Sobering reflections on our lack of preparedness for a true emergency

 

A few articles caught my eye in recent days.  They illustrate eloquently how unprepared Americans as a whole are for a true disaster-level emergency.

First, Brandon Smith looks at mass starvation.

Because we have lived in relative security and economic affluence for so long the idea of ever having to go without food seems “laughable” to many people. When the notion of economic collapse is brought up they jeer and call it “conspiracy theory.”

Compared to the Great Depression, the US population today is completely removed from agriculture and has no idea what living off the land means. These are not things that can be learned in a few months from books and YouTube videos; they require years of experience to master.

. . .

The greater problem in terms of famine is not that individual Americans are not aware of the threat; many of them are. The problem is that our infrastructure and logistical systems are designed to fail and there’s not much the average citizen can do about it.

. . .

Growing food, hunting food and foraging food are all supplemental measures, especially in the first years of any crisis event. Without a primary emergency supply most people will not make it. Food storage has been a mainstay of civilization for thousands of years for a reason – It works. When larger secure communities are established then agriculture can return and self sustaining production makes food storage less important. Until then, what you have in your basement or your garage is the only thing that’s going to keep you alive.

There's more at the link.

Next, Michael Totten analyzes the very real risk of a catastrophic earthquake in the Pacific Northwest - one that may be many times worse than anything any of us have ever experienced.

Roughly 100 miles off the West Coast, running from Mendocino, California, to Canada’s Vancouver Island, lurks the Cascadia Subduction Zone, where the Juan de Fuca Plate is sliding beneath the North American Plate, creating the conditions for a megathrust quake 30 times stronger than the worst-case scenario along the notorious San Andreas, and 1,000 times stronger than the earthquake that killed 100,000 Haitians in 2010.

. . .

Scientists scrambled for core samples of the ocean floor just off the American coast and found turbidites—layers of tsunami debris—that date back millennia and, most recently, again, to 1700, revealing a cycle that repeats itself every 300 to 600 years. The Cascadia Subduction Zone is not quiet, after all: it triggers catastrophic megathrust quakes, on schedule. “A fault that ruptures with this big of an earthquake every few hundred years is ragingly active,” says Yumei Wang, a geotechnical engineer at the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries (DOGAMI).

A 9.0 megathrust quake is too powerful even to be measured on the now-dated Richter scale.

. . .

“No community on the planet is adequately prepared for a major subduction zone earthquake,” observes Dan Douthit, spokesman for the Portland Bureau of Emergency Management (PBEM). The Northwest, however, and especially Oregon, is nerve-rackingly further behind than it should be. Nothing built here before 1995—which includes the vast majority of all structures, including skyscrapers, bridges, and hospitals, as well as houses—was engineered to withstand it.

Again, more at the link.

However, the really scary part comes when one puts the warnings from the two articles above into joint perspective:  in other words, how they interact with and affect each other.  A massive natural disaster like a Pacific Northwest earthquake might - probably will - cut almost all transport links from the West Coast to states further inland, and vice versa.  Emergency relief won't be able to reach disaster zones, and refugees won't be able to move away from them.  We won't be able to get at the vast agricultural and processing resources of our Western states, which together supply more than half of our fruit and vegetables;  and we won't be able to help those that produce them, meaning they'll probably be unable to produce more for a significant length of time - years rather than months.

What's more, the sudden need to reallocate transport resources - trains, 18-wheelers, etc. - to disaster relief, plus the loss of transport resources in the disaster zone, will result in a sudden and unavoidable collapse of distribution networks throughout the rest of the country.  We may have plenty of food for everyone:  but if it can't be moved from field to processing facilities to distributors to consumers, how are we going to get our hands on it?

Too many of us are prone to say, "Well, that's just fear-mongering.  There's no guarantee anything like that will happen."  Unfortunately, there is such a guarantee.  Read the article about the Pacific Northwest earthquake potential, and look at what scientists and professionals are saying about its inevitability.  It's scary.

Remember "nine meals from anarchy"?  That well-known saying appears to have been first used by Alfred Henry Lewis in 1896.  In 1932 a New Jersey newspaper noted:

How nicely civilization has become balanced is shown by the easily perceived fact that we are never more than nine meals away from anarchy. Throw an impenetrable wall around this metropolitan zone of ten million persons, prevent the people from receiving a supply of food and water for three days, and our vaunted civilization goes on the scrap heap.

In a more recent article titled with that well-known saying, Jeff Thomas pointed out:

Importantly, it’s the very unpredictability of food delivery that increases fear, creating panic and violence. And, again, none of the above is speculation; it’s a historical pattern – a reaction based upon human nature ... At that point, it would be very likely that the central government would step in and issue controls to the food industry that served political needs rather than business needs, greatly exacerbating the problem.

I said a month ago:

There's also the question of the duration of an emergency.  If it's [a major nation-wide catastrophe], then the effects will be felt for not just years, but decades.  There's no way we can stockpile enough supplies to cater for something like that.  Those who can farm, growing their own food, will have an edge:  but everyone else who survives will be doing their best to raid farms for food, so keeping it is likely to be a very serious problem.  Certainly, if we are not already growing at least some of our own food, we're very unlikely to be able to grow enough from scratch to survive.  We lack the knowledge, tools, seeds, and experience to do so.  Tempting advertisements to buy a certain brand of seed, or a particular tool, or land on which to establish an "emergency farm", are likely to benefit only those selling them.  Realistically, most of us can afford to plan, and stockpile supplies, for an emergency lasting from a few weeks to a year.  Anything beyond that . . . well, it's unlikely we'll live through it.  That's just the way it is.

Nothing in the articles linked above leads me to think differently.  Perhaps all of us should re-evaluate our own emergency preparations with that in mind.

Peter