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Our cities are designed to function with public services.
Many cities/suburbs/urban areas are built locations that do not have readily accessible water. Without electricity that is needed to power our water treatment and distribution system no one in the city gets water.
Urban areas now are dependent upon long supply chains of food production and distribution. Of that supply line collapses people starve.
Most Urban homes, apartments would be lucky to have a wood fireplace at most. The majority don't even have that. Many Sun belt locations were way less populated in even 1900-1950 because without cheap and reliable air conditioning they were inhospitable. Take that away now and people run a serious risk of heat stroke or hypothermia.
Just basic food, water, shelter would be an absolute struggle in modern urban areas. Our Urban areas are not designed to be habitable without ekectricty. It would be an epic ****storm.
exactly! just how many urban dwellers even know that we have a "Just in time" food delivery system, usually 3 days worth of normal food sales, in an emergency that will be gone in a matter of hours.
once the mains water goes down you need some way of filtering the water you find, all sources will be full of germs and unsafe to drink unless treated first.
then there is the question of toilet waste!!!
exactly! just how many urban dwellers even know that we have a "Just in time" food delivery system, usually 3 days worth of normal food sales, in an emergency that will be gone in a matter of hours.
once the mains water goes down you need some way of filtering the water you find, all sources will be full of germs and unsafe to drink unless treated first.
then there is the question of toilet waste!!!
97.689% of the western "advanced and civilized" society absolutely cannot comprehend this. It literally is an impossible concept to them.
They need to somehoe be exposed to these ideas in a way that gets their attention, is believed and they take seriously.
It's almost impossible.
Most people don't want to hear it either. They WANT to be oblivious and care free.
Simply not true. Any supermarket carries a couple of weeks of inventory not 3 days. Once worked in a super market that could go bare shelf on Friday But even that super market turned inventory in a week.
In the real world the question is how much real damage occurs. You can of course imagine fantastic scenarios where not only is the grid destroyed but ever semiconductor. Then again why waste your time? Just send the Sun up and no more life on the planet.
In the real world even after a big Carrington effect survival level recovery in a couple of weeks and full recovery in less than a year.
You folk are systematically overstating the difficulty. We would need a lot of jury rigging and strange arrangements but it is not all that difficult. And as the days of distributed power generation advance it will become easier and easier. In the great NE blackout some years back the system ran square into the boot strap problem. Took less than 12 hours to solve it. The Eastman Kodak power plant was set up to protect Kodak not the grid. So it cut itself loose when the grid started acting up. It then bootstrapped a local hydro plant and we were off and running. similar things will happen in a real disaster.
A plant somewhere or the other will be down close to being ready to go back on line. it will experience little damage.You bring it back up and you have power to some small part of the grid. You use that to get other places up..
It may be a while but the jury rig will get things to survival levels pretty quick.
I don't know where you live but where I am(I don't live in America) the supermarkets DO carry only 3 days worth of normal sales, any such stocks will be gone in an emergency in as many hours, we have actual experience of this, Bread and Milk goes first, then the perishable stuff, then cans go last, once the shelves are empty they wont be replaced, same with the filling stations.
as for electric we don't have an alternative supply, once the power goes off there is no way of rerouting it, once its down everything electrical shuts down.
I don't know where you live but where I am(I don't live in America) the supermarkets DO carry only 3 days worth of normal sales, any such stocks will be gone in an emergency in as many hours, we have actual experience of this, Bread and Milk goes first, then the perishable stuff, then cans go last, once the shelves are empty they wont be replaced, same with the filling stations.
as for electric we don't have an alternative supply, once the power goes off there is no way of rerouting it, once its down everything electrical shuts down.
All the weather man has to do is predict a few inches of snow or a hurricane and everybody grabs everything off the store shelves.
Simply not true. Any supermarket carries a couple of weeks of inventory not 3 days. Once worked in a super market that could go bare shelf on Friday But even that super market turned inventory in a week.
In the real world the question is how much real damage occurs. You can of course imagine fantastic scenarios where not only is the grid destroyed but ever semiconductor. Then again why waste your time? Just send the Sun up and no more life on the planet.
