Tag: disaster

Apocalypse in Plain Sight: The Everyday Miracles One Bad Week Away From Failing

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Imagine explaining an ordinary Tuesday to someone from three hundred years ago. You turned a tap and drinkable water came out. You flipped a switch and the room lit up. You ate fruit grown on another continent, spoke to a friend a thousand miles away through a glass rectangle, and threw away more food than some of their villages saw in a week. To them, our normal would look like sorcery. It might also look terrifyingly fragile, because almost every one of these miracles depends on systems most of us never see. Here are the ones hiding in plain sight, and what happens when they stop.

The grocery store

Modern supermarkets run on just-in-time delivery: instead of storing large stockpiles, they are restocked constantly by trucks. It is efficient, and it means stores typically hold only a few days of food. Anyone who remembers the empty shelves of early 2020 or the bread-and-milk rush before a blizzard has seen how quickly that runs out when deliveries stop or everyone shops at once.

The tap

Clean water is the greatest public health achievement in history, and it arrives through pumps that need electricity and treatment plants that need chemicals and staff. During long power outages, many towns issue boil-water notices within days because pressure drops and contamination can get in. A few cases of bottled water and a filter are a cheap insurance policy.

The light switch

The power grid is a continent-sized machine that has to balance supply and demand every second. When it fails, it fails widely: the 2003 Northeast blackout left around 50 million people without power after a software bug and an overgrown tree branch combined at the wrong moment. Lose power and you lose refrigeration, heating controls, phone charging, gas pumps and, in many places, water pressure.

The pocket rectangle

Your phone feels independent, but it relies on cell towers with a few hours of backup power, data centers far away and a battery that lasts a day. It is also where most of us now keep our maps, phone numbers, photos, money and memories. Write down the numbers you need, and print the map.

The pharmacy

Many people depend on daily medications that are made overseas and shipped through long supply chains. Shortages of common drugs happen even in normal years. If you rely on a prescription, ask your doctor and pharmacist about keeping a small reserve.

The quiet hum

Our ancestors would also notice the noise: engines, fans, compressors and electronics running all the time. People who live through long blackouts often say the silence is the first thing they notice. It is a strange reminder of just how much machinery is running to keep ordinary life ordinary.

The point

None of this is a reason to panic. These systems are remarkable, and they mostly work. But knowing what you depend on is the first step to being ready when one of them stops, and a week’s worth of water, food, light, medication and cash covers most of the everyday ways the world briefly ends.

Which everyday miracle would you miss first? Tell us in the comments.

Breaking Bad Habits: Ten Small Changes That Make You Apocalypse-Proof

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Most disaster preparation is not about bunkers. It is about small habits, because a disaster freezes you exactly as you are on the day it starts: with whatever is in your tank, your wallet, your medicine cabinet and your head. Here are ten everyday habits that leave you exposed, and the small swaps that fix them.

1. Running the gas tank to empty. When a storm or crisis hits, gas stations get long lines, run dry or lose the power to pump. Swap: refill when the tank hits half. It costs nothing extra and means you can always leave.

2. Never carrying cash. Card readers and ATMs need power and networks. Swap: keep some small bills at home and in your go-bag, enough for a few days of food and gas.

3. Refilling prescriptions at the last minute. Pharmacies close in disasters, and the day you run out is the day you can’t get more. Swap: refill as soon as your insurance allows, and ask your doctor about a small emergency supply.

4. Letting the phone die. A dead phone in an emergency means no calls, no maps and no news. Swap: charge it every night and keep a charged power bank in your bag.

5. Remembering no phone numbers. Your contacts live in a device that can break, die or get lost. Swap: memorize two numbers, and keep a printed list in your wallet.

6. Leaving procrastination to fate. The smoke detector battery, the flashlight with no batteries, the first aid kit you meant to restock. Swap: pick one day a year, like the daylight saving time change, for a ten-minute check of everything.

7. Not knowing where the shutoffs are. A burst pipe or a gas leak is far worse if nobody knows how to shut it off. Swap: find your main water valve, gas shutoff and electrical panel this week, and show everyone in the house.

