PROBLEMS AND CATASTROPHES

Did you ever wonder about how many things there are that can constitute an emergency situation? Around where I live it could be anything from a washed out road to a nuclear bomb. And many things in between. We have graveled country roads and they can wash out. The roads were put in at with a method called path-of-least-resistance. In these hills and hollers that means a lot of roads are build in the bottoms and when it rains the water from all those high hills shoots down into the narrow valley between the hills and it can really tear a road up. I have seen roads that were normally pretty good become impassable to all but a log skidder. All it takes is one good toad-strangler of a rain and you are blocked. I have experienced it. And when it is the only road in or out you have a problem.

And after the roads you must face power outages. Our power goes out if you look at the line harshly. It goes out all the time. At least once a day and most times at night. And a lot of times it is for just a second or two and it is back on. That only shuts down your electronic equipment. Your stove and refrigerator and freezer will keep right on working. Your computer and your clocks will not keep working. You will have to reset or reboot. We have had the power go out for 4 days straight. It pissed the Old Man off so bad he called the electric company and told them if it was not turned on immediately he was going to hook his big 3 phase generator up to the power lines, and they knew he would do it. We had power back on very quickly. Hell, we had 50 or 60 kids down here to feed and care for and we were not going without electricity! Today, at least at my house, we could probably get by for quite a while, but not back then.

Then there is always the matter of fires. No fire protection within 8 or 9 miles. If it catches on fire you will most likely lose it. Wooden buildings. You wonder how many buildings have had a fire and someone caught it immediately and put it out and just never said anything. Maybe too embarrassed to speak about it. But it can happen and with terrible results. And you have to figure out how to work around it when it happens. You have to get some housing up and going pretty damn quick, especially in cold weather. Women and kids sorta require shelter. Men do too, but maybe not as functional as what it takes for a family. On the food front, we have food in two locations and stand a good chance of saving at least some of it in the event of a fire.

A step up the ladder is a tornado. These suckers can tear up a whole town if they get loose. One thing about tornadoes is they are not lingering. They come in, smash everything they can, and then they are gone, looking for more targets. We have two underground cellars we can get into if necessary. One will hold a lot of people and the other will hold a few. The devastation from a tornado is very profound. A stick-built home or a house trailer can be wiped off the face of the earth in a heartbeat. BOOM! and it's gone. The way you handle tornadoes is to get good shelter and let it do what it is going to do. Get into a root cellar or a regular cellar or a cave or whatever you have and STAY THERE until the damn thing has passed. Hell, get into a culvert under the road if it ain't running water! There is no humanly way to fight a tornado. You can't whip it or put it out or anything else that might slow it down or halt it. Get to shelter and stay there until things have settles down. It will be over soon enough and you will have a terrible amount of work to do so don't get into a hurry.

Going higher on the disaster scale we come to earthquakes. If you go looking at a map of Illinois and you go off the Southwest corner, into Missouri, you will see a small town by the name of New Madrid. And it is the home of a HUGE fault in the earth. It went off in the early 1800's and rang the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia. It caused the Mississippi River to run backwards for a day. The Ohio River also. Now just you go out and try to even halt the Mississippi. But don't get your hopes up. That river generates a whole lot of horsepower, well above what you can accomplish. But the New Madrid Fault can do it. Even cause it to run backwards. A hellish force to be sure. But that is history and we are in the present. If you look at the Southwest corner of Indiana you will see a fairly good sized town named Evansville. It sits on something akin to Jello. If an earthquake goes off Evansville will most likely be destroyed. Tall buildings are not where it is at in Evansville. But as you come Northeast toward Bedford you will find yourself on solid rock, either Limestone or Sandstone or a mixture of both. Ol' Brer Earthquake cant' do too much to solid stone, or so it seems. At least not from the distance away to New Madrid. But if somehow the earth got to rockin' and a rollin' with some big tremors the damage to my area would be minimal to what other places would endure. We would have to be on the lookout for downed timber across the road. We would have to watch for flooding in case a few trees got together and decided to block a river or creek. Towns would be liable to have broken gas mains and water and sewer mains. But we have none of that. Just 4' plastic pipe buried in the ground. Power lines being down could cause some excitement. But I do not see any bridges being torn out or buildings being shook down. Too much distance between us and the big shakin' thing.

Then we can get into man made disasters. How about economic collapse? Does that strike you fancy and get your attention? We could be looking at some of this stuff in the very near future. In act I think it is quite probable. I believe that most dangers of an economic collapse have been cussed and discussed to one helluva large degree here in this blog. You have to watch out for mobs and horse thieves. You have to avoid citizen round-ups by folks like FEMA and others. You have to feed yourself and those with you. You will most likely do your own doctoring. You will grow your own food and animals. For awhile it could get to be like the 1850's again, except for no steam engines pulling trains. You just have to be quick on your feet and quick on your ol' thinker. Your brain is your best survival weapon.

So there you have some thought on different kinds of survival, from taking a detour to bunkering down for a collapse of society. There are worse things than a collapse of society but we don't want to go there today. Just do your best to stay alive.

Michael

mboone@rtccom.net