Civilization After an EMP: TEOTWAWKI (Which is not a Hawaiian word)

“Look, any longer out on that road and I’m one of them, you know?  A terminal crazy, only I got a bronze badge to say I’m one of the good guys.” – Mad Max

Before Hurricane Ike:  Looks like lemon cookies, Weight Watchers® and vegetables will be there after the apocalypse.  Also?  The wine section was empty.  No booze left in the entire store. 

This is part II of a story that begins at the start of a catastrophic collapse – you can find the first part here (Civilization, The Iron Triangle, and You).  It begins at 4AM, at the start of a blizzard on the East Coast.  Thankfully, your protagonist isn’t on the East Coast – but he is 252 miles from home, and most of the important electrical devices that he’s used to having are now (and forever more) inoperable.  Back to the hotel room:

I was now wide awake.  Soon my hotel room would be getting cool – thankfully not cold, it was 40°F outside and not colder.  But one thing I knew – it was going to get strange, and soon.

I got dressed and started to pack.  I assessed my belongings, and the things in the room.

Computers, phones, digital watch?  Useless.  I put them on the desk.  That would be as good a place to put useless things.  It’s odd, because before I went to sleep, those items were vital for me in the information they contained and the way I used them for work.  Now they were nothing but dead weight.

Thankfully, I had packed for winter – winter coat, gloves, and boots.  I also had my workout clothes and gym shoes.  I decided to keep them – I tossed them in my backpack.  I kept some paper and a pen and pencil.  Why?  Not sure.  The novel I was reading?  I hated to leave it, halfway finished.  But it was dead weight.

I looked at the room – there were two bottles of complementary water – I could use those.  I left the room, with a single knapsack, half full.  I was headed to Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart wasn’t exactly chaos – I had apparently gotten up fairly quickly – a few of the more enterprising employees had broken into the candles and matches and there were lights up and down the main aisles.  This was a 24-hour Wal-Mart, which meant that you could buy your Ol’ Roy dog food at 3AM as the stockers replenished the shelves for the next day.

I walked down the aisle towards the toy section, and took a right.  There they were – left over from Christmas.  Bikes.  Rows of them, all in a line – from small pink bikes with pink and glitter tassels up to off road bikes with big, fat tires.

I grabbed one of those – it was on the top shelf and pulled it on down.  I looked for a pull-behind cart, but I guessed that February wasn’t a strong month for pulling babies behind a bike in the Midwest, so I didn’t see one.  I looked at the bike accessories and found a repair kit, a bike bag that strapped to the handlebars, a dozen spare tires, and some of the goop that you can pop into a tire so that it re-seals after a thorn pops through the tube.  Oh, and a small bike pump.  Not much good to have a new tire but can’t inflate it.

I then dropped over into menswear – I grabbed a wool cap and scarf, some winder gloves, and thick wool socks, and then walked to the checkout line.  A single night manager was there.

“Sorry, man,” he said.  “I can’t do any transactions at all right now.”  He waved around the store.  Power’s out.

I laughed.  “Sure, I can see that!  But I have to get this stuff – it’s my boy’s birthday this morning,” I lied,” and my ex will use this against me in court if I forget to get him a present again.”

“Sorry, man, register is dead.  No can do.”  As I got closer I could see he was a younger man, early 20’s.  Probably pretty committed to Wal-Mart.

“Hey, I understand . . . I’ll go and put the stuff back.”  I started to head the other direction back into the darkened aisles of merchandise.

I turned back to face him.  “You know, there is another way.”  I pushed the bike and tossed the rest of the merchandise on the motionless belt.

“All of this stuff has UPC labels on it.  I can just cut them off, and pay you in cash now.  Then, when the registers come back on you can ring it up.”

His expression didn’t seem to be confident that this was a good plan.

“Tell you what – the bike was about $150.”

“$147.89,” he responded.

“Yup.  And all of the rest of this stuff is less than $200, total, right?”

He nodded.

“Cool.  That’s $350.  Here’s $500.  I’ll get you the UPCs from this, and then you can keep the change after you ring it up, and your inventory matches.  We good here?”

We were good.  Thankfully I generally traveled with a few hundred in cash, mainly for emergencies.  I had $100 left as I pushed the bike out of the side door – the one that wasn’t electric.

I walked the bike to my car, which was parked outside of the hotel.  I pressed the “door open” button on the key fob.  Nothing.  Which is what I expected.  I put my actual, physical key into the lock (which I hadn’t done for years with this car) and opened the door.

Just to be sure I tried to start the car – nothing, not a light, not a click.  Nothing.  I tried the headlights – oddly enough they worked, but none of the interior lights came on.  I turned off the headlights.  The trunk was entirely electric, so I had to pull the rear seatbacks down to get into the trunk.  I was plenty dark, but what I was looking for was just one bag.

