Prepper's Long-Term Survival Guide: Food, Shelter, Security, Off-the-Grid Power and More Life-Saving Strategies for Self-Sufficient Living

CHAPTER 1

Long-Term Events: Learning from History to Prevent Future Déjà Vu

It has been 112 days since the lights went out and didn’t come back on. I know this because the last thing I do every night, after checking all the locks one more time, is cross off the day on the calendar. Four months ago, had anyone told me a major disaster was right around the corner, I’d have snorted at them for being doom and gloom.

I’ve been meaning to start this journal for months now. I kept putting it off because there is always so much to do, and by sundown I’m ready to just collapse into bed. But, while I make no promises to update this thing every day, I do want there to be some sort of record, some documentation, of what we’ve endured so far and will continue to experience as the days progress. Heh, who knows? Maybe decades from now, if the country ever gets back on its feet, they’ll talk about this journal in schools across the land.

Four months ago, I could take a hot shower three times a day if I wanted. Today, I bathe once a week at most, in tepid water that three others have already used.

Sixteen weeks ago, I had my choice of any number of restaurants for dinner. Today, we eat whatever we can find, grow, hunt, or trap.

One hundred and twelve days ago, I was living the American Dream. Today, I’m living a nightmare. Welcome to the end of the world.

When we talk about long-term events, we are referring to catastrophes that effectively bring society to a screeching halt, along with all the associated chaos and confusion one would expect. Tornadoes and hurricanes, while certainly disastrous in their own rights, don’t bring with them quite the level of societal collapse we’re looking at here.

Thankfully, these events don’t happen very often, but when they do, it takes a long time to return to some semblance of normalcy. To better illustrate the point, let’s start by taking a look at some historical examples.

Pandemics

Pandemics are epidemics that cross national or international boundaries and affect great numbers of people. In other words, a whole lot of people living in a wide area have all been infected with the same disease. This isn’t just a case of the sniffles running rampant through a school district.

For many people, the first thing that comes to mind when discussing pandemics is the Black Death, sometimes called the Black Plague. While it is impossible to cite an exact death toll, historians believe the Black Death claimed up to 200 million lives from roughly 1347 to 1350. In just three years, it decimated up to 60 percent of the entire population of Europe. This pandemic of the bubonic plague originated in or near China and spread over the Silk Road to Europe. Fleas, carried on the backs of rats that infested all the merchant ships, helped spread the disease everywhere they went.

Take a moment and let those numbers sink in a bit. About 200 million people perished as a result of the disease. To put that into perspective, in 2012 the estimated population of the United States was roughly 314 million people. Can you even imagine what life would be like if two-thirds of the US population all died within a few years? How long do you think it would take for life to return to anything close to normal? According to some experts, it took Europe about 150 years to get back on its feet.

A more recent example is the flu pandemic that occurred in 1918–1919, during World War I. This was the first major outbreak of the H1N1 flu virus. It is sometimes referred to as the Spanish flu, only because of the distorted news reports back then. Government censors worked hard to keep wartime morale up by not allowing much negative news to hit the airwaves. (I know, that would never happen today.) So, as the early reports came in about the spread of the deadly flu in the countries at war, these censors did what they could to keep it hushed up. Spain, however, was neutral during the war and didn’t bother keeping things quiet. The result was that news reports seemed to indicate Spain was being hit harder by this flu than the rest of the world, hence the name Spanish flu.

What was particularly chilling about this flu outbreak was how it targeted healthy segments of the population. The deaths were not centered among the elderly, the infirm, and children; rather, it was the strapping young adults who were hardest hit. This was due to how the flu virus worked, by causing what’s called a cytokine storm in the body. Essentially, the virus would send the patient’s immune system into overdrive. The healthier the patient was at the outset, the more powerful the body’s immune response, resulting in a cytokine storm of such force that it killed the patient.

This flu pandemic hit just about every corner of the planet. While numbers are still sketchy, estimated death tolls range from fifty to one hundred million. No matter how you look at it, that’s a lot of dead bodies, but bear in mind that most of them perished within a nine-month period.

