Potential SHTF scenarios & tinfoil hat thread (Please read post 1)

touts wrote: »

This one might not have the grand scale of invasions or methane disaster or euro collapse but its one that I believe is quite likely. Electricity strike. Specifically ESB strike. The unions there are among the most militant in the country and are quick to rattle the sabres when someone questions the pay and perks. So lets assume that something sparks a strike in the ESB. There may be a limited generation or inter connector capacity but at best electricity will have to be severely rationed with lengthy rolling blackouts.

Until the army take over and start running things in the power plants as they did in the 1970s and during the fuel crisis of the same decade.
Remember Texaco tankers rolling into Limerick with the Irish Armys logo crudely spray painted over the Texaco logo.:)

Leave aside the impact on factories offices and Irelands reputation as a place to do business. Instead ask yourself how do you cope in such a scenario. Say the strike lasts 2 weeks before eiter the government backs down or a mob burn down the union hq. How would you manage in those 2 weeks. We are far more reliant on electricity than we were back in the 70s and 80s when the last strikes happened. Now pretty much everything in your home needs electricity.

Portable electric generator,prefably diesel.
OR use the Grizzs emergency power unit.
You need

1x deep cycle marine battery[Designed for multiple dis and recharge,and to store a charge for a long period of time.

1x solar panel or micro wind/hydro power generator to recharge and one normal battery charger to recharge before the power goes out.

1x Power inverter 12/220v.Use it for the strongest NON motor power device you have[Motors "spike" on starting up and trip off power inverters.well if you can afford a unit that will run washing machines,dishwashers etc,you wont need this homebrew device in the first place]

1x a four plug 12v car ciggerette unit.
Box to store and cart to move all this optional. 2x battery clamps, blue /brown wire.

Clamp battery terminals on + and - ,run brwn from + and blue from- or if already there croc clips onto respective terminals to 4 point 12v DC ciggerette unit.

Plug in 12v/220v power inverter into 12v ciggerette socket,,plug solar panel,micro wind genny etc into other free 12v ciggerette unit.

This is a VERY crude power source,but it is enough to power emergency 12v LED lighting for a couple of hours,run your TV for an hour,and a few other emergency devices for appx 1to 2 hours.But then again you will just have to give up the ol Xbox for the duration.Its enough to power up/charge your laptop/phones etc. The solar panel or micro turbine keeps a trickle charge going into it during daylight hours,and you just use this in the evening for whatever emergency tasks need power.However this system can be expanded on how much money you have to rig up more batteries to it and what your power requirements are .
I lived for four weeks on a boat using this system ,and we power our hunting lodge in Germany with a bigger version and a backup diesel genny
Cost about 300 euros give or take to put together,less if you are good at scroungeing parts.

How do you cook if you have a modern electric cooker. How do you heat your home with no way to power the boiler.

Heating,would suggest ,now if possible install a decent woodburning stove in living room,,without the hotwaterback boiler option.They get hot enough to cook on,and get the family to "camp out" in front of it for warmth at night.
Shut off the rest of your house,and keep one room warm at all times by insulating and keeping the curtains and door closed.If you dont have double glazing,nail plastic over the windows to form a heat barrier..
We slept like this for four winters in Ireland in the 1970s.
Still do it once inawhile to see if the aul back can still take it.:eek:

If in the crisis,figure out how to build a " hobo stove" out of a 55 bgallon drum and how to pipe the smoke out of your living room,or apartment room or whatever you have for a closest exit to the outside.
Just about everyone in Yougoslavia in the cities did this in the civil war to keep warm.

There is a way of rigging an electric generator into your domestic power on a temp basis.However it is dangerous, and proably illegal here,and requires you pulling out or cutting your main feed into your property.
Be that by pulling your main circut breakers or whatever.Called back feeding from your generator.Google for further info.

How do you light your home. How does water get to your home with no power getting to the pumping stations.

candles,oil lamps,or go to bed at dusk get up at sunrise as our ancewstors did.Collect rainwater of your gutters or via a trapaulin,filter and boil.

How do you keep up to date with news on the strike or public service announcements?

Battery operated transistor radio.Newspapers,switch on De Telly once at midday or 21:00 for the news via your genny or emergency battery station.

How do you buy food in the local shop if their cash registers dont work

.
Bet you they WILL discover how to use a pocket calculator pretty quickly.

How do you withdraw money with all your bank records now on an elctronic system and not in a book.

Either have a four week cash reserve,or by then your local bank clerks will have discoverd how to do ledger and account enteries again like Grandad ued to do.

How do you get petrol for your car from a dead pump.

Tricky,but I bet by then the garage owners will be siphoning the stuff out of the tanks,or will have beeen "loaned" by whomever generators to get the pumps woirking and to keep the transport network rolling somwhat.
no fuel,no transport,no transport no food,no food ,..RIOTS!

If you can answer many of those question you are better prepared than most people.

