Setting Your Resiliency Goal

Setting Your Resiliency Goals

To prepare for a loss of services, you’ll want to make an educated guess about what might happen and how you might weather it. Reality will never match your planning exactly, but a solid plan is still far better than no plan—or a weak one. Your plan will depend on your goal.

In many cases, city dwellers cannot achieve ambitious goals, as renters and unavoidably reliant on outside services, but they can still vastly upgrade their resilience profiles with a small amount of well spent money. Suburbanites can usually aim for greater resiliency, and rural folks even more. I cannot tell you what your goals should be. They will vary based on your location, home ownership, age, disposable income, family size, ambitions, distractions, and more. As a general guide, a city dweller can, without too much expense or effort, live reasonably comfortably for a week without services. A suburbanite can aim for a month. A rural person like me can reasonably target up to a year. The cost depends on your goal and expertise in implementing part or all of your plan yourself.

City dwellers: one week

For city dwellers, I’m talking about being able to:

• Stay warm.

• Have enough to eat and drink.

• Keep computers and cell phones charged.

• Maintain necessary supplements and medications on hand.

• Flush toilets.

• Have enough light to read or work at night.

Optional resiliency might include credible home defense and the ability to get news without cell service or TV.

Suburbanites: one month

A suburbanite can aim to do all of the above for thirty days, plus:

• Retain full functionality of the house (heating/cooling, water, cooking, sanitation as much as possible).

• Maintain the capacity to travel once a week on a forty-mile round trip if necessary.

  
  

Rural residents: up to a year

A rural person can work toward doing all of the above for a year (possibly with less travel), plus:

• Hunt and grow food to supplement stored food.

• Actively communicate at a distance with others (radio or other non-grid systems).

• Maintain sufficient tools and supplies to clear downed trees, restock firewood, and repair broken amenities.

• Provide shelter for friends or family members coming from cities or suburban areas.

Why everyone should prepare for at least a week.

In the past decade alone, services have been interrupted many times by storms, tornados, floods, and fires in most areas of the United States. If someone is not prepared for a week of interruptions, then it would seem they do not mind being very uncomfortable, becoming dependent on others, or they simply have not made the time to prepare for the inevitable. I try not to judge, but if you can’t take care of yourself and your family for a week, you are probably going to ask someone else for help. Is that responsible when you could easily have been prepared—not just for yourself, but as an asset to your community instead of a burden?

Longer outages: a month to a year

I’m not sure many people in the United States have experienced an interruption in services for a month. I haven’t. Experts can’t say for sure how many would die in such a scenario, but estimates range from several hundred thousand to several million excess deaths. If power went out for three months, the estimate runs from the low millions to tens of millions. If it went out for a year, some experts expect that 80–90% of U.S. citizens would die.

So, statistically speaking, it appears that:

• All but the most vulnerable can likely last a week without services.

• Many could last a month with planning.

• The ambitious and lucky might last three months to a year.

Given that, why not prepare to live reasonably comfortably—and with much less anxiety and fear—for a month without services, if it is not that hard to do so?

The vulnerability of the U.S. grid

Most Americans do not realize how vulnerable the U.S. grid is. It is more vulnerable to extended, large-scale interruptions than many Western European and Asian systems, mainly because it is older, more fragmented, more exposed to weather, and a frequent target in cyber and EMP discussions. While U.S. politicians throw military weight around the world, they don’t advertise that our adversaries could seriously cripple our grid. That grid also depends on a small number of huge, house-sized transformers that cannot quickly be replaced and may take many months to a year or more to fully restore.

So what sorts of things can bring down the grid for a month or up to a year?

• Nuclear war is one, but I, for one, have no plan to survive that. The resiliency I advocate is not intended to survive that level of calamity. To survive nuclear war, you’d need a properly designed, fully stocked bunker or extraordinary survival skills and the means to bug out to a very remote place. I have no interest in a bunker and no desire to leave my homestead to be scared and uncomfortable in a foreign land.

• More realistic scenarios for most of us include:

  • Tornados, storms, floods, fires, ice storms, or vandalism that could bring down your local grid for a week or more.

  • War, an EMP, a large volcanic eruption, asteroid impact, massive solar flare, or a large-scale cyber-attack that could bring down the grid for a month or longer.

These are the scenarios for which I am relatively prepared, though I won’t know how well until something actually happens.

My personal goals and yours

Living here with my life partner as middle-class Americans, in my late sixties, and with at best about thirty years left to live, I have two main goals.

The first goal is simply to feel resilient. It feels good, right now, in my normal day-to-day life, to know I can handle what comes. We are having a major winter event this weekend with ice, low temperatures, and expected power outages. I have zero concerns. That feeling alone is worth my investment in resiliency, even if I never truly “need” it.

The second goal is to be able to stay home for up to a year without outside inputs of energy or food and live nearly as comfortably as we do now.

Each level of preparedness comes with a price tag. I understand that the poor have fewer options. But most of the people reading this have at least some choices. I suggest you do some research of your own, decide what kinds of interruptions in services you want to be prepared for, and tailor your plan accordingly.