Anatomy of an Apocalypse

Thinking the Unthinkable - Part I

Everyday life in America is easy. All necessities of life are provided to you, in seemingly endless quantities, at the supermarket, gas station and a turn of the tap. What would happen if this extremely interconnected system failed?

That's the subject of this article. The purpose is to show you how fragile our lifestyle is. You will be shocked to discover that America is not too big to fail - quite to the contrary, it may be too big not to fail.

Part II will cover the reconstitution of these systems and what you can do.

The scenario here is a complete collapse of our national electricity, finance, and petroleum systems. Here's some of the potential causes:

- EMP burst
- Solar Event
- Pandemic
- Widespread crop failure
- Hyperinflation / financial collapse
- Nuclear exchange
- Hacker attack on critical infrastructure

To flesh out this scenario, I've relied on the EMP Commission Report, auto and aircraft mechanics, a chemical engineer, and a manufacturing engineer. I've also lived through a 150 mph typhoon and a 7.8 magnitude earthquake - and called to duty for disaster relief in both instances.

Here's a graphic showing the interconnectedness of our critical systems. Pull out one piece across the nation, the entire system collapses. Click image for a larger view:

Our financial sector is completely inter-meshed with the telecommunications system. Most of the money in circulation is simply electronic.

Food distribution relies on electricity, petroleum, telecommunications, and transportation systems. No power? Then no fuel gets produced, trucks don't run, orders can't be transmitted, payment can't be made. If the crisis continues for more than several weeks, the ability to create hybrid seeds for the next growing season will be gone. Very few farmers have heirloom seeds on hand.

Our power system is also quite fragile. Most power plants in the U.S. do not have the capability of a "black start", which is to say they need external power to turn the power plant on. And once it is on, it consumes copious amounts of hydrocarbons which have to be delivered somehow. Switches and transformers of the transport grid rely on the telecommunications network to command SCADAs, or computerized system controllers. Without telecommunications, power plant operators would have to run the network blind. And speaking of telecom, overseas hackers have been probing how to control and shut down power plant SCADA systems...

Petroleum refineries depend on all the above. These systems are very dependent on reliable electricity and telecommunications. The most dangerous time for a refinery, chemical engineers will tell you, is startup and shutdown. Power getting cut off is not a graceful shutdown - and refineries have burned to the ground due to just that.

Many of the consumables you rely on have short shelf lives, and in a crisis will disappear quicker than you think. The standard answer is that an average city has three days of consumables in it - but in a crisis, the store shelves could be bare in mere hours!

Here's a table showing the likely exhaustion dates and longevity of common items. This scenario of collapse starts when the national electricity goes off or supermarkets are sold out. It's a bit of an eye-chart, click for a larger version:

I'll touch upon some of the items here:

Gas: Many stations rely on daily deliveries of gas, sometimes a couple of deliveries per day. You may empty your tank waiting in line for the last gas in town.
Cars: Late-model cars left unattended drain their batteries within two months. A good winter freeze and the battery is completely dead. Try push-starting an automatic!
Cell phones: Towers have backup power only for a few days at most. Ditto for wired telephones.
Deer: Deer will be almost extinct within a month East of the Mississippi.
Ammunition: There's likely under 15 billion rounds of ammunition in the US. Divide that by the UN estimate of over 250 million firearms nationally, you come with a pathetic 60 rounds each average.
Trains: It's not only the locomotives or the fuel to run them. It's the tracks. Without annual maintenance they come out of alignment due to heat and become unusable.
Government: In a collapse scenario it will become quickly evident that Humpty-Dumpty can't be patched together anytime soon. Emergency supplies, meant for the American people, will be hoarded by regional bureaucrats who will use it as payment for security personnel. They most likely will set up shop near Navy ships, hydroelectric dams, and nuclear plants. Islands of control in a sea of chaos.

After these systems have collapsed the open-source estimates I've read range from 50% to 90% mortality. Not pleasant dinner table conversation.

In Part II I'll cover the steps needed to reconstitute a basic infrastructure.

-- Hugh Farnham