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Disaster planning for regular folks (2015)

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Re: Disaster planning for regular folks (2015)

#131

Post by grp000 »

User23 wrote: post #102
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's how the Japanese do it. If you have noticed, they do a really good job of responding to disasters. In fact, one of the funniest aspects, is that the Yakuza (Japanese mobsters) often are the first ones on the scene, and seem to take pleasure at beating the government response. I suspect that part of the reason is that organized crime tends to have an incredibly robust infrastructure, hardened against unpredicta…

I heard once that the Yakuza are actually in the phone book in Japan. Can anyone confirm?

I heard that Yakuza have business fronts that are open secrets. If that's the case, then they probably are.

Re: Disaster planning for regular folks (2015)

#133

Post by strken »

notakio wrote: post #122
hef19898 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This focus on combat for survival thing is so American. In Civil War combatants are quickly trained by warlords, and quite expendable. No amout of training will allow a single person to survive alone. In case of warfare, there are armies. For all other circumstances, combat skills are negligable. Repair, food "gathering" and medical skills are so much more important. Followed by organising people and stuff.

"Combat skills" include medical skills, communications skills, planning, coordination, and effective teamwork skills. None of the training I've ever been involved with has been focused on turning a single person into Rambo, but more along the lines of turning 4 or 12 people into an effective team, able to accomplish specific tasks under decent amounts of stress.

These are also the skills you'd learn in e.g. a volunteer firefighting brigade or search and rescue team, you'd just be applying them to the task of putting out fires and finding lost tourists rather than killing a building full of people.

Re: Disaster planning for regular folks (2015)

#134

Post by rvense »

snowwrestler wrote: post #5

The book Eternity by Greg Bear had an interesting take on this. In that book (spoiler) there is an exchange of nuclear weapons between the U.S. and Russia, which devastates the surface of the Earth. But many people survive, and a society quickly develops post-war. But it is dominated not by those who were most individually prepared, but by those who contributed the most to their neighbors and communities. There is so…

Here in Denmark, it's impossible to get more than maybe ten kilometers from a settlement of 500+ people.

I am, by local standards, comparatively out in the sticks, but I'm still no more than a few hours walk from a city of a 100,000. Even if something happened that wiped out 90% of them, that's still a lot of people who are likely to walk by here and want my food.

Prepping for just myself would be a solipsistic fantasy.

Re: Disaster planning for regular folks (2015)

#135

Post by anamax »

snowwrestler wrote: post #5

The book Eternity by Greg Bear had an interesting take on this. In that book (spoiler) there is an exchange of nuclear weapons between the U.S. and Russia, which devastates the surface of the Earth. But many people survive, and a society quickly develops post-war. But it is dominated not by those who were most individually prepared, but by those who contributed the most to their neighbors and communities. There is so…

Eternity is fiction. It isn't evidence, it's a story.

Compare Lord of the Flies with https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-... .

There will be a range of outcomes.

That said, my plan is to become Mormon.

Re: Disaster planning for regular folks (2015)

#136

Post by peckrob »

germinalphrase wrote: post #87
peckrob wrote: post #21

The thing is, you don't have to be a Doomsday Prepper to just be prepared. It's about mitigating the risk of the disasters you are likely to face in your locality. I lived through the 2011 Super Outbreak [0]. Following the tornadoes, we had no actual damage (and most places didn't, tornadoes are pretty localized disasters, even in big outbreaks), but we had no power for about eight days because the tornadoes tore up…

re: communications - in the events that cellphone and internet infrastructure fails, what are the viable alternatives? Are landlines intrinsically more robust (or they share the internet fiber)? Shortwave seems obvious, but there’s an obvious education/investment/network barrier (no one I would want to communicate with is a HAM).

In my case it is predicated on a disaster being localized. Basically it assumes that I will have 48 hours to get a message out.

Where I live is six hours from the coast so hurricanes and tsunamis are not a threat. An earthquake on the New Madrid fault [0] is a possibility although a fairly remote one in any given year. The disaster I optimize for is tornado outbreaks, because it's the most likely to happen. Those occur fairly regularly every few years and are contained enough that I could get a message out probably within 48 hours just by going down the highway an hour or so to get cell coverage.

