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How Would a Grid-Down Scenario Affect You Personally?
How long do you suppose the food in your pantry will last? Most Americans go to the grocery store every three days. Let’s assume you eventually eat the boxes of uncooked food raw (you will once you’re hungry enough). With rationing, most households might have enough food for one to two weeks. A tiny minority may have canned food to last them a bit longer or have looted their local grocery store before the masses arrived (within 48-72 hours) to clean it out. Only ma and pa stores may open their doors and then they will only take cash (for a few days, or until they realize the power isn’t coming back on). Unlike some popular post-apocalypse books on the subject, major supermarket chains will not be open for business. The managers have no vested interest in the stores, which are owned by some vast, faceless corporation in another state. Employees aren’t going to show up for work without lighting in the windowless stores and the cash registers not functioning. Once the food is looted, there is no resupply coming.
Most people don’t realize how the food supply in this country has radically changed over the last 100 years (especially in the last 10 years). A century ago, most people, even “city folk,” grew and preserved a good portion of their daily food. Today, very few people garden and the ones who do consume it as it grows. Very few Americans know how to can or preserve fruits and vegetables to last through a winter. With the introduction of electricity and food on demand at your supermarket, the skills needed to live without electricity have been completely lost to 99.9% of Americans. Even most of today’s older generations grew up with electricity. With the help of computers we now have a “just in time” delivery system. In other words, food is grown, canned, and resupplied to the grocery shelves as fast as it is taken off. There are no great towers of grain like in ancient Egyptian days. If you stop the growth, canning, and resupply, it won’t be long till ALL the food in this country is completely gone.
Most supermarkets don’t operate storerooms anymore or stock much in the back room like they did 20 years ago. Have you ever asked your local supermarket employee to check the back room for something they are out of? They look at you like you’re stupid and then pretend to go in the back only to return a minute later and tell you “it’s all out on the shelves.” Most supermarkets get two to three truck deliveries per week to keep their shelves stocked. In the modern world (with electricity and computers), when you buy a can of beans at your local store, the checkout computer tells the warehouse to put another can of beans on the next truck. The warehouse’s computer then tells the distribution center’s computer that they need another can of beans on the next truck. The distribution center’s computer tells the canning factory’s computer they need another can of beans to be sent on the next truck delivery. The canning facility computer then emails the farm in Mexico that it needs more raw beans on the next available truck. What are the two common denominators in all those steps? The computers can’t communicate with each other and the trucks can’t drive across the country because of traffic jams and the gas stations don’t have electricity to run their pumps. This is true with every item you buy at every store you visit. Interstate commerce completely shuts down and you will not be able to buy ANYTHING you need to survive once the store’s current supply runs out or gets looted.
You would have no money outside of what is in your wallet or safe. Our entire finance industry is run by electricity. Most people have no clue that the average bank branch has less than $10,000 on hand at a given time. I wanted to pay cash ($9,000) for an older EMP-proof Jeep a while back and my bank told me I would have to schedule that size withdrawal in advance and it would take the bank three days to get it. If you can’t get quick access to your money at the bank pre-SHTF, what makes you think you’re going to get your money out after things have fallen apart? My bet is that the banks aren’t even going to open their doors once the grid goes down. They know people are panicking and they don’t have the cash on hand to give to them (most of whom will want to drain their accounts). Besides, every bank I know of uses computers and electricity to perform bank transactions. There is no electricity, remember? You were a millionaire before the crash? Not anymore. Don’t bet on a single bank opening its doors for business. Also, don’t rely on storing up large amounts of gold and silver for a grid-down scenario. No one is going to trade you precious food for your gold or silver coins. It will be years before there is any semblance of normal commerce where you can use precious metals to barter for tools or food. I would recommend spending whatever cash on hand you have in the first few days getting as much food as possible. Within a week, once store owners (the very few with heavy security that haven’t been looted already) figure out that the power isn’t coming back on, your money is worthless. A hungry person isn’t going to trade you a can of beans for a thousand dollars.
There would be no communication with those who live farther away from you than earshot. In other words: no phones, no emails, no mail delivery, no Facebook, and no Twitter. Are you getting the picture? Think about all the family and loved ones that have moved away. Do you have a sibling in California? Do you have a son or daughter at college in Texas? You’ll probably never see them or speak to them again. If someone breaks into your house looking for food, how are you going to call for help (not that the police would be able respond anyway)?
