Disaster planning for regular folks (2015)

Well, don't leave us hanging. What did they say?

Cool new toys! I like it. I've recently been thinking of branching into more water sports such as rowing, ocean swimming and the like to have a better shot at surviving out at sea. Hopefully I've gotten some mountains covered by now.

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I like this idea. I would like to extend it by providing bits of advice on how to handle the passing and how loved ones can move on with confidence.

I'm in California, and I'm lucky that I've been able to renew my home insurance. My brother wasn't able to, because every insurer had pulled out of the area, and he had to buy insurance directly from the state for several times more than what private providers charge, and those rates are likely to go up because the state program that runs it is bankrupt.

If anything happens to the my house, it can take a year or more to get permission to rebuild it, and if fire or earthquake or flood takes out the neighborhood, the permitting backlog can take multiple years. My neighbor tried to build a house on a slope, and it took ten years to get the county to acknowledge that the engineering plans were sound, but by that point my neighbor was too old to build the house.

It's really common to have power outages here at least annually, if not more often, and that's been a problem for decades, but there's significant resistance to building new power plants, including solar and wind, which wouldn't fix the instability anyway, and a tenth of our power comes from the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, which is past its design life and we'd be lucky to get another five years out of it.

The oil refineries keep shutting down, we don't have any pipelines to bring in oil, and gas stations are required to sell a California-specific formula anyway.

Restaurants are closing everywhere, discount stores are closing, the 99¢ Only chain went bankrupt, eliminating one of the few affordable sources of fresh fruits and vegetables.

We've been so obsessed with NIMBYism for so long that we're losing our infrastructure and quickly approaching a collapse. A high paying job is necessary to barely scrape by, a generator is a must, gasoline shortages may soon become a problem, and electricity outages may grow from seasonal to regular.

I have contingency plans for all of these issues, but long term I'll probably just move to Nevada, Idaho, or Utah.

One of those things that I have trouble mentally placing in the correct time period is the standardization of the cartridges that we still use today. When they were developed, tractors were still using metal tires and blood type testing for transfusions didn't exist yet. Living on the West coast usually meant that you had to be self sufficient. Some of my ancestors at the time lived in Idaho in a hole they dug in the ground, that they put a roof over. They had another similar dugout that they filled with ice blocks during the winter, to sell in the summer for some income. Most of them were sustenance farmers. One of my great grandparents had multiple acres in Van Nuys to grow enough food and raise enough rabbits to live off of. That land would be worth millions now, but back then it was what you needed to get by. Being rich would mean you had nicer clothes and a bigger house and servants and didn't have to grow your own food, but even the rich rarely had electric power, and when they did it was only routed to lamp sockets.

Do many people think that with their single assault rifle or other weap9n, that they would successfully defend against one or more truckloads of vandals looking to steal whatever they have stored up "self-sufficiently"? History seems to indicate that in the absence of law, those with the most people inside a fortified structure and position are the most likely to survive.

That's probably the best strategy, but no one wants to admit it. Everyone seems to think that Lord of the Flies depicts human nature, when in reality teen boys on a deserted island are more likely to form a band than kill each other (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongan_castaways#Cast_away) and adults are even better behaved.

yeah my folks live on an island off the coast and there are real concerns over things like tsunamis, flooding, or even just strong winds that knock out power for a while.

they live in a cul du sac and there are a bunch of community watch meetings where the folks get together and basically said "if shit goes down we need to be able to live together, so that means we need to 1) have trust, and 2) have the gear"

Of particular note are the few people with big trucks and boats, and the general gist of the planning was "live long enough on the island to be stable, and then use those boats to get off"

I met someone who had stored food rations in case of emergency. The mundane disaster where it came in ended ended up being unemployment, letting him put his entire budget toward housing.

For finance, I find interesting the other way around. You see many fire types preparing TOO MUCH. Obviously you should not live paycheck to paycheck. But if you prepare for a 3% return fire, wasting years, your chance of dying early is the much bigger worry than running out of money.

That's one of the issues with these if you ask me.

Either you're a hermit, that really can build that hermit cave in the mountains, far off and all the guns they're stockpiling won't really be used.

Or you're way too close to civilization coz you have an actual family and they'd never do / care about any of that "crazy stuff".

And if you're that close to civilization, it's all about who's got the larger stockpile and larger amount of armed thugs. Are you really gonna fight off 30 guys with AR-15s with a family of four, two of which are children to protect your stash of food and gas and generator(s)?

The only way your "prepping alone" is gonna help you is the hermit case, far far out of sight or if it's "not all that bad anyway".

i've not read the book, but i've thought about this on and off for a while.

the common trope of a mad max style wasteland where there are roaming barbarians and everyone is in a state of disorganized chaos is imo overstated. a hobbesian fantasy/wet dream.

humans tend to be self organizing and (mostly) altruistic in the face of disaster. we have plenty examples of this: fukishima, the boston bombing, ongoing ukrainian conflict, syrian conflict.

that's not to say that scoundrels do not exist. times of chaos create space for predators to take advantage of people. it happens more frequently at greater scale. there will be plenty of untethered folks with some form of military training.

similarly, the idea that you could simply ride out a long term disaster in a prepper cave is (again coached in an imho) mostly a fantasy. most people simply need community to survive.

fear of warlord run gangs shouldn't dissuade you from having a small stockpile of goods to survive. if they exist, and you meet they'll probably chop your head off regardless.

the most sensible thing to do is prepare within reason and build a community of people around you that can rely on you and vice verse.

Roving hordes of warlord-run gangs aren't likely to last all that long. Unless they're extremely successful, they're going to be constantly infighting for resources, and success is a very high bar, because if they don't win every conflict, their population will rapidly decline from attrition.

It won't take long for it to become overtly apparent to the members of roving hordes of warlord-run gangs that befriending an off-grid self-sufficient abode is a much, much lower risk option than raiding it.

I feel like a mobile abode is the way to go. You'll eventually be found and there's no way to outlast a group forever. They'll find a way to cut your air or water. Get a land cruiser with a good tent and go fuck off in the middle of nowhere.

Reading the advice on psychological-resilience section, it also makes a good guide what to do during a mental health episode. i haven't thought of that.

how big is the wikipedia?

  119265903349 Aug 24 09:47 wikipedia_en_all_maxi_2025-08.zim

Going out searching for more food after 2 weeks just ensures you're placing yourself amongst people that haven't eaten in 2 weeks and are willing to do anything they need to in order to eat.

Stable societies fundamentally require increasingly large energy inputs. What we're seeing happening right now, in a large part, is due to a system whose complexity has exceed the available energy required to sustain it.

The idea that what we're seeing is because "too many people voted for the wrong guy" fails to recognize the larger condition for which all of this is merely emergent phenomena. We no longer have the resources to sustain the society we life in so it begins to uncomfortably revert to lower energy states in ways we haven't seen in a long time.

But be prepared for the society you live in to vote for an obviously, significantly destabilising leader...

Further more, know your neighbors, join mutual aid groups, build social connections before bad things happen. The idea of a single prepper surviving the apocalypse is a farce, humans work in communities.

Some societies can be stable for a while, but all of them eventually become unstable, collapse, and make room for new ones.

Care to name any examples?

That's like saying "Everyone be friendly and helpful to one another"

Easier said than done