For several years I’ve kept kits in every car that we own.  Simple stuff.  A compact blanket.  Waterproof matches and a lighter.  A small saw.  Fuel cubes meant for lighting a charcoal grill.  A water-purifying straw.  A tarp, and some concentrated food bricks.  A hatchet.  100 feet of parachute cord.  Two pocket knives.  Some carabiners.  Duct tape.  Stuff for when a day turned bad.

I found it the pack – it was tan and pushed against the seat back, so it was easy to get to.  I hated abandoning the cool socket set and other tools in the trunk, but since they were heavy and I had no way to pull them?  I’d leave them for whoever found them.  I put the bike repair kit, tubes, and pump into the bike bag.

I clipped the backpack from the hotel room to the kit bag, swapped my socks for the brand new wool socks from Wal-Mart, put on the knit hat, scarf and gloves, and started pedaling.

In February, the wind blew mainly from the north.  I was heading south.  I got on my bike, and turned south, skipping the Interstate as I headed through town.  Fifteen minutes later I had cleared the edges of the town, and was headed through open farmland as the Sun began to rise.  I was on my way.

### (for now)

TEOTWAWKI is short for “The End Of The World As We Know It.”  Sure, it’s a song from R.E.M., but it’s also shorthand for groups and individuals for the sudden collapse scenario where the world changes in an instant.  Many of the old rules, if not all of them, disappear very quickly.  And, if we didn’t have electricity, we’d never have to listen to R.E.M. again.  So, it’s got that going for it.

This version of TEOTWAWKI is set quite deliberately in wintertime, at the start of a blizzard on the East Coast.

Why?

Photo via wikimedia, CC3.0 By SA, Bill Rankin

20% (roughly) of the population lives there.  Government is seated there.  The financial and trading center of the United States is there.  If that region lost power in winter, in the middle of a blizzard?  At least 50% of the population would die that week, and I would expect the total casualties would be 90% or more within two weeks in that region.  The combination of the cold and chaos and the extreme population density would make most dystopian science fiction novels look positively cheery.  One thing that East Coasters don’t think much about is where the food they eat and the gasoline they use comes from.  Hint:  it’s not New York.

The average person has a couple of days of food in the house.  The average supermarket has three days of inventory.  Beyond that?  Factories, warehouses and logistics are required to keep a continual supply of food on the way to prevent starvation.  Our technically advanced and efficient civilization that allows us our apparent wealth, paradoxically makes us susceptible to nearly instant poverty.  The areas that are the least used to modern conveniences and least reliant on power will be the most resilient.

What about the cars, would they really not work?  That’s hard to say.  Although there has been some testing done (it is summarized in the Report of the Commission to Assess the Threat of Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack) that would seem to indicate that many cars (80%??) might be unaffected, there is much that is still classified – and I don’t think the classified information says “not a problem.”  I will note that Congressman Roscoe Bartlett, the guy who led the EMP study in Congress now lives off the electric grid in a self-sustaining remote farm.

But, let’s say that 90% of the cars still work.  I chose the opposite for this story, but let’s say that 90% still work.  The cars would be good . . . exactly for as long as they had gasoline in them.  Without electricity, getting gasoline would be pretty difficult.  There’s a general consensus that most cars built before 1984 would work okay, as their electronics were minimal in comparison to today.  And computers and chips would be in trouble.  One declassified document I found in my research noted that computers were at the top of the list of devices that could be destroyed by an electromagnetic pulse.  And cars today are increasingly computer-dependent, but they’re also made of metal and don’t feature long conductors, so, that might help them be more resilient.

Why a bicycle?  Well, that’s the one thing that I could be pretty sure to find at 4AM in any town with a Wal-Mart.  And having cash is nice.  One time I tried to pay with credit card but mine had been cancelled (ID theft).  Having cash was very nice.  Carry some.

But with a bicycle you can cover a LOT of ground in a day – 100 to 150 miles for someone out of shape wouldn’t be out of the question.  If someone rode regularly?  They could easily do double that, especially with the wind at your back.  I did read one book called 77 Days in September – you can get it on Amazon – where the guy walked all the way home from Houston to Montana after an EMP.

I’m pretty sure by day three he would have figured out how to get a bicycle.  You could bike his route in 12 days or so, but I guess that would have killed the snappy title.  It’s not a bad book, but, you know, bikes won’t be hurt by an EMP.  Even many motorcycles might make it through fine, or be made to work with minimal retrofitting.  Maybe that was the point Mad Max was making?

The final point for today’s post:  There is a huge advantage in moving quickly when the rules change.  On multiple occasions in my life I’ve managed to get motel rooms, rental cars, or out of a really bad situation because I realized that things were off the rails and, rather than rage about it, act before the herd did.

In emergencies, being right 15 minutes before everyone else is an amazing advantage, which is why preppers prep.

Looks like this series will take up another Monday or two, at least until our hero can get home.

But what will he find along the way?  What will he find when he gets there?