There will be no emergency services. Police, firefighters, and the National Guard will all be in the same scenario as you are. There will be no way to contact them, their vehicles will quickly run out of fuel and the traffic jams will pen them in just like you. They are just everyday people like you and me. Once the looting begins, most will rush home to be with their families and protect them from the rioters and home invasions. Very few will show up to work on day three. Some of the more honorable, single men may stay at their post for a while and try to help out, but within days of the grid going down, don't expect to see any emergency services. You will likely see the same result with National Guardsmen who are typically activated via a phone roster. Most will not be reached and most will not report for duty or will go AWOL to protect their family once things go south. Again, in a crisis situation, they will put the safety of their family before orders from their superiors. Even active duty military will experience a huge amount of AWOL soldiers heading home to protect loved ones and family. However, a good portion of their families live on base and they will be available for duty. Even so, as I explained earlier, the military bases WILL NOT be able to perform disaster relief because the military is dependent on the civilian electric grid. While they may have a few thousand MRE’s on hand, their food situation is the same as yours. It’s eventually going to run out. Law and order may last a while longer on military bases with possible C130 shipments of food from international aid, but eventually the big bases will dissolve into rioting and looting just like the big cities.
There are no hospitals or medicine. Most hospitals are only required to have a one or two day supply of backup electricity. Once they run out, loved ones on life support will die. Hospitals will be flooded with emergencies and injuries related to people doing stupid things out of their normal routine. How many nurses and doctors will stay more than a few days without going home to check on their families and protect them from the looters? Without the ability to get resupplied, the hospitals will soon run out of bandages and the like. How long before the doctors and nurses throw up their hands in despair with their inability to help an ever increasing number of patients and head home?
You need a prescription to survive? Guess what, almost twenty percent of America’s population do as well. This includes everyone who suffers from asthma to diabetes. The drug stores will be closed because they have no way to verify prescriptions or check you out with non-functioning cash registers. How long before the tweekers and heroin addicts raid your local pharmacy because there are no security cameras and no way for the police to respond? How long will the vials of medicine you so desperately need last without refrigeration once the electric grid goes down? If your child requires medication and you haven’t stockpiled or are unwilling to risk looting your local pharmacy, then you will know exactly when that child will die....shortly after his or her current supply of medicine runs out.
Your house will not protect you like it has in the past. There will be no A/C or heat in your home. If you live in an area of the country that has cold winters or hot summers, life will become very uncomfortable and deadly in some cases. A lot of malnutritioned people, not thinking clearly, will resort to doing incredibly stupid things to get warm, like start a fire in their house or burn a charcoal grill indoors. In urban areas with row houses and large apartment buildings, you will likely see large out-of-control fires burning whole city blocks because one person does something dumb and there are no fire trucks (out of gas) to come and put the fires out. Besides there’s going to be no water pressure at the fire hydrants even if they could get there. You could actually see whole sections of large cities burn to the ground with no way to stop the flames. Do you know how to stay warm in your home once the thermostat drops below freezing? Many people will go to bed and not wake up the next morning. Also, a lot of people watch action movies and think they can hide behind a door or wall to be protected from someone who is shooting at them. This is not accurate. Most bullets will travel through multiple walls until they hit a stud or two. Your home is NOT bulletproof! Ducking down below your window in a firefight with your starving neighbors will not protect you from their bullets.
If you rely on city sewage, it will likely back up into your home over time. Raw sewage could start bubbling out of your sinks and tubs as people continue to use toilets and sinks even though the sewage facility isn’t operating. This will create dangerously high levels of methane in your home that could make you very sick. Because of poor sanitary conditions around the country and most people not cleaning their hands properly before cooking due to lack of water, Dysentery and Cholera will become major pandemics in this country with a lot of people getting sick and dying. Regular baths will become a thing of the past, and many people will start bathing in their local creek or water source, causing dangerous bacteria to float downstream where other families rely on the same water source for drinking.