But to more directly answer your question, pretty much everything depends on power. When the power goes out you have a limited amount of time before backup generators run out of fuel. Even landline telecom systems need power at the switching end. A widespread outage that lasts more than a couple days basically means nothing works and you're reduced to using (like you mentioned) amateur radio or other point-to-point methods that don't rely on ground-based power.

During the Super Outbreak, the cell network stayed "up" for a couple days before going offline completely. But it was impossible to get a message out, most likely because of either demand or damage to the interconnects.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Madrid_Seismic_Zone

Re: Disaster planning for regular folks (2015)

#137

Post by throw0101a »

ghaff wrote: post #43
Tepix wrote: post #15

For me, planning for a five day power outage in the winter seems like it's something that takes only a limited amount of effort and resources and could come in very handy indeed. Make sure you have enough water (and a way to make it potable), heat, food, light, 1st aid and communications. Going all in and getting a year of supplies seems excessive. As always, YMMV :-) PS: In Germany, the BMI (interior ministry) publi…

For heat in northern climates, unfortunately there's only so much you can do (outside of a backup generator with a big propane tank). A wood stove/fireplace can keep you comfortable but you'll still probably end up with frozen/broken pipes. But I agree with your basic point. Early on in the pandemic there were people stocking up on 6 months of rice/pasta/etc. In cities. You basically plan for relatively short outages…

> A wood stove/fireplace can keep you comfortable but you'll still probably end up with frozen/broken pipes.

Primarily a problem with old school copper pipes. Plastic / PEX pipes may be less of an issue:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOeBJ8mDr8Q

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9W466z5Cwk

Re: Disaster planning for regular folks (2015)

#138

Post by agumonkey »

btbuildem wrote: post #33
snowwrestler wrote: post #5

The book Eternity by Greg Bear had an interesting take on this. In that book (spoiler) there is an exchange of nuclear weapons between the U.S. and Russia, which devastates the surface of the Earth. But many people survive, and a society quickly develops post-war. But it is dominated not by those who were most individually prepared, but by those who contributed the most to their neighbors and communities. There is so…

I've always thought the way to prepare for / survive such hardships is to have a strong community, not some elaborate individualistic prepper bunker scenario.

You need some good ingredients in your community too. Otherwise it's a dead mass maybe ?

Re: Disaster planning for regular folks (2015)

#139

Post by notakio »

hef19898 wrote: post #127
notakio wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Combat skills" include medical skills, communications skills, planning, coordination, and effective teamwork skills. None of the training I've ever been involved with has been focused on turning a single person into Rambo, but more along the lines of turning 4 or 12 people into an effective team, able to accomplish specific tasks under decent amounts of stress.

Honest question, did you receive this training in a military or disaster relieve organisation? If so, good! You forgot one, very relevant, support skill (since we include a lot of enabling skills now it seems): logistics.

Yes, to both; the latter as the result of my experience with the former. But I would say that the vast majority of the training that I have received the most use out of was obtained outside of either, though often from trainers who are generally focused on servicing both of those fields, generally.

And yes, logistics skills are very important. I would say that most of my logistics knowledge comes from vocational exposure, and though I've looked for civilian logistics-type training (I'm old, I have a toddler, and I'm not going back into service at this point), I have not found much available. That may be a failure on my searching skills, though.

I have found a number of valuable references, written, over time, but that's not the same thing as experiential training, at least from the perspective of how I best consume information with an expectation to retain it.

Re: Disaster planning for regular folks (2015)

#140

Post by notakio »

hef19898 wrote: post #126
notakio wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Training is training, and it's all beneficial. And a good portion of my training has been in trauma care, medical response, and techniques. It resulted in my getting my EMT license, though I never used it. It all falls under "harder to kill".

So you have some basic medical yraining, but no experience. Skills deteriorate when not used in real life.

I train periodically for a small subset of medical response skills, but I'm not dedicating the kind of time to it that would be required to keep the license up to date.

And I would hardly assume "no experience"; though I've not done paid paramedic duties, I have been the first person or persons on the scene of multiple vehicular accidents and other trauma events, and able to positively contribute to keeping people alive and stable until FD or medics arrive. If I see something bad happen, I stop to help, because that was what I was trained to do, and because it is the right thing to do.

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