Monthly Archives: July 2024

A mile of dead wires

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Remember the coworker I mentioned a few posts back? She finally got power up at her place restored Sunday night. She’s having car problems and her and her husband are sharing one vehicle.  I offered to give her a ride home and to reclaim my loaned gear.

As I was driving her outta town I saw, literally, a mile of stumps and matchsticks where the powerlines used to be. Apparently once one or two go, they yank down the others. The wires were laying by the side of the road like garden hoses on a summer day. Some power poles snapped a few feet above the ground but it looks like some were snapped at ground level. It was a mess.

I did see quite a few power trucks and crews driving around so, despite the ‘the power company gives all their money to shareholders and not into maintenance’ ranting from the left here in town, progress is being made. But…those boys have really got their work cut out for them. I hope the folks out there are treating them right.

My new water cans arrived yesterday. Even though I personally suffered zero problems at my house because of this event, that doesn’t mean the possibility isn’t there. I had a half dozen of the Scepter water cans on hand in the basement. I just upped that number with another ten. Why that many? Three reasons: First, why not? Second, it makes it easier for me to help people that I choose to help (enforced charity, rather than charity-by-choice, is not charity), and finally, at some point I’ll need to be stashing some of these at an off-site location…could be Commander Zero’s Post Apocalyptic Bunker O’ Love And Lingerie Proving Ground, or it could be at a friends outbuilding along with a Pelican case of gear and some fuel cans. Regardless, they seemed like a good idea.

I really need to get my little hideaway set up and online. I am rapidly losing my ability to let living around these useless people not get to me.

A comment over at Bayou Renaissance Man really summed up the sheeple attitude:

A few years back, I read a piece on crisis management and why people screw up so badly, over and over. The writer, who is some sort of expert on the subject, said the chain of denial reasoning goes like this:

  • It won’t happen.
  • OK, it’s going to happen, but not to me.
  • OK, it’s going to happen to me, but it won’t be that bad.
  • OK, it happened to me, and it was so bad, there was nothing I could have done about it anyway.

This commenter is absolutely correct. As a disaster progresses, the unprepared go though those stages and never imagine that their level of suffering is inversely proportional to the amount of personal responsibility they’ve undertaken. The larger overall problem, I suppose, is that no one wants to take responsibility. In my town, like many other places, we have a huge amount of homeless people causing all sorts of problems. The lefties in town demand that we provide all sorts of services and accommodations for these ‘neighbors’. But, if you ask what about the responsibilities of the homeless to actively take part in their redemption…well, you’re clearly lacking empathy. The notion of taking responsibility for your situation is just not on the radar for these people….its all about the feels. Empathy, compassion, solidarity, etc, etc.

When it’s 2am and there’s no electricty, your water pump is dead as a doornail, there’s a puddle forming under your fridge, and the kids are telling you theyre scared….which would you rather have…empathy or a generator, some stored gas, and a few flashlights?

I really don’t want to be a misanthrope. I think that people are not fundamentally bad, but they are dangerous, not just when when they’re scared. It’s just downright foolish to ignore that the other person’s self-interest will usually trump yours. Men In Black was a popcorn movie but it had this nugget that will be forever making the rounds on the internet:

“A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.”

And, worst of all, their vote counts as much as yours or mine.

I cannot get my heavily fortified little slice of Montana fast enough.

 

Who can’t afford fifteen cent water?

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Bottled water is available for free at one of the city buildings for people who have no water. Keep in mind that Walmart, CostCo and every supermarket in town is open and doing business. I just got back from WalMart and a 20 oz. bottle of water is $0.15….fifteen cents a bottle.

I am unable to believe that anyone is incapable of affording bottled water at fifteen cents a bottle. I mentioned this online and was told that its the difference between gas money to get to work or having water to drink. I am absolutely slack-jawed at the stupidity of this comment. But I’ll bet those same people who feel a fifteen cent bottle of water is ‘unaffordable’ bought craft beer, weed, cigarettes, or McDonalds today. To put that in perspective, 120 ounces of water, almost a gallon, comes out to six 20-oz bottles at $0.15 ea. Or, in other words, a six pack of drinking water is about a dollar. Skip one beer, one joint, one chocolate bar, or one can of pop out of a vending machine and you’ve got the resources to buy enough drinking water for the day.

Sadly, this town is full of people who absolutely refuse to take any accountability or responsibility for their well being. The second one thing, big or little, goes wrong, the reflex of these parasites is to turn to .gov. And if you question them about their helplessness and their lack of willingness to fend for themselves, you get tagged as ‘lacking empathy’.

All this to say that I really have given up on the unprepared strangers around me. If you can’t be bothered to take steps to be prepared to take care of yourself, or worse yet you can’t be bothered to take steps to ensure your family’s safety and security, then I am absolutely uninterested in covering for your abdication of personal responsibility.

Sure, I do help out my unprepared neighbors or coworkers but those people aren’t strangers to me. And I try to nudge them in a direction of more preparedness afterwards. But these idiot mouth-breathers who can’t even be bothered to have a flashlight and a case of bottled water? Screw them. They’re part of the problem.

 

More lessons

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One of my coworkers is still without power, which means she is also without water. She’s been coming into the office and taking our spare 5-gallon water cooler bottles and bringing them home. I asked her how much water was she going through that she needed this many. And her response was….waitforit……”It takes a lot of water to flush the toilets