Don’t rely on your vehicle getting you out of Dodge. In the event of a Super EMP, a large number of cars will come to a stop in the middle of the street. Even if they don’t, a lot of people will try to flee the cities on empty gas tanks causing massive traffic jams. It only takes a handful of cars to run out of gas on the roadways to completely block traffic. If you do not flee town within 24 hours of the grid going down, you are likely to find yourself penned in. If you have a vehicle that is running, it will only run if you can get fuel for it. Most gas stations don’t have back-up generators. The ones that do will be quickly overrun and emptied. There is no way to resupply them because the trucks rely on the gas stations to get the fuel to other gas stations. Even if they could be rigged to resupply from their own tanks, don’t forget that there are massive traffic jams all over the country. Even if they could work out the details, very few truckers are going to leave their families behind unprotected while they travel across the country with rioters and looters everywhere. Oil refineries take massive amounts of electricity to operate and will not be operational any time soon. What about the nation’s precious fuel reserves? If you don’t think the government is going to confiscate that for military and government use, I have oceanfront property in Arizona I’d like to sell you. There will be no refueling shortly after the grid goes down. If you were a forward thinker and have a large supply of fuel for your vehicle, I would only recommend using it the first few days. After a week, most cars will be out of gas and people will be desperate for a running vehicle to get them where they need to go. If you are driving one of the few cars on the roadways, YOU ARE A TARGET. I wouldn't start using the vehicle again for a full year (after most of the starving masses are dead).
You will not have lights once it grows dark outside. I understand that you may have a flashlight and some candles at your house, but honestly, how long will your batteries and candles last? I would use them very sparingly for a couple reasons. With no streetlights or ambient light in the cities, nighttime will become a very dark and dangerous place to find yourself outdoors, and light attracts attention. If you do have a large supply of batteries or candles, use them very carefully. Two weeks in, once people start getting hungry and desperate, lights coming from a house will be a huge beacon for looters and home invaders who will use the cover of darkness for their nefarious activities. Most people have never been to the mountains on a backpacking trip. On a cloudy dark night, you can see someone smoking a cigarette on the next mountain over. In a perfectly dark city, light escaping from around the edge of your blinds or curtains will be seen from a long way off. In a grid-down situation, you want to rise with the sun and go to bed once it gets dark, utilizing natural light and conserving flashlights and candles for emergencies.
These are just a FEW of the ways your life would be impacted by the electric grid going dark.
Next, let me paint a picture for you on how difficult it would be to just procure water.
For the last seventy-five years, you turn a faucet and a seemingly endless supply of crystal clear water comes pouring out to drink, cook, and bath with. It’s always been that way and that’s all contemporary Americans have ever known. Most Americans don’t even realize that half of the world’s population will never enjoy that luxury...but I digress. That endless water supply stops within hours of the grid going down, and I’d guess many of you’ve probably never pondered the logistics behind gathering and purifying your own water. Please don’t get lazy when it comes to purifying your water. If you do, you will eventually get sick or die from waterborne viruses, bacteria, or parasites. It’s only a matter of time.
Depending on your home’s location in relevance to your local water tower, your house could lose water pressure within minutes or hours. Due to the extreme amounts of electricity used to process and pump water into the water tower for the average town, most cities do not have backup generators for this. The ones that do will only last for a few hours to a day at most. If you live in the country and have a well, did you know that typically your well pump operates on 220 amp electricity? Your water stops instantly unless you are one of the lucky few who have a backup diesel generator or similar power source.
Now, how much fuel do you have stored? FEMA estimates that the average person with a backup generator has less than 5 gallons of fuel on hand at a given time. Even if you have more, you’re going to run out at some point. Also, gas and diesel generators are extremely noisy, letting every starving person within a mile know you have electricity. What if you live in the Southwest? To put it politely, you’re probably going to be dead soon. Deserts were never meant to be inhabited for obvious reasons and only electricity and our modern infrastructure allowed us to live there in comfort. The Nomads throughout the centuries who traveled the world’s deserts had life skills available to them that we both know you don’t possess.
For those of you who live in areas where you have nearby streams or other water sources, do you know how to purify your water? Let’s assume you do. You are going to soon run out of bleach drops and Iodine tablets or your purification cartridge will eventually get clogged. You are now a week or more into a grid-down situation and you are going to have to boil your water just like everyone else did for the last 3,000 years. How far away do you think starving and desperate people can see and smell your fire? Farther than you think. On the plus side, your shoulder muscles are going to be huge from carrying five gallon buckets of water from the nearest stream back to your home. Sounds like fun, right? You are eventually going to need to take a bath. How many five gallon buckets does it take to fill up a bath for each member of your family? Think about it.