Not all the solutions,but possibly some to make life abit easier

To answer my own questions if there was an electricity strike for two weeks:

How would I cook: I have an electric oven and hob BUT I have a 2 ring camping stove with a couple of drums of gas in the shed. I’m thinking of upgrading that to one of the 4 ring systems you see in some shops or if I came across a cheap old style gas cooker with oven and hob (you remember the white ones every Irish house had 30 years ago) I would be tempted to leave it in the shed until needed. Every few months I turn over the drums with a friend who has a gas hob as his main cooker. That way the gas doesn’t go stale (actually does anyone know how long a drum of gas should last?). If it was a long term crisis and gas ran out I would have to look at a wood fired thing but I have downloaded & printed a few DIY survival guides to doing that. I must read them and check that I have the required materials.

How would I heat the house: I have an open fire in one room and a former open fire now with a wood fired stove/firefront (which is fantastic a 3 briquettes or a couple of wood blocks lasts over 2 hours and there is residual heat for a while after that). So I could heat one room to sleep in and one to “live” in if the strike came during a really bad winter. I have a small store of coal (for the open fire), briquettes and wood. I could probably do with increasing that a bit. When we moved into the house we had the option to have up to two open fires or just one or even none. There was also an option to kit them out for gas not a real fires. I’m very happy we went for two open fires. Most of our neighbours in the estate got rid of the fire places and even the chimneys to create more space in the rooms and bedrooms over them.

How would I light house: I have picked up a handy supply of candles (from tea lights to church style candles). There are enough to keep us going for weeks. After that I have a few torches and a store of batteries. After that I have two wind up torches. I have seen those solar powered shed lights in hardware stores. I’m tempted but have no idea if they are any good. I’ve also seen solar powered car battery chargers in the likes of Maplin but again I have concerns about how good they are.

How do I get water: I have a number of containers (ranging from 5lt to 25 lt) that I could sterilise quickly with a bit of Milton and fill with enough water to keep us going for at least 2 weeks. I have a water butt that I wouldn’t drink unless desperate but it would be perfect for flushing a toilet. Beyond that I’m probably looking at water from a stream brought back home in some containers and a wheelbarrow and then boiled. Again I have downloaded and printed guides to filtering and purifying water but I need to make sure I read them and have all the stuff I need.

How do I keep up to date with what is happening: I have a couple of battery operated radios and a store of batteries. One of the wind up torches is also a wind up radio. Sure it isn’t perfect but I could at least pick up hourly broadcasts to hear what was going on. I have one of those solar powered phone chargers. Assuming the mobile network would be down in a power cut I could still use the phone for FM radio.

How do I get food if the shops shut down: Grizzly has rightly pointed out that many shops would learn to use a calculator and paper fairly quickly. But that will be mainly small local shops. The large supermarkets staffed by teenagers who almost panic if the barcode doesn’t scan will simply cease to operate (especially after those same teenagers lead their family and friends in looting the warehouse). Food will quickly run out in the small shops because the large computerised wholesalers will cease to operate. Over the last few months I’ve built up a store of tinned/dried food. I’ve done it gradually and it hasn’t cost that much week by week. I estimate that reserve is now at least 2 weeks food for my family and maybe a bit more on some items especially if we ration it. Throw in whatever we have around the house at the time the SHTF and that most of it would have to be used first (from freezer etc) and that should add a week or ten days to the supply. That said I am aiming to get that up to a month of a reserve (excluding what ever is already in the kitchen for regular use) and will do so gradually so the cost isn’t too much. I know that some people say you should have 6-12 months and maybe eventually I’ll get there but right now the next target is a month. I plan to grow as much stuff as I can in my garden this year (a) because its a nice hobby and (b) it gives me skills and knowledge that would be valuable if the SHTF. I have also bought some books and downloaded some info on foraging, preserving etc. Hunting may be a skill to learn after gardening.

How do I get money from the bank: That would certainly be an issue. Given how computerised the banks are I really feel they would simply shut their doors rather than try to go back to a stamping the book based system. They are the biggest b***ards in the country and they will simply take your money and run at the first sign of trouble. Maybe down the line a safe and a small stash of cash would be a wise investment but even then I wonder how valuable it will be in such a crisis when confidence in the government is at an all time low. I think I will rely on barter as suggested by Grizzly and others.

How do I get diesel for my car: That would certainly be a problem. There is a family farm with a tank of agri green diesel that could probably be used for a while (I assume the few guards that turn up for duty will have better things to do than dip cars in such a crisis and if they don’t then a cup of rice should bribe your way through the checkpoint). But there would be a number of us pulling from that tank so it won’t last long. Therefore last year I bought a Bicycle. I won’t be winning any races on it (it’s too heavy and I’m too slow) but I can get around. I also purchased two good solid locks for it along with all the repair stuff I would need to keep it running. Beyond that I can walk into the village or to most places I need to get to.

All that should I think get me over 99% of the possible SHTF situations. The really big stuff (nuclear war, methane explosions, super volcanoes, Mayan end of the world etc) well no matter how well you prepare for those you’re never well enough prepared.

