can easily stay alive without much.
If you're talking true Walking Dead level post-apocalypse LARPing civilization is gone and not coming back, stored supplies do nothing but delay the inevitable. You need to learn how to live off the land and probably fight for it. Look at people taking shits in the street that Hacker News hates so much and see what they do to survive without working utilities and access to grocery stores. Eat trash. Drink rainwater. Stay out of sight as much as possible and look insane and dangerous when you're not out of sight.
It's the same as asking: how would you prepare if you were to travel back in time to 600 CE?
You need to be self-sufficient. You cannot rely on money for at least 18 months. You need to be somewhere with access to water, shelter and food. And not that many people. The only safe bet is to have an off grid 'bunker' or holiday home that you could ride out the global chaos for 2 years.
Worldwide grid outage is pretty low likelihood but if it happens everyone will be reminded of the worst aspects of human nature, and the cruel indifference of nature pretty fast.
Also, gasoline.
Of course if you're in Texas in midwinter when a CME happens, you are well and truly screwed.
What do you call someone who puts their tablet and phone in the microwave? Preppy?
A year of food stored and a really good place to hide from the hordes that want it. Very difficult imo.
These are very different things.
Part of the electricity bill here in Flanders is based on monthly power peak. I charge an EV at home, and by setting up the charging station to take into account consumption data from the meter, I have no problem staying below 7 kW. Okay, that's averaged over 15 minute time slots, but even the connection for my house is only rated 13.8 kW!
I think that's it, anyways; this is not my strong suit.
In the US we have single-phase (split-phase) 120/240v 200A service drops for houses, 48kW. Houses over 3,000 square feet with electric heating, electric ovens, electric water heaters, and electric air conditioning can push 150A peak demand, and a 200A service drop is not much more expensive for the utility than a 100A service drop. Most houses in my state have gas water heaters and furnaces so 200A is overkill for most people in my state.
A 7kW 240V single-phase load draws (7000/240) 29.1A
IIRC most of Europe gets 230V or 400V three-phase power for houses, so here’s both calculations.
A 7kW 230V three-phase load draws (7000/(230*1.732) 17.57A
A 7kW 400V three-phase load draws (7000/(400*1.732) 10.1A
The reasoning behind a 50kW for a house in the US is (probably a 48kW) generator is you can fully back up your 200A service (240V times 200A = 48kW) and not split out the generator loads into a subpanel.
Older houses in the US might have a 100A service, I’ve even seen 60A house services.
P.S. 1.732 is sqrt(3)
The North American residential electrical code limits how many circuits you can put onto a generator based on the circuit capacity, not the expected use. You aren't allowed to pinky swear that you won't run your electric oven and dry laundry at the same time. It doesn't matter that your generator will just trip its breaker or die.
So if you want to have most of your house on a permanently wired standby generator you need to wildly oversize that generator such that it can entirely replace utility power.
Put gas in your car. Impacts are likely to be regional, one town might loose power and another not. Be ready to move if needed.
Read One Second After by William R. Forstchen. It's probably the most accurate description of what may happen.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4922079-one-second-after
It's more about tripping out the grid, or sensitive inadequately-protected grid-connected electronics. Even then, the short will likely happen in the input stage of the power conversion, where repairs with salvage parts are not infeasible.
In fact I doubt gold/silver becomes money because it’s generally too rare and inconvenient (hard to cut the gold bar without tools even if you have one). Realistically people will just keep using cash.