Next, do you know how to start a fire in the rain to boil the water? You do... great! How much firewood do you need to have on hand to build a fire and boil water twice each day? If you have any firewood at all, it will probably be gone faster than you think. Do you have a large saw or ax to cut down a dead tree and how many dead trees do you think you have close by your home? How far will you eventually have to travel to find firewood? Can you physically cut the tree down and then bolt it up into six foot sections and then carry the logs long distances back to your house only to cut the long logs into sixteen inch lengths? You are still not done. Have you ever split wood before? Are you proficient enough to do it without sticking the ax in your shin when you miss the log you are aiming at because you are physically exhausted and weak from hunger? Hospitals will be overrun and most won’t be operating without electricity or supplies after day five or six. I hope that deep cut doesn’t get infected or you’ll lose the leg and you’ll probably die from infection. But again, I digress....
So far, we have only been discussing water. Let’s add in the fact that you were a bargain shopper and have a stockpile of canned goods from Costco in your basement. Maybe you were really prepared and had some long-term food storage for your family. What happens when you spend a lot of time being noisy and walking around your neighborhood procuring firewood to boil your water, and cook your food? What happens when your sick neighbors see you and show up for some heat by your fire and begging for water because they don’t have the tools, energy, or ability to purify it on their own? Okay, it’s only water, so you help them out and give them some because you are a nice human. Good for you; you have now guaranteed that they will be back the next day probably with a couple other loved ones or neighbors from down the street who saw the smoke plume from your fire. I’m also willing to bet those same people weren’t forward thinkers like yourself and they have long ago run out of food. They are literally eating pine cones from their driveway at this point (no joke).
With no chances of getting resupplied, are you going to give your hungry neighbor some of your child’s food? That was nice of you. I guarantee they are coming back for more water and food every single day until you run out of supplies or the energy to help them. If you refuse them from the get go, they will probably beg and cry for help. They will even use their sick baby or elderly mother to play on your heart strings. How heartless are you? If you still refuse, that neighbor (who you’ve had a beer with on multiple occasions and borrowed a mower from a time or two) with a hungry and thirsty family down the street will get mad and demand you help them. He may even try to fight you. So you scare or beat him off with a piece of log you were just splitting.
How long do you think it will be until your neighbor is sick and desperate enough to return with his Pappy’s shotgun to take your water and food by force because his kids are literally starving and dying before his eyes? In his weak mental state, he will resent you for not suffering like he is and would rather kill you than watch his family starve to death. Oh...so you have a battle rifle and you defend yourself, killing your neighbor and leaving his sick and starving wife and kids (your son’s best friend) without someone to protect them. It was justified. He pointed the gun at you first...I understand. Good luck sleeping for the next month with those images floating around in your head.
Now the rest of your neighbors are ticked off at your “selfishness” and gang up on you with multiple handguns and rifles. Okay, so you are John Rambo incarnate with an arsenal that would make a militia proud and you fight them all off without getting shot a single time. Good for you. More sleepless nights full of nightmares (ask any soldier). How many people do you think heard that gunfight? Take out a map and make a one-mile circle around your location point. What percentage of those starving people might think that someone with a gun has something that is valuable and worth protecting? How many of those starving people will eventually come for your stuff hoping to take you off guard at some point? Can you stay awake every waking hour to protect your family? You have to sleep sometime or you won’t have energy to chop more wood tomorrow.
What happens when the bad guys show up while you are out cutting wood? Is your wife just as John Rambo as you are with an AR-15? Did you ever buy her the Tacticool plate carrier with ballistic plates that you wear when you are out of the house? Could she fight off a dozen rednecks with deer rifles without getting shot in the melee? Let’s be honest, probably not. Instead of killing your wife, maybe they just watch you each morning till you head down to the creek for more water. Maybe they post up in your dead neighbor’s house waiting for you to step outside and weed your garden in the back yard. You are hungry, sore, and exhausted at this point. Are you alert enough to see that man with the deer rifle a hundred yards away hidden under some garbage bags? Probably not. What becomes of your beautiful wife and daughter then? What will their life resort to after their food is gone? What will they have to do to survive? Do you think I’m being vulgar or gross? If so, I’d say you are being naive. Outside of the GI Jane types, most women without protection in this type of society will use what they have to survive. Look at history and some of the horrific things done to women by the Russians and Germans during World War II. Those are events that people don’t usually discuss in history class or make movies about, but they still happened.