Grizzly 45 wrote: »

Found this site
http://shtfschool.com/
Well worth reading from somone who survived the Yougoslav conflict.
As said,this starts when all the stocked goodies you have are gone and it starts to get smelly and sticky..Enjoy!

That blog brings memories flooding back, thanks for posting.

I have only read a few of the blogs and I have taken away some good points. For example stoves that take to long to heat up use up too much wood, as I have 2 stoves and both take 30+ minutes to reach operating temperatures so I need to have a think about my strategy.

And chalk one up for nature in the neck and neck race against global contagion, we have a new strain of totally drug resistant tuberculosis doing the rounds...

Physicians in India have identified a form of incurable tuberculosis there, raising further concerns over increasing drug resistance to the disease1. Although reports call this latest form a “new entity”, researchers suggest that it is instead another development in a long-standing problem.

However, data on the disease, dubbed totally drug-resistant tuberculosis (TDR-TB), are sparse, and official accounts may not provide an adequate indication of its prevalence. Giovanni Migliori, director of the World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborating Centre for Tuberculosis and Lung Diseases in Tradate, Italy, suggests that TDR-TB is a deadlier iteration of the highly resistant forms of TB that have been increasingly reported over the past decade.

Although the WHO describes TB as a “disease of poverty”, drug-resistant varieties might best be understood as resulting from poor treatment. According to a 2011 WHO report, fewer than 5% of newly diagnosed or previously treated patients are tested for drug resistance. And it is estimated that just 16% of patients with drug-resistant TB are receiving appropriate treatment.

Total Drug Resistant (TDR) TB cases arose in Italy in 2007, Iran in 2009, and now in India. In the 1990s, cases of Extensively Drug Resistant (XDR) TB emerged in 58 countries with 25,000 new cases per year.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensively_drug-resistant_tuberculosis

TDR TB does not respond to any first-line antibiotics (e.g. isoniazid and rifampicin) nor second-line (e.g. levofloxacin and ciprofloxacin), which can be quite toxic in their own right. The TDR TB bug appears to be a 'new entity' which is invulnerable to the mechanisms used by any first or second line antibiotic, requiring third-line chemotherapies which promise to be yet more toxic.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuberculosis_treatment

"Third line" antibiotics are so-called because they're either ineffective, unproven, or expensive, and require close attention during treatment to avoid crippling or crippling the patient. Thus the spead of bacteria treatable only by third line antibiotics is A Very Bad Thing, especially for the 33% of the world infected with TB who also live in the Third World.


Here's a PDF document with a map of multidrug-resistant TB prevalence rates.

I doubt anyone here is old enough to remember the bad old days of TB infections in Ireland, but its a disease we really do not want making a comeback.

A tourist can visit a place like India, hop on a plane and get back to London in just a few hours, infecting everyone and everything in every airport they travel through. While TB is perhaps not a global catastrophe, it does indicate just how close modern massively interlinked societies are to disaster if the wrong virus or bacteria gets out there.

Which in my opinion, and that of many epidemiologists, is only a matter of time.

Was ours when and if things had finally gone to GTFOD.
Was only to be used in it is happening right now,and you should have gone like, Yesterday! Situations. By using how many exclamination marks behind the message you had a good idea how serious the situation was going to be.

baords dyslexic wrote: »

And what happens when they "frack" up their ground water supplies in the process?

Well there is a proposal to start Fracking in North Leitrim and given the potential revenue its hard to see Berlin not instructing the local Irish administration to give permission for the project. So if you live in the North West you can add fracking up your water supply and local environment to your potential SHTF scenarios.

http://www.rte.ie/podcasts/2012/pc/pod-v-03011226m05stodaywithpatkenny-pid0-1565088.mp3

So, China's empty cities, real estate bubble or do they know something they aren't telling us?













Clearly these are no small developments but proper urban centres capable of housing millions. And they plan to build 400 of them.

I haven't bothered to research the exact location of these places, but I'm guessing they're all far inland, so maybe a hedge against sea level rises? The source of the construction is private companies, but in China of course most of the large private companies are controlled by the state to a great extent.

Possibly "make work" projects to keep sectors of the pouplation busy whgere there is no other work available?Or their versions of Potempkin villages??

krissovo wrote: »

My news alerts just kicked up this interesting article. While I certainly do not expect it to cause a situation if it knocks out the power grid in anyway it could cause some interesting challenges to us.

There are two kinds of EMP discharges as I recall, one is solely from high altitude nuclear weapon bursts, thats the lad that fries all electronics, laptops, computers, anything plugged into the grid or attached to a short wire.

The other one is the solar flare type EMP, which gives you the aurora borealis. The last time there was a major event like that was back in 1859:

Telegraph systems all over Europe and North America failed, in some cases even shocking telegraph operators. Telegraph pylons threw sparks and telegraph paper spontaneously caught fire. Some telegraph systems appeared to continue to send and receive messages despite having been disconnected from their power supplies.

That would be quite serious these days, although property damage would be minimal, it would just knock out the substations. Major power losses but once they replaced the fried components everything would go basically back to normal, so anywhere between a couple of hours to a few months for the affected areas.