We had a multi-day power outage after a windstorm. It got me thinking. We had cold tap water, we had gas for the stove, we had working cars, the internet was available, and I had some small battery backup devices.
Candles are OK.
A refrigerator keeps cool for almost 18 hours as long as you don't open it.
Keeping cell phones charged from the cars was easy enough.
One car has a wimpy 150 watt inverter but that was able to keep my laptop charged.
Stoplights don't work, and traffic really really backs up.
Bucket baths work with water warmed by the sun.
We could spray down the roof to keep the house a bit cooler.
It gets really hot and uncomfortable at night nonetheless.
Getting the battery backups recharged was a real chore. It became a twice a day ritual to lug those thing to a friend's house to get them charged up. I wanted to keep my fish alive and that required some air pumps. But the battery backups beeped obnoxiously and I never did figure out how to turn off the beep on one of them. No fish died. But man was that tedious. In a real catastrophe the fish are going to be toast. Instead I would fire up the cable modem and router on occasion for information, presuming internet was still available.
Food wasn't a huge issue for us. We packed out the fridge to our daughter's house. We threw some marginal stuff out but saved most of it. We did OK. But the local grocery store had stuff they had to throw out while they waited for an emergency generator to arrive. In a worse sort of crisis I imagine the shelves could empty, the emergency generator could be hijacked, and we would only have the food to eat that was already on hand.
I had a job that day installing some computer networking equipment. The building I was at had power. But one of their other buildings didn't, and they lost a day of production waiting on their emergency generator to arrive from 400 miles away. In a worse crisis would I have even been able to work?
WW3 seems like it could happen soon enough, and that it wouldn't be all 'over there'. And we are polarized to the point that civil war is becoming thinkable too. Energy security becomes a thing in both scenarios. Food security ditto. Water and sewage and trash removal? I know I can live without electricity for a while, for a few days anyhow. I did it for two years when I was younger. The big bag of rice, the big bag of beans, and the multiple jars of peanut butter go a long way. One good dish from West Africa is Domoda, which is basically rice and peanut sauce with tomatoes. Chickens work, but you have to feed them too. They forage but they need some high protein food too, at least to produce eggs in any quantity.
So do you have a stable drinking water situation? I filtered and boiled water for two years. That requires fuel for the boilage. I have a creek near me now, but the prospects of working to clean that up to be drinkable do not excite me. It would need hours of settling, running through a ceramic filter, activated carbon cleanup, and then boiling. Not relishing that at all.