In the real world even after a big Carrington effect survival level recovery in a couple of weeks and full recovery in less than a year.
You folk are systematically overstating the difficulty. We would need a lot of jury rigging and strange arrangements but it is not all that difficult. And as the days of distributed power generation advance it will become easier and easier. In the great NE blackout some years back the system ran square into the boot strap problem. Took less than 12 hours to solve it. The Eastman Kodak power plant was set up to protect Kodak not the grid. So it cut itself loose when the grid started acting up. It then bootstrapped a local hydro plant and we were off and running. similar things will happen in a real disaster.
A plant somewhere or the other will be down close to being ready to go back on line. it will experience little damage.You bring it back up and you have power to some small part of the grid. You use that to get other places up..
It may be a while but the jury rig will get things to survival levels pretty quick.
I also worked at a supermarket when I was younger. They really only had a few days of stock on hand to support heavy shopping. They got multiple truck deliveries every day to keep up stock replenishment. I know this to be true because anytime we are forecasted to get a snowstorm the milk and bread section is literally picked clean. It typically doesn't get restocked for a day either. Anyone who lives in a northern climate has seen this first hand.
And to be honest were arguing over semantics. If a store has a day, 3 days, 1 week, 3 weeks worth of food doesn't matter. Its not an infinite supply and 3 weeks worth of go of won't last long in looting and will only slightly delay the inevietable. The real issue to look at is the supply chain. People have no clue how our supply chain works. Its extremely conplex, efficient but also fragile. Its never really been stressed.
I'm going to be somewhat deliberately vague here On this open forum, but in my job I have absolute first hand knowledge how fragile our supply chain is and how it's dependent upon electrical power, and the internet. I can say with 100% certainty without power and the internet my company CANNOT produce and ship materials. The materials my company produces and distribute are life and death. Without them people will die and industry will be damaged and shut down. I'm sure many many companies have similar problems and issues they would deal with. Generally speaking there is no contingency plan for extended grid down.
Once the supply chain breaks all bets are off and it will cause cascading unpredictable systemic failures in ways very few imagine.
everything these days is dependent on electrical power, have a think about all those things that use electricity in your own lives and think what would happen if the power was no longer available.
computers, mobile phone recharging, filling station pumps, elevators, traffic lights, automatic doors, to say nothing of fridges, freezers, electric heating, gas heating too as most have electrical controls.the list is endless, modern life would come crashing to a halt if the power grid shut down.
I don't know where you live but where I am(I don't live in America) the supermarkets DO carry only 3 days worth of normal sales, any such stocks will be gone in an emergency in as many hours, we have actual experience of this, Bread and Milk goes first, then the perishable stuff, then cans go last, once the shelves are empty they wont be replaced, same with the filling stations.
as for electric we don't have an alternative supply, once the power goes off there is no way of rerouting it, once its down everything electrical shuts down.
Kroger turns its inventory 18.9 times or every 2.76 weeks. Spoil-able goods will of course turn faster.
In most situations in urban environments there are lots of ways to reroute electric.
And certainly the issue will be to get the electric working quickly to the level needed for the population to survive. The doom sayers however always act as this is an impossibility. I would think the likelihood is that we all get killed is much higher than the likelihood of totally losing electric. Virtually any real scenario will end up somewhere in the middle and we will jury rig our way out.
Kroger turns its inventory 18.9 times or every 2.76 weeks. Spoil-able goods will of course turn faster.
In most situations in urban environments there are lots of ways to reroute electric.
in my country(not America) there is only one power line, if that goes down there is no way to reroute it, it has to be fixed before power can go through it again.
I don't know who or what Kroger is, here we have a "just in time" delivery system, in normal times that is sufficient but in an emergency where the supply line is disrupted the shelves will be empty in a matter of hours and the stock will not be replaced, we had a fuel "protest" here a few years ago and the refineries were blocked, no fuel=no deliveries, it only lasted a week but the store shelves were empty for the duration.
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