What I’m trying to show you here is how impossible it will be to survive in a suburban area after the grid goes down. Even if you are in a smaller suburb of thirty thousand upscale people, how many rounds of ammunition do you have? Ninety-five percent of the country will soon be starving, sick, and desperate. They will resent anybody who is not suffering with them. It’s just human nature. PLEASE do not listen to the survival experts who will try and help you “fortify” your home or apartment and show you how to successfully ride out the storm in town. If you follow their advice, I can almost guarantee you will be dead within a month. I would also be very leery of the same type of survival experts who recommend you band together with your neighbors and fortify your cul-de-sac. Here is why. Most likely, even with all their big talk, your neighbors haven’t taken the threat nearly as serious as you have. Most of them won’t have nearly the supplies and long term food that they brag about.
What about all the other neighbors who weren’t part of your planning group but live on your street? You’re going to need their help to protect the cul-de-sac and work together for food gathering missions, growing crops, security, wood gathering, etc. Guess what? You are feeding them now as well. If you have $100k in long-term food reserves, then this scenario may work out for you. But in all likelihood, your neighbors will help you eat your family’s food supply in a month and then you will starve to death through the first winter just like they do. Do you seriously think you are going to keep your food from them because it’s “yours” and you paid for it before the collapse? You may for a short while. Eventually, they will be starving and your family won’t be. THEY WILL NOTICE AND THEY WILL COME FOR YOUR FOOD EVENTUALLY. I don’t care how close you are to them or what kind of “agreements” your little band of survivors has in place. All that goes out the window when blue-collar Jerry watches one of his little girls die of starvation. Blue-collar, church elder, and your fun-loving neighbor, Jerry has just become a starving, desperate, irrational, natural born killer and you are going to take the brunt of his anger before he watches his other child die a slow and painful death. DO NOT under-estimate a starving and desperate person regardless of his personality before the collapse. Hungry people make absolutely crazy and un-characteristic choices. Trust me; I’ve seen it firsthand with highly-trained soldiers in the field who have gone only days without food. We are talking about civilians with no training and no food for weeks or months. Most will literally become half-crazed walking zombies with one mission...food.
A lot of the “experts” will say I am fear mongering or exaggerating how bad it will be. They say Americans will work together and will get through it. They do not understand human suffering and have no experience dealing with starving people. Starving Americans will act no different than starving people in the Congo or Mogadishu. In fact, they will likely act much worse. Americans (even the poor) have never seen true hunger or been actively starving regardless of how the media portray them. America’s “poor” eat better than 80% of the world’s population. They didn’t grow up without food like people in certain parts of Africa or China. Americans and their entitlement mentalities will be VICIOUSLY ANGRY when they get hungry. They will have no experience or idea how to deal with the mental hallucinations brought on by hunger pains and most will resort to anger and violence. Looting, raping, and pillaging will become the norm. It will be straight Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome and eventually like the movie The Postman. I don’t care if they fix the electric grid a year later. Most Americans will be dead and the only ones left will be the survivalists, the extremely lucky, the larger well-organized gangs of looters, and the strongest and most brutal of men who left their souls at the gate and did horrible things to survive. Who are they going to fix the grid for? Are we all going to forget what has transpired and go back to driving our Priuses to work at Starbucks? Are you going to get the warlords to give up their positions of power among their men and their harems of sexual slave girls? The day the electric grid goes down, America as a civilized nation ceases to exist.
You need to understand that life after the grid going dark will probably be ten times worse than I am describing. There will be 300+ million Americans facing the same horrific questions as you. Where do I go? What do I do? It is vital that you understand and accept that the following is true: A few weeks after a grid-down scenario, there will be hundreds of millions of starving people wandering around the country desperately fighting over every last scrap of food. A month or two after the grid going down, most Americans will be violently sick from food deprivation and other illnesses. THE AVERAGE DESPERATE AND STARVING AMERICAN WILL KILL YOU IF YOU HAVE FOOD AND THEY FIND YOU. I don’t care how protected you think your home is. You will eventually be overrun!
There are very specific things you can do to survive this scenario. If you have the financial resources, you MUST hire an Emergency Preparedness Consultant like myself to help develop your family’s plan of action following a total collapse scenario. There are a million details I can’t fit into the pages of this book and every family’s situation is different. Don’t spend a bunch of money on a rural cabin that has serious OPSEC issues before getting professional survival retreat advice. Also, don’t just buy two years of food supply and put it in your basement in town thinking you’re covered. You will only be feeding the looters who will eventually scramble over your dead body to take YOUR food and haul off your beautiful wife and daughter to God knows where.