8. Wearing only impractical shoes. If you had to walk home from work today, could you? Swap: keep a pair of comfortable walking shoes at work and in the car.

9. Throwing away anything broken. A throwaway habit means no repair skills when replacements stop arriving. Swap: fix one thing a month yourself, whether it’s a sewn button, a patched tire or a glued chair leg.

10. Skipping the basics of fitness. You don’t need to be an athlete, but you should be able to walk a few miles with a pack and climb stairs while carrying something. Swap: walk more, and occasionally with a loaded backpack, so a long walk in an emergency is hard rather than impossible.

None of these takes more than a few minutes, and together they cover the most common ways a bad day turns into a dangerous one. Which habit are you breaking first? Tell us in the comments.

The Prepper’s Guide to Philanthropy: How Volunteering Prepares You for the Apocalypse

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The lone prepper in a bunker full of beans is a movie character. In real disasters, the people who come through best are usually the ones with skills, connections and neighbors who trust them, and one of the most direct ways to get all three is to volunteer. Here is how helping other people now prepares you for the end of the world, and where to start.

Volunteer programs that are actual disaster training

CERT (Community Emergency Response Teams). A program supported by FEMA that trains ordinary residents in disaster preparedness, fire safety, light search and rescue, first aid and team organization. Local fire departments often run the courses, and they’re usually free. This is about as close to official apocalypse training as it gets.

The American Red Cross. Disaster volunteers staff shelters, deliver supplies and help families after house fires and storms. You get training, experience in real emergencies, and a clear look at what people actually need when things go wrong.

Medical Reserve Corps. Local units of medical and non-medical volunteers who support public health emergencies. You don’t need to be a nurse to join, and you learn how health systems respond under strain.

Food banks and pantries. You’ll learn how food is stored, rotated and distributed at scale, and how fast demand rises when a community is hit hard.

Ham radio clubs. Many amateur radio clubs volunteer for emergency communications through programs such as ARES. They’ll help you get licensed and put you to work when the phones go down.

What you get out of it

  • Skills. First aid, logistics, communication, cooking for crowds, building and repair, all practiced in real situations.
  • Experience under pressure. Nothing teaches you to stay calm in a crisis like having been in a few.
  • A network. You’ll meet the nurse, the electrician, the farmer and the person who knows where everything is stored. Those are the people you want to know when the grid goes down.
  • Trust. In a disaster, communities organize around the people they already know and rely on. Being one of them is a survival advantage no stockpile can buy.

And the simplest one

Give blood. Blood supplies run short after mass casualty events, and donated blood has a limited shelf life, so supplies need constant replacing. It takes an hour, costs nothing, and the next disaster will need it.

Have you volunteered in a disaster or trained with CERT? Tell us in the comments what it taught you.

Apocalypse Party: The Real Joys People Find at the End of the World

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Plenty of people say that if the apocalypse came, they would just give up. It’s a common joke and a common sentiment, and the history of real disasters suggests it is wrong about how people actually behave. Survivors of earthquakes, blackouts and blizzards regularly describe something unexpected in the middle of the wreckage: purpose, closeness and, sometimes, joy. So in the spirit of a site devoted to the trivial details of the end of the world, here are the upsides.

Strangers become neighbors

Movies show disasters as a free-for-all. The research says otherwise. In her book A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit documents how, after earthquakes, fires and floods, ordinary people overwhelmingly organize to help each other: community kitchens appear, strangers share homes, and people describe feeling more connected than they ever did in normal life. Panic and looting happen, but far less than headlines suggest. The apocalypse party, it turns out, is mostly a potluck.

The stars come back

When the 1994 Northridge earthquake knocked out power across Los Angeles, observatories and emergency lines reportedly got calls from residents alarmed by a strange silvery cloud in the sky. It was the Milky Way, which most of them had never seen. Without city lights, the night sky turns spectacular. Learn a few constellations now so you can enjoy it then.

The quiet

No traffic, no leaf blowers, no notification chimes. People who live through extended blackouts often mention the silence first, and how strange and restful it is to hear birds and wind instead of engines.

