TEOTWAKI Part III: Get on your bikes and ride!

“I thought I was prepared.  I knew the theory, I . . . reality’s different.” – Interstellar

Heh heh.  During the hurricane we were in, I think we gained weight.

This is part III of a series of life after an Electromagnetic Pulse Takes down much of the electronics that form the systems that allow us to live our lives in the relative luxury we have today . . . part I is here (Civilization, The Iron Triangle, and You) and part II is here (Civilization After an EMP: TEOTWAWKI (Which is not a Hawaiian word)).  As always, comments on inaccuracies are welcome – I’ve learned quite a bit about our systems writing these, and love getting the feedback to make them more realistic.

Okay, back to the story . . . our hero has realized that an EMP has occurred, secured transportation, and is heading home.

THE TOWN HAD BEEN quiet as I had pedaled through.  Not many people are out at 3am, and almost none of them are happy about it.  In a town this size, I bet there wasn’t more than one cop on duty when the power went away.

The wind was at my back, and a pretty stiff one today.  It was okay.  The road was clear of traffic and there’s a stillness when you’re going the same speed as the wind.  It’s odd – you are travelling at 20 miles per hour (same as the wind), but there is not a hint of wind.  It’s also nice, because when you bicycle in cool air, your feet and hands get very cold.  Because you’re going with the wind, you can hear much better than someone just standing outside in the wind – your senses aren’t supernatural, but it certainly feels that way.

South out of town with the north wind at my back, I thought about the trip ahead.  I’d become so used to using either my phone for a map or the GPS that I knew there wasn’t one in the car.  It had been a long time since I’d seen a map in a convenience store.  Heck, it had been a long time since I’d seen a magazine in one.  But the trip ahead was fairly simple – head south and then head east.  That was where home was.

There was one big city between here and home – hundreds of thousands of people.

And that was the danger.  It wasn’t cold.  It wasn’t planes falling from the sky.  It was people.  And there were, probably, about a million between me and home.  The last thing I wanted to do was to go through them, even if I could do it today before things became really chaotic.

My bet was that I could head south and then loop around to the east.  From memory, there weren’t many people at all along that route, and if I could make 120 miles or so, I could turn east.

And it was mostly quiet.

For the most part, all of the little towns I passed through might have a gas station and a small diner, but the route I was on was pretty unpopulated.

About hour two, or forty miles according to the mile markers, I heard a low rumbling off to the east.  I pulled the bike to a stop and looked.  A small, bright orange spot was visible on the horizon, with a thick, black cloud beginning to form above it.

I pulled a water bottle out of my backpack and took a long drink.  Nice thing about the day being cool was the water was cool, too, about 60°F.

I wondered for a second on what could have caused the explosion on the horizon.  I vaguely recalled that there was a crude oil refinery off in that direction.  Yeah, that was probably it.  Refineries are run very efficiently, and lots and lots of automated valves and switches and such allowed them to run with only a few people.  But all of those were electronic.  Looks like something failed.

As I watched, in fairly quick succession I saw two more fireballs.  I straddled my bike and waited.  About a minute and a half later, I heard the twin rumbles from the new explosions.  Fifteen miles?  Twenty?  Certainly far enough that I don’t have to worry about hazardous vapors on this trip.  I put the bottle back in my pack and continued pedaling.  There are things I can fix and things I can’t.  Exploding refineries after an EMP were definitely in the latter category.

Most of the small towns had forgettable names and were so small that I was through them in three or four blocks, and they looked mostly deserted, though I did see smoke from quite a few chimneys.  The strength in this area, at least, is that most of the actual homes (versus the trailer homes) were built back before piped in natural gas, before electricity.  They’d be warm, as long as the inhabitants had wood to burn.  Of course, there’d be house fires as chimneys not used in decades were used by people who’d not used a fireplace or woodstove in as many decades.

At last I came to a big enough city that I’d heard the name before.  It looked to be a mile or so on a side.  I decided it was a city that was big enough that I didn’t want to risk going through it.

I decided to skirt it to the east – it looked like the most of the city was to the west of the road that I was on, so, a quick detour a mile west might be all that I needed to do.

After going a mile east, I turned south again.  A mile later?  I was staring at a dead end, caused by a river.

It was noon.  I had two options.  I could head back to the city, where I was reasonably certain that there was a bridge, or I could head farther east, where, in sparsely populated country like this I might not see another bridge for miles.

