by St. Funogas, Survival Blog:
This article discusses some of the thoughts I’ve had about the different stages of post-SHTF life while writing my upcoming article, “A Realistic Top-10 Prepping List.” Consider this a preface to that article.
Everything presented here is my opinion of course. As I’ve prepped and worked towards living a self-reliant lifestyle, I’ve thought a lot about things over the years. Many of my conclusions are based on history, ideas presented in some of the post-apocalyptic novels and movies, reading daily SurvivalBlog articles for the past seven years, and concerns about my current situation if the Schumer hits the fan next Thursday. Some of the possibilities presented here may come to pass if we were to end up in a long-term grid-down world.
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My goal is to get those preparing for a long-term TEOTWAWKI event to tweak their thinking and take a closer look at what exactly we should be preparing for. While researching various top-10 TEOTWAWKI prepping-item lists, I discovered two things. First, almost all of the list makers weren’t quite sure what the goals were. Second, I came to the realization that many of us are preparing for the first two stages of life after the SHTF but not the third and final stage, the New Normal.
So here are my thoughts on those three stages.
The three stages of TEOTWAWKI are: the Emergency stage, the Survival stage, and the New Normal stage.
STAGE 1: EMERGENCY STAGE
The emergency phase will either be a slow-motion event taking weeks, or a more sudden realization that the Schumer has officially hit the fan.
Types of Emergencies
Slow-motion event – A slow-motion situation would be watching the world rapidly falling apart before our eyes, knowing the S is probably going to hit the fan in the very near future. Watching a war unfolding which involves the US, getting worse by the day, or an overnight turn of events, could inspire many to make some last-minute preparations. For the better informed, it could be an indication that it’s either time to get out of Dodge, or for those of us already out of Dodge, to go buy that last case of Thin Mints, top off the gas and propane tanks, and buckle in for the ride.
During this slow-motion collapse, most people will be in a state of apathy or ignorance, not really understanding what’s going on other than what Fox News and CNN are broadcasting. As some of them start to realize that perhaps things can get a whole lot worse, the majority will still be in a state of denial, also known as normalcy bias, believing the possibility of something big happening isn’t likely. If it does, no worries, the government will get everything fixed soon enough. That ignorance and denial will cause further wasting of time and resources. By the time the majority does finally realize their life is about to change, it’s too late to do much. From then on they’ll be in constant emergency mode trying to figure out what happened and how to cope with the unknown. Many will never get past the emergency phase since they’ll lack the basic means to live for more than just a few weeks with what little food and water they have on hand. Water will be the single largest issue for most.
Another type of slow-motion event would be a pandemic with far worse results than the Spanish Influenza pandemic of 1918 which would cause many of us to self-isolate. If any of the possibilities explained below were to occur, enough people self-isolating could not only disrupt supply chains, but also affect basic public services. Were enough of the workers who make water and electricity available self-isolate, small (or large) grid-down types of results cold occur.
The alternative media (including some science journals) was two months ahead of the mainstream media when the covid epidemic first started. Generally, disease-causing organisms stay within a certain class of animals such as birds or mammals. Occasionally, they can jump from those groups of animals to humans in an event known as zoonotic spillover. Sometimes the results are disastrous and have on more than one occasion caused an epidemic or even a pandemic. The Spanish flu epidemic occurred after an avian flu jumped from birds to humans. Roughly 500 million people were infected which was a third of the earth’s population, and between 50 and 100 million people died. In other words, one in five people who were infected with the Spanish flu virus died. Those kinds of numbers would have a serious effect on today’s supply chains. Ebola and bird flu are also from spillover events and both have a nearly 50% death rate. The Hendra virus in Australia moved from bats to horses with an 80% mortality rate, then into humans with a 60% mortality rate..
