The most important mental prep is if you have a septic to prepare a burn process.
What I mean is that a usual use septic system it's about 3 years to pump. Ideally pump trucks will be functional longer, but priced may skyrocket etc.
If you negate a lot of the solids-use you could stretch it to possibly decades +
So if you poop, you want to flush the poop, bag the paper, burn the paper. This would give you likely 10+ years, possibly essentially indefinite use of your septic.
The most important mental prep is if you have a septic to prepare a burn process.
What I mean is that a usual use septic system it's about 3 years to pump. Ideally pump trucks will be functional longer, but priced may skyrocket etc.
If you negate a lot of the solids-use you could stretch it to possibly decades +
So if you poop, you want to flush the poop, bag the paper, burn the paper. This would give you likely 10+ years, possibly essentially indefinite use of your septic.
It's really fantasy novel thinking that people with more capacity won't have control/distribution of such.
Money....money in various forms is the answer.
It'll be near impossible ti be in a situation where gas tanks are just chilling for the taking. Whether food barter, gold, or some form of money, you're going to see people like.... the owners of the gas tanks bartering it.
You're either going to be a bandit or a trader. So you'd be better served having say, food to pay the gas man. Just like now, you use money to pay the gas man.
If gas is a hot commodity and I own a gas station, I'd be trading my gas, not leaving it to go where and do what?
You'd need something like say America, 330 million people, if a true super big killed off 100 million in a couple of years and at the same time there was 2 big earth quakes AND a "Carrington event" then maybe you could use a pump to go get abandoned gas.
I don't know if I'd say money as in paper dollars/coins. In many situations, money can become useless. But various types of "currency" to trade, yes. Especially ammo, food, medicine, and water. It all depends on exactly which factors were impacted in what type of disaster and what an area has easy access to for natural resources. But if goods/commerce can't move, money becomes worthless quickly. If you have a solid supply of food you can trade from, or valuable skills, it is easier to get access to other things. A lot of people seem to believe that all this stuff (gas, gardens, farms, lake access etc) will just somehow be untended and free to walk up and take from. That'll be the first stuff people will try to get control of.
I’m telling you. Having been through several months now potable water situation I die a little inside every time someone says they have 50 lbs each of dried rice and beans. They are going to be rehydrated and heating them with hot bitter tears. Garbage you can put in a dumpster of burn pit, stash it out back. Some of this other stuff you will be uncomfortable or inconvenienced without but no water and no food because of it is bad
I would say water stations. Outhouses have been around for centuries. I think digging a hole once a year is easier then hauling and boiling water everyday. Plus I have a septic tank so it wouldn't be instant.
When large governing bodies fall apart, small ones step up. You'd quickly see a lot of towns have their own systems and rulers. You'd see some step up to do things like law enforcement and medical care and food distribution. Some of those systems would be kinder and more organized than others. Think Wild West, where it was fairly common to shoot criminals on sight of folks felt threatened. I don't think it would happen for any large amount of time in the US... but examples like Katrina show you what happens until order is restored. Also... Rome... all systems have fallen at some point.
Get a battery "generator" from Jackery, Bluetti, or Ecoflow that has a 12 volt power port. Make sure it has the option for solar charging. Then buy a couple of solar panels from Amazon or Harbor Freight. They can be connected together and if one stops working you can just remove it from the system and the rest will keep charging.
Then all you need is a 12v to 24v adapter. If you have a charger than can plug into a car power port then you're already set. You can just use your regular charger on one of the 120v wall plug outlets on the battery generator but you'll lose a lot of efficiency
A complex question. Sewage transport is probably the most important for sanitation but water pressure is needed for personal hygiene as well as irrigation and washing sewage through the pipes. But everything is so interconnected with required parts and expertise and large scale operation that I do not know if any single person or group of people could keep things running for long. The system is not designed to work for a village scale.
In the longer term there are options using stuff like gravity fed systems and Archimedes screws or windmill pumps for water pressure. Sewage would be a lot harder and would probably revert to outhouse style.
Seriously. if SHTF that bad that civilization collapsed I wouldn't be worried one bit about anything other than the people under my roof. The time for helping others would be over, for a while at least. Once the initial panic and deaths roll through then we can come together as a community to get things done. But tomorrow? Tomorrow is about protecting mine.
If the grid is running we can fix everything else. If the grid is gone, we can't refrigerate food, pump gas, run hospitals, operate military bases, do communications over any distance...
How long did humanity survive without electric refrigeration? Fermentation, cellaring, dehydrating, salting, smoking, spring houses - all low tech options for food preservation prior to refrigeration.
As they said, there were a lot fewer people then. Our current system works because we ship in large amounts of food from other countries between growing seasons. You can't move that much food without refrigeration.
Then there's the skill problem. How many people do you know that can grow and save enough food to make it between grow seasons? How many truly have enough food to make it through to the next harvest?
The fantasy machine, because the shock of not having civilization actually collapse will kill them.
Civilization has never collapsed in our entire history. Empires have collapsed, it's true, but I can't think of a single case where a civilization fell back into a tribal hunter/gatherer form of society. Ever.
This is it. I have a BA in history and read history for fun, and sudden complete collapses are extremely rare and they're location-dependent. A sudden world-wide collapse is unheard of. Even the dinosaurs died off unevenly.