Could something like that happen today? I mean, with all our modern medical knowledge and advanced technology, surely the powers that be would act quickly to stop the infectious disease before it got out of control, right?

Think about this, though: HIV/AIDS has been around since 1981, and they still haven’t found a cure for it.

Famine

Famine is defined as a widespread lack of food, causing a sharp increase in fatalities on a regional level. Basically, something causes crop failure or in some other way limits the amount of available food in a given area over a period of time. For example, a long-term drought could result in a significant lack of food crops being available. Famine could also result from political upheavals, as when an oppressive government negatively affects food distribution.

Occasionally, both natural and political factors can combine, causing something akin to a perfect storm of food shortages. In July 1995, a series of massive floods occurred in North Korea. The floodwaters utterly destroyed crops, arable land, and, perhaps most importantly, emergency grain reserves. Given the already tumultuous political climate and declining economy, North Korea didn’t have the capability to bring in resources from outside the country.

While precise figures may never be known due to the lack of reliable information coming out of North Korea even today, estimates range up to three million deaths directly attributable to the famine.

One of the most well-known famines is the Irish Potato Famine. From 1845 to 1852, approximately one million people died in Ireland as a result of a potato blight that wiped out the primary source of food. Another million or so people managed to flee the country. Between the famine deaths and the mass exodus, the overall population of Ireland dipped by about 20 to 25 percent during this period.

At the time, roughly 30 percent of the population were entirely dependent upon the potato for food. Further, most of them relied on a single variety of potato, called the Irish Lumper. Because of the lack of genetic diversity among the crops, the blight was particularly devastating.

It wasn’t just starvation that killed people during the Irish Potato Famine, nor in any other famine. As people starve, their immune systems begin to falter. This, coupled with the gradual lack of services providing medical care, clean water, and other necessities, causes significant outbreaks of disease.

We may live in a nation of plenty right now, but what if the ever-changing climate were to take a turn for the worst and cause massive crop failures? The domino effect from even one or two bad seasons could send the country into a tailspin.

Economic Collapse

Of the various types of long-term disasters, perhaps the most difficult to define is economic collapse. Many situations would fall under this umbrella, such as hyperinflation or a lengthy economic depression resulting in mass bankruptcies and high unemployment. No matter the cause, one thing almost all economic collapses have in common is mass civil unrest.

In 1998, Russia experienced an economic collapse that resulted in bank closures and mass runs on basic commodities. Inflation rose to about 84 percent. By comparison, the United States currently averages around 1.6 percent inflation. Prices for food went up almost 100 percent, while at the same time the ruble decreased in value. Millions of people saw their entire life savings disappear as banks failed.

Those Russians living in urban areas were the worst off. With no homegrown crops to sustain them, they were forced to stand in long lines for the most meager of supplies. The elderly living on pensions suddenly found the much-needed money completely cut off. Hospitals were also affected, seeing massive reductions in already scarce drug supplies.

While the Russian economy did rebound rather quickly due to rising oil prices the following year, I don’t think they are out of the woods completely, even today.

Around this same time, Argentina experienced its own collapse. After several years of economic instability, including at least two bouts of hyperinflation, the bottom finally fell out in 2001. By the end of that year, unemployment had risen to about 20 percent. As a result of people pulling their pesos from the bank, converting them to dollars, and then sending them abroad, the government froze bank accounts for twelve months, allowing only very small withdrawals each week. This measure naturally did not go over very well, and people took to the streets to protest. While many of these demonstrations started out peacefully enough, albeit loud, they were soon accompanied by property damage and violence. It took several years before anything that could be called recovery began to take place.

What would you do if the government suddenly froze your bank account? What if what little money you could scrounge was all but worthless?

Freak Occurrences

Things like economic collapse and pandemics don’t typically happen overnight. There is usually a chain of events, though perhaps imperceptible at the time, that takes us from Point A to Point B and on down the line. However, history has also witnessed events that occurred so suddenly and had such long-ranging effects, it is almost mind-boggling.