Everything becomes a project

Without stores, every problem becomes a puzzle: how to fix the stove, build a better rain catcher, keep the cold out of a drafty room. It is hard work, but it is satisfying work, the kind where you can point at the result. Our list of DIY projects worth starting now is a head start.

Meals become events

When food takes effort, eating together becomes the center of the day. A pot of stew shared around a fire beats takeout eaten over a laptop. See our pantry recipes for the menu.

Fashion stops mattering, then matters again

Office dress codes are the first casualty of the end of the world. What replaces them is a strange new style built from whatever is warm, tough and available, and people inevitably start customizing it. Patches, paint and the odd bit of salvaged jewelry are how people say who they are when everything else is gone.

Bodies get used

Walking, carrying, digging, chopping and climbing make for a fitness routine nobody has to schedule. It is not glamorous, and you will be sore, but many people are surprised by how good it feels to be tired from real work.

A note of honesty

None of this makes disaster good. People lose homes, health and loved ones, and pretending otherwise would be cruel. But the idea that there is nothing left worth living for after the world changes is simply not what survivors report. Purpose, community and small pleasures persist, and the people who find them tend to be the ones who keep going.

So when someone tells you they’d give up if the apocalypse came, invite them to the party anyway. What upside would you look forward to? Tell us in the comments.

Likely Apocalypses: World Wide Nuclear War

Posted on by Safety and Survival Council

Let’s expand on some of the likely apocalypses we touched on back in our list of likely apocalypses.

First up in the list of likely apocalypses: World Wide Nuclear War

Nuclear war may be inevitable, but we have been lucky so far. However, we shouldn’t kid ourselves that the end of the cold war has made the threat of the nuclear war an irrelevance. In a lot of ways, things are more dangerous than ever. There are two nuclear powers who refuse to play nicely with each other in Pakistan and India, then there is the newly armed and unpredictable North Korean regime, and a belligerent Russia keen to reassert its power to the world. According to analysts, there is a 5% chance that a nuclear war could happen every decade.

All it takes is for someone to press the detonation button. A single US stealth bomber can carry 16 B83 nuclear bombs. Each of those bombs can produce 75 times the yield of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and a single Trident submarine can destroy over 40 million people. Continue reading “Likely Apocalypses: World Wide Nuclear War”

Quick Survival Tip: Avoid Stress

Posted on by Safety and Survival Council
English: Effects of stress on the body.
English: Effects of stress on the body. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Stress can have extremely damaging effects on the body if not properly managed or avoided. Survival situations are hard enough without adding the chaos caused by stress.

According to the American Institute of Stress (AIS) some of the more dangerous symptoms include: Difficulty concentrating, racing thoughts, Difficulty in making decisions, Feeling overloaded or overwhelmed, Feelings of loneliness or worthlessness, Overreaction to petty annoyances, Excessive defensiveness or suspiciousness, Increased anger, frustration, hostility.

If you know what causes you stress, plan for or avoid it. Some people need to feel that they are supported, in control, have something to look forward to, or just that they know what to do next.

Continue reading “Quick Survival Tip: Avoid Stress”

Disaster struck and we were mostly ready…

Posted on by tavia.

The last weekend of October is normally about trying not to eat all your Halloween candy before strange, disguised children can com to your door and beg for it. this year, though, it was about flashlights, candles, two-player Uno and extra socks.

Yes, my husband and I were caught in the the Halloween Snowpocalypse of 2011 (Read: An icy October snowstorm in 2011 that, combined with the weight of leaves still being on the trees, resulted in a number of broken trees and downed power lines leaving about 2.5 million homes without power.). At 9:30 our home went dark and the lights in our souls dimed a bit.

I knew exactly where to find the flashlights and the candles, we had warm clothes and blankets galore, and food was a non-issue. Unfortunately, once we were set up I started to notice the flaws in my planning.

Continue reading “Disaster struck and we were mostly ready…”

In Case of Emergency: Use Social Media [Infographic by Etón Corporation]

Posted on by Safety and Survival Council

Below is an awesome infographic detailing how social media can be vital in the days around a disaster. The image was created by Etón Corportation, a company that makes safety radios.

Continue reading “In Case of Emergency: Use Social Media [Infographic by Etón Corporation]”