Life without Power

Oh the shitpile at outhouse in minus 20 reminded me of "pyramid " from 1 dollar bill.

All activity cease at nightfall???



Reality is....that's when they COME OUT.


This was only 2 DAYS of a blackout in NYC....imagine if it lasted for 2-3 months!


1977 NYC Blackout



Last Edited by Useless Cookie Eater on 06/10/2012 03:50 PM

Actually, you can make a fire, by digging your pit into the ground. Dig two holes side by side, connect them under the ground for ventillation. Stick your fire in one of the holes and go. Smoke is very hard to see, only way you'll get caught is by smell of the smoke.

Nice post OP.
When everyone was worrying about being Y2K-ready,
I focused on being Y1K ready. Hand-powered tools are vital.
I highly recommend a hand-cranked grinder. Mine is currently dedicated to coffee, but that could change with 1 massive x-class direct hit.

Winter camping in snow and below freezing weather for more than a few days is a good test. Also a few days deep in the woods with just enough food to survive (if you fail to find eats in the forest) is another good test.

I dig testing myself. Everything is different camping in Winter. So eerily quiet. ;-`)

without power...in city

every home turn in cave.. and worst, because even in caves
(they stay worm inside)out in the fields and in the woods you have fire and food (even snakes and rats if necessary), and very possible, water (we have survive in caves for thousands of years).

a home without power inside a city will have no fire, no water, no refrigerator or freezers to keep foods, no lights
no elevators, just caves worst than real caves...
thousands caves together with alot of starving people
without food or water inside or outside...looking eachother..

for them who will not succeed to escape from the cities in a
big time loss of power, life will bring them soon or later in
situations near to cannibalism (if there is no outside help
and the power loss involve the whole country)

You want to see what its like? Read this PDF called lights out. About a EMP blast and life afterwards. Get your guns!!!
[link to www.frugalsquirrels.com]

eh, we will get along fine. people adapt very easily when you have no choice. as long as you you have food, water, shelter from cold you will be good.

Oh really?
Better watch this video then.

Soap should never be used in a lake or stream.

My life sure wouldn't be as boring, thats for sure.

I'm not worried about 3-days to a week without power. I'm worried about a couple weeks or even year without power.

Our water facilities can go a week+ on backup without outside help. This includes treatment. After that time the treatment stops and the water still runs for most of us (gravity feed). Even then, we live within a couple miles of many springs and such where people already collect water. Beyond that, I'll admit... not very prepared though.. at least not for large supplies of water. Enough to stay alive isn't going to be pleasant.

We have backup power at home .. dunno how long realistically that would be useful. At some point, the only good it would do would be to keep the lights on. We have crazy neighbors that might not like that.

Deliveries would continue to come assuming it wasn't a national or even regional event. Emergency food is fine but still, not the point.

I believe we are ready for survival if need be.. but personally.. I don't think I'm ready to deal with it.

The military say that in a REAL emergency, in the short term there's only one foodstuff you need plenty of: HARDBOILED SWEETS!

#1 set up a survival EDC on a keychain and carry a good knife every day.

Take a good course, teach yourself or whatever how to survive with a Knife a roll of wire and a fire striker and your brain. Learn how to make a friction fire.

Learning to make Cordage is a good idea too.

If you have shelter, water and fire you can survive and all that is left is food.

Now to live in a typical 1800 type setting you need to go back to school again. My grandparents lived like that. No running indoor water, no electricity and no indoor plumbing not even to mention no AC. No refrigeration. All that stuff came later. I even remember my grandmother was so indoctrinated into living like that, that after they got a refrigerator, she would still keep pies in the pie safe, and Lunch leftovers stayed on the table until Dinner and got covered with a cloth. Sometimes when it was really hot,
the corn would be bubbling by Dinner time.

Cook on a wood burning stove, take a bath in a tub on the porch once a week, Smoke and Salt cure pork, can vegetables etc etc. It was a hard life and those people really worked their asses off, but there was also more of a sense of community where people pitched in. Kids in the family also worked.

If you took kids today and dropped them into that situation they would probably suicide from bordom with no PS3 etc.

My father is ancient now and knows all those things, IE the way people lived.

Those people even made their own soap and if you go back far enough they even knew how to leech lye from Ashes to create the soap from rendered fat.

A huge amount of knowledge that is almost lost.

That, and don't bury your waste or dead too close to water sources.. if it gets that bad, make sure they are buried far enough away from water and living quarters to prevent contamination.

Remember, cleanliness is next to godliness... or something like that.

someone should type up a list of survival items :O..

Dude, currently we have 35+ degrees Celsius here, so sleeping under the sky isn't that bad! The problem is not the housing. The Electricity company is under heavy economic pressure here and although is one of the 1000 biggest companies in the World, it has liquidity problems, so they are saying that in the following months they might be taking down power from time to time. Oh, and we expect a big earthquake until the end of August since we haven't had any big one in the recent years (we should have at least one above 6R every year near the mainland).

One difference though.....they had no concept of the technology we have now.
People WILL rebuild technological things that make our lives easier.....it will not go away forever.
Short term....potentially ugly...YES.....but humans will never go back to 1800's era living for long.

It's organic made by myself from animal fat.

But I guess the mercury and PETE in the water is in some way less harmful to the bass I eat?

At least here every one has a village to go to. Even Athens was a village 170 year ago.

Best thing you can do for water is buy a gravity feed Sawyer 0.1 micron water filter setup, a biodiesel pre-strainer for a 5 gallon bucket or a 5-10 micron biodiesel poly filter bag to use as a prefilter and a few 5 gallon buckets and keep a couple of gallons of household bleach around.

The Sawyer will filter out Giardia, etc and the big stuff and is good for a million gallons.

5-6 drops of clorine per L of H20 mix and sit for 30 minutes will kill all the remaining bacteria and Viruses. Especially important if you live in one of the countries with Hepatitis in the surface water.

We "whites" use hardboiled eggs..

Peace

All i can come with is

-Drinking water container
-Washing water container
-Bowl for washing
-Food Bag
-Knife

This is TRUE!!

Come on, we don't want you dummies killing streams and wildlife.

When the SHTF....no on is going to give two sh*ts about SOAP IN A LAKE/STREAM.....or the spotted owl....who will become DINNER.

With 25% of the US population being obese (defined as being 30lbs or more overweight), what is the effect on an obese person when suddenly put on a power-outage starvation or subsistence diet?

With all that blubber, does he cope better or worse than a normal person?

Have many things for camping. Have sleeping bag even for winter. for -40C cool a :)

An essential survival weapon to have is a good AIR RIFLE: accurate to 100 yards, silent if equipped with a silencer, will take out a trespasser's eye, or slay a pigeon for the pie.

If you have an air rifle, you will never starve for lack of fowl and small game (even dogs!).

Depends on how long it lasts and if a lot of people are wiped out.

If the grid collapses and 90% of the population is wiped out and things get ugly, who will be left that knows how to build a transistor, IC chip etc or even a basic radio.

Sure we all know basics, but society has so many specialist, you would have to pool together a large batch of the right people to just rebuild one form of technology from raw materials.

Rebuild, Yes but how long will it take. 1 year, 5 years, 50 years, 500 years, nobody knows. If everything is down, where do raw materials come from or better yet, the energy to get the ball rolling and transported etc.

We are globally interconnected in a massive web of small specialist and no one individual knows how to build much of any modern technology from scratch.

Quotes messed up. Will try again.

Last Edited by Nine's - IN MEMORIAM on 06/10/2012 04:31 PM

Yea. When I didn't have a cell phone for a couple of months, I started to enjoy the 'liberation'...it was bittersweet getting another one.