In 1815, volcanic Mount Tambora, located on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa, violently erupted. This remains the single largest volcanic eruption in recorded history. The eruption column rose about twenty-eight miles, spewing over sixty cubic miles of dust and debris. The ash that jetted into the atmosphere created something akin to a nuclear winter. Temperatures across the globe fell for a year or more.

HORROR STORIES

Believe it or not, the Tambora eruption helped create two of the most popular horror icons in modern history. A group of friends were vacationing in Switzerland that summer, and the poor weather forced them to stay inside for much of their trip. A contest was set up between the friends to see who could write the scariest story. Mary Shelley won the contest with her story Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. A second member of the party, Lord Byron, wrote A Fragment, which later inspired a third member of the group, John William Polidori, to write The Vampyre. This work, in turn, greatly influenced Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

The so-called Year Without a Summer was the result of those falling temps. The abnormal cold wiped out many crops. In June 1816, frosts were being reported in New York. Lake ice was seen in Pennsylvania in July and August. In some areas, only 10 percent of the crops planted were eventually harvested. This drove the price of grains up, tripling in some places.

On June 30, 1908, an explosion occurred in Siberia near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River. This explosion was about a thousand times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It is believed to have been either a meteoroid or a comet that exploded about five miles from the ground. The explosion leveled pretty much everything within almost eight hundred square miles.

Due to the remote location, it took several years for scientific investigators to mount an expedition to the site. What they found at ground zero was an area about five miles across containing upright trees that were scorched and missing all limbs. Moving outward from there, trees were completely flattened, all falling away from the site of the explosion. Because the explosion happened in the middle of nowhere, there were no known human casualties.

However, what if something like the Tunguska event were to happen today, say a few miles above New York City? Meteoroids enter Earth’s atmosphere every day. Most of them burn up before hitting the ground, and those that survive the fall are usually rather small. But an explosion or strike in a populated area would have serious, lasting consequences.

Now, keep in mind that this has been just a very brief walk though history. There are many other long-term events we didn’t touch on, along with examples of entire cultures and societies that fell apart, such as the Romans and the Mayans.

What sorts of calamities might the future bring? What events will shape the world to come? Let’s take a look at some of the more likely suspects.

New Madrid Earthquake

When you say the word earthquake, most Americans think immediately of California. I mean, how often would thoughts turn to the Midwest?

The New Madrid fault runs along the southeastern edge of the Midwest. Extending roughly 150 miles in length, it goes from Illinois through Missouri, Arkansas, and Tennessee. Several thousand earthquakes have been reported in this area over the last four decades, with most of them being way too small to be felt by residents. However, that certainly wasn’t the case in 1811–1812. Beginning with two quakes on December 16, 1811, this seismic zone went into an uproar. These quakes were powerful enough to be felt hundreds of miles away. They caused sidewalks in Washington, DC to crack and church bells to ring in Boston.

With so many tremors happening every year, this is obviously an area with a lot of seismic instability. Should the fault finally decide to give way, the damage and loss of life could be staggering. Some experts believe a major quake along the New Madrid fault is inevitable, perhaps within the next few decades.

Should that come to pass, it would make any of the California earthquakes look like a child’s temper tantrum by comparison. Unlike those of the West Coast, the building codes in the New Madrid fault zone have given a nod to seismic safety only in the last twenty years or so. Anything built prior to that won’t hold up in an earthquake.

If you thought the government responses to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita were ineffectual, can you imagine just how overstretched the emergency response would be to a disaster that encompasses several poorly prepared states?

Yellowstone Caldera

While this threat is becoming a little more recognized by the general public, many people still do not realize the home of the much-vaunted geyser Old Faithful rests atop a huge underground volcano. Imagine a vast underground bubble of magma or molten rock. If it gets emptied, say through an eruption, the land above that bubble may collapse. That’s called a caldera.

The Yellowstone Caldera was formed 640,000 years ago after what is sometimes called a supervolcano erupted. While there weren’t any scientists around back then to take notes, they’ve postulated that this eruption sent about 240 cubic miles of ash and debris into the air. Now, go back and reread what I said about the eruption of Mount Tambora and the effects it had on the world. The amount of debris sent flying then was about one-quarter of what the Yellowstone supervolcano