Category: prepping

10:37 – Yesterday, for only the second or third time since I started keeping this journal about 20 years ago, I forgot to post an entry. We have so much going on here that it just slipped my mind. We still have boxes and bins stacked all over the place, and a lot of sorting/organizing left to do.

One of my concerns about this new place is the water supply. We have a well, which is fine as long as we have electricity to power the pump. Without electricity, we’d need to depend on rainwater harvesting. Fortunately, that doesn’t look like it’d be much of a problem. We have about 2,000 square feet of roof space. The downspouts connect to tubing that carries the rainwater off to the perimeter of the property, but it’d be easy enough to intercept it and capture it. All we’d need then to have a decent supply of potable water is a pre-filter, which I have all the components for, and the Sawyer PointZeroTwo filter, which I can get setup quickly. Sparta averages about four inches of rain a month, generally pretty well distributed over the month, which translates to about 5,000 gallons a month if we capture all of it. That’s 150+ gallons per day, which is sufficient even for bathing, laundry, and flushing toilets.

So, at this point, if necessary we can be completely self-sufficient. We can eat, drink, stay warm, and defend ourselves for months, and we have enough spare to provide for family and a few friends for at least a few months. We’re living in a small town in the Blue Ridge Mountains, a good way from the big cities. That’s about as good as it gets on the East Coast. I’ll never be completely satisfied with our level of preparation, but at least we’re now at a comfortable level.

As I’ve said over and over, I don’t really expect things to go completely to shit, at least not for years, but I’ve been wrong before. And if TS does HTF, we’re at least in a position to ride it out. What I do expect is a continuing slide into dystopia, and as that happens we’ll have time to make further preparations.

07:14 – I told Barbara yesterday that I wasn’t thrilled with the idea of installing a propane stove, for a lot of reasons. I said that we could get one if she really, really wanted to, but no matter what I wanted to have at least a small wood stove. She understands my reasons for wanting a wood stove, and she agreed not to get the propane stove but a wood stove instead.

We decided on a Little John stove from Buck Stoves. It looks perfect for our needs: about 75,000 BTU/hr output, a 22″ 2.8 cubic foot firebox, non-catalytic so there’s nothing that needs replaced periodically, and it has a flat top that could be used in an emergency for cooking. It’s even EPA-exempt, although I’m not entirely sure what that means other than that there shouldn’t be any hassles getting it installed and using it. I’ll call the fire marshal and ask what permits or other stuff we need to get to be legal. I already asked our home insurance agent, and he said it wouldn’t be a problem.

It’ll go in the unfinished basement area, which already has two 6″ flues specifically installed for a wood stove. There’s a concrete floor and a concrete block wall. The outside door in the unfinished area opens onto a large concrete pad, and is covered by the deck, so we have a good place to put a woodpile under cover. The deck will keep not just rain but also snow off the wood pile, and it’d be a 20 foot walk from the woodpile to the stove, without any stairs.

Best of all, the stove is low-end price-wise, at around $650. It’ll cost more to get it delivered and installed, of course, but that shouldn’t be outrageous considering that there was a wood stove already there that the old owners hauled off. In fact, we may just run down and pick up one at the factory, which happens to be in the western NC mountains about 70 miles from our house.

If there’s one thing that Sparta, NC has, it’s trees, so I imagine that a cord or two of wood will be competitively priced. Wood will certainly be less expensive per therm than electricity, so we’ll probably keep the wood stove going at least intermittently all winter long.

08:40 – Yesterday, Barbara put a reserve hold on Ted Koppel’s new book, Lights Out. There won’t be much if anything in the book that I don’t already know, but it’ll be interesting to see Koppel’s take on the issue.

Most of my readers are already aware that a long-term grid-down situation is the worst nightmare imaginable for any prepper. Being without utility power for an extended time would literally destroy our country. It would probably kill off 10% of our population within weeks, and perhaps 80%+ within a year. Call it 250 million dead, just in the US and Canada. Modern society simply cannot survive without electricity. That’s the point Koppel is making, along with the fact that there are many different threats that could cause such a disaster, from hackers taking down the computers that control our grids to a massive coronal mass ejection (CME) to an intentional electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack.

It’s difficult to estimate the probability of such events. The best probability estimates I’ve seen of a catastrophic CME are 1% to 1.2%. Per year. Those estimates come from NASA and various scientific journal papers. I don’t know enough about space weather to judge their validity, but they seem convincing.

An EMP attack is within the capabilities of various nations and groups who hate the US. All it would take is one small fission device detonated at very high altitude over the central US to cause incredible and long-lasting destruction to our power grids. North Korea has already demonstrated such a device, as has Pakistan. Iran probably isn’t far from having them, if it doesn’t already. Note that neither a fission warhead nor even just a fission bomb is necessary. All they need is a fission device. That’s because the device will detonate in space. That makes it a couple orders of magnitude easier to achieve. Designing a warhead to survive re-entry is the hard part. Any number of nations, including China, Iran, and North Korea, have missiles capable of boosting such a device to the required altitude. It could be done easily from a freighter outside US waters.

As to hackers, who knows? The fact that parts of our grid are controlled by Internet-connected PCs running Windows XP makes me think it’s just a matter of time. When one considers all the possible threats, it seems reasonable to me to assign a tentative probability of 10% per year to a catastrophic grid-down event. And that’s much too high to be acceptable.

The recovery time would depend on the cause of the event. A cyber attack would probably cause the least physical damage of the three, although there’s still the potential for significant physical damage to distribution. If we were lucky, we might see power start to be restored within weeks and a return to normal within months. A Carrington-class CME would cause more physical damage, although that could be limited to some extent because we could expect to have at least several hours’ to a day or so notice of the actual impact. Things could be taken off-line and protected against the flux. Whether or not that would happen would depend on the decision makers. They might well hesitate to cause a complete disruption of the power grid, even knowing what was about to occur. The EMP attack would cause incredible damage, because it would happen on essentially zero notice. There would not be time to take any protective actions. High-voltage transmission lines would be destroyed, along with the transformers and other gear required to control them. And those aren’t things you can just order from Amazon Prime. Most of the equipment is made outside the US, and even if the factories that make them were unaffected (a big if) the lead times on them run to months or even years.

On a lighter note, here’s another example of why I despair about modern eduction: Can you solve the 50 cent maths exam question that is dividing the internet?

Anyone who needs more than a fraction of a second to come up with the correct answer doesn’t understand basic geometry. Those 12-sided coins have interior angles of 30 degrees (360 degrees / 12 = 30 degrees). The angle in question is twice that, or 60 degrees. That should be obvious at a glance to anyone who’s passed basic geometry.

10:37 – A few minutes ago, as we were binning seed bags, our real-estate agent in Sparta called. The second-mortgage holder countered our $5,000 offer verbally with $7,000. We agreed, so at this point we’re waiting for the second-mortgage holder to sign the agreement. When that happens, things will start to move quickly. We’ll close on the house in a couple weeks.