As with so many things, there's a non-zero chance of it happening, but it's not the scenario I'd base my prep on because I'd probably be a goner, too. And if I did survive, I don't know that I'd want to stick around for what came next.
I only prep for what's a reasonable possibility - hurricanes or civil unrest, with the first being one I've already been through three times. If someone wants to prep for an outlier event, that's their privilege, though.
Health care. We have such amazing advances due to refrigerated vaccines and antibiotics. Just those two things dramatically decreased the mortality rates. If you could figure out how to produce and safely store antibiotics, and how to produce and store vaccines, you would just about own your own kingdom. However, it's a very complicated process. We might be able to continue variolation, but I'm not sure how the rest could be done.
I think people would freeze to death unless they found a way to keep warm. We had two 6F days and even in a house with a heater, it was hard to keep warm. I'm all for wool socks and 0F sleeping bags.
That's highly location-dependent, though. Where I live, we might get a night or two per year around 30F, but heatstroke would be a serious concern for half the year, especially in homes constructed after the '60s, when a/c started to become common and they quit constructing in such a way that you can open windows on all sides of the house and catch whatever breeze might be flowing through.
Seven of the warmest years on record where I'm at were in the last ten years.
Everyone needs to prep for their area's conditions.
Depends on location. Colder climates? Fuel delivery. Hot climates? Water delivery.
There’s not one good answer, but if civilization collapsed, I would hope you’re surrounded by a good community otherwise it doesn’t make the scenario very survivable.
More like I would want mini versions of some things like fuel making capability, water purification, power generation, bullet factory, food processing to make more long term emergency food and so on.
I get sewer but outside dense urban living all you really need to know is how to build a hot compost pile. And I’m not sure I couldn’t pull that off there.
"Keep running" as in meaning keeping a large part of services available for the GDP, or "keep running" as in your infrastructure at your prepared BOL or retreat?
During Helene all you heard GDP types whine about was the heat, even though it hit the end of September it was a little warm in South Georgia. The bigger problem being those types are the types that keep their windows and houses closed up 24/365. Meanwhile, if you were in remotely decent shape and semi climatized it wasn't a big deal.
But plenty of GDP folks would burn gas driving to cities an hour away to largely waste time in AC stores. Meanwhile plenty of hurricane cleanup was being done by those of us that aren't tethered to AC 365 days a year.
For us personally, having some gaps exposed in our energy system sucked- big diesel genset had issues and it was the only one sized large enough to power one of the deep wells. That meant hand pumped from another well for clothes washing which was a PITA and took my wife out of other labor she was helping with. Once you get a little bit into this, it isn't about having power to "keep the fridge going"- it's about having power for labor saving devices and security apparatus. Your food storage plan shouldn't go to shittake just because a freezer is shut off..
As far as overall population/GDP, having some semblance of electricity and a bit of internet would probably keep people calm- and that's really all the gubmint gives AF about in that regard (control).
Everyone saying water tells me most people haven't trained sourcing water in an actual survival scenario
There's easy ways to get large amounts of drinkable water without modern infrastructure
I think my first move would be power sources. Electricity to run refrigeration and access offline stores of TBs of data saved on plenty of essential skills and knowledge
Locally that's disconnect all the loads from our 2 small hydro plants. Get a local time reference to replace the grid timing. That's enough to get important facilities up and running fire/pd/emergency shelters off their local generators.
I got a spring on my property and a 365 creek if needed ;) but ya dirty water has killed more people then guns ever have over the last 300 years.
a water source, a RV water pump and a solar panel with a few 10" water filters will provide 100's a gallons a day. Its really the only long term water solution I see for a small to mid size groups
My rifle will always come first though, with out it I will have issues keeping everything else.
100% agree. Things go sideways that bad and your firearm will need to always be with you and ready to go.
I have a creek 100' from my property and I just dug into the water table on my property about 8' down from the lowest point. Salty though. So I need to make sure that whatever filters I have can remove the salt.
Unfortunately I'm not any kind of hero or serious know how person.
Tomorrow I'm going to a medicine class close to my house, so, I'd guess I'd invite all my classmates back if they don't live close/can't get home so we can figure shit out.
I've got power systems in place, hopefully for long enough that we can figure out alternatives (digging a root cellar, "burying" whatever large amounts of ice we can make, and preservation tactics) and my biggest issue is waste management. I don't have a plan there, besides, well, more holes for outhouses.
So realistically, as just me, all I can do is keep my battery backup going and start ramping up food production.
Take out my seed storage, ask the neighbor if we can use his field to plant crops (in partial shade areas, it's late to start for the season but the fast growers might get a produce).
After that, my life is mostly in the hands of the community, hah, and what we can all do together.
I'll admit back during the 2012 "scare"- we downloaded all the classics of literature we could get for free, free text books, history books, math, science, medical, prep and DIY and farming books and pdfs we could find onto my kindle. Still have them and have actually used some since. charging a kindle (or two for backup) seemed like an easy thing to do with solar charger.
Civilization has never collapsed. Sure empires have came and gone, affecting the people living in them. The next empires using the remains of the previous ones to build off of.
I wouldn't worry about sewage or water. I'd dig a hole and shit in it, piss on a tree. What I'd do is look to build up a group, there's safety in numbers. Create search parties for various things. I'd make sure we had entertainment, movies, games, some drinks. Moral is going to matter.
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u/vato915 2d ago
Sewage services