I decided to chance the city.  It was small, I told myself, and a lone guy on a bicycle wasn’t much of a threat, right?  Although my legs were getting a bit tired (I hadn’t biked in three years) I felt a surge of adrenaline as I neared the city.  I got up speed.  It turned out this road entered the city right at the bridge.  There were a few people at the bridge, but no physical barriers or any sort of road block.  There were a few shouted questions “Hey, what’s going on out there?” as I went by, but that was all.  I just smiled and waved.

I noticed some of the men were armed, but nobody raised a weapon toward me as I headed away from the town.

I kept on going south without further incident.  I headed east, more or less directly toward home after I’d gone about 120 miles south.  No hypotenuse for me.  Straight south, then straight east.

I turned east in another quiet, small town.  I pedaled with the mild evening wind for about an hour until I came to a small streambed.

It was secluded, three miles since the last house, and there were trees all around the stream.  Good.  I found firewood, plus a small, secluded grassy patch.  I got some small sticks, and piled up some of the sandstone from the creek bed for a fire ring.  I pulled out my knife and turned one stick into a “fuzz stick” – a lot of small, shallow cuts into the stick, leaving the wood together so that it looked like a fuzzy stick when done.  If you don’t have paper – it’s a great way to start a fire since it has so much surface area.  I also gathered handfuls of dried, dead grass (easy to find in February!) and added in some very small sticks.

If you don’t have lots of matches, make each one count.  Spend the time preparing to make the fire before you strike the match.  And I had no idea if I could even make it home in three days.  A big snowstorm might set me back for days, or weeks.  And how many matches did we have at home?  It was time to save them all.

The small fire was nice.  I’m not sure if it was the light or the warmth, but it was pleasant, unlike my butt, which was very sore, and I’m sure I’d feel fire in my legs tomorrow.  As I went to sleep that night in my makeshift tarp-tent, I was completely unaware that this would be my last completely peaceful day until I got home.

### (until next Monday)

The first day after a catastrophe like this is bound to be filled with a tremendous amount of inaction – nobody will know quite what to do.  Everyone will walk by the switch on the wall and flip it, expecting, believing that the light will come on.  We’ve been conditioned for that.  Ultimately, the vast majority of people will believe that things will return to normal, even when it’s clear that they never will.  Nassim Nicholas Taleb talks in his book The Black Swan about how his family talks about what they’ll do when Lebanon returns to normal, which at this point no one thinks will ever happen, even though the Civil War that tore Lebanon apart started in 1975, 43 years ago.  Lebanon had been one of the most advanced countries on earth, but now large areas of the country are considered “no go” for almost anyone with a modicum of sanity.  But people expect that one day . . . it will return to normal.

This is wonderful.  If the lights are going to come back on, slaughtering that neighbor that played the music really loud (Bon Jovi?  Really?) while you were trying to sleep is a bad idea.  If the lights are done?  So is that neighbor.  Scores will be settled, especially if it involves Bon Jovi.

During that first day, people will begin to understand that maybe this catastrophe is different.  Outside of every catastrophe that has hit the United States in history, this one isn’t regional.  90% of the unaffected population won’t be available to turn to for help, which happens today after a hurricane or volcano or Rosie O’Donnell-created earthquake.

A regional incident means that the region is going to be helped.  A national or global event?  You’re on your own.  Every rule changes.  Think you own that second house down by the lake?  I think the family that moved into it might not care.  And neither will the sheriff.

But there is one place where the time delay between civilization and Mad Max® level insanity is thinnest:

Modern cities.

Win a sports title in a modern city and you can be happy if only two people are killed and the arson is limited to a small area near downtown.  The larger the city, the quicker the violence hits, and the more violent it will be.  Google® “Selco” if you want to hear the grim stories from his survival in the cities during the Balkans War in the 1990’s.  And those were cities that had spent years under the Communist® system with people who were used to working around failing systems.  Imagine Baltimore when things go really bad?

Again, in a catastrophe like this – avoid cities and other people at all costs.

I hinted around that there are other infrastructure pieces that will have issues after an EMP.  Refineries, pipelines, and power plants are absolutely dependent upon control systems that pull data from the boiling oil or high pressure natural gas and use it to make decisions. Many times those decisions are made at millisecond speed via computer without any input from a human required.  And without those systems?  At best, the pipelines and refineries and power plants won’t work.  At worst?  Systems that are used for safety won’t work.  Normally, everything is designed to go to a safe state.  But those safe states often rely on there being power, even battery power.  There will be some failures in those safety systems.  If we’re lucky, it just wrecks equipment, and not result in huge fireballs.

Nuclear power plants are a special case (and not in a good way), which we’ll discuss in a future post.

Oh, and the fuzz stick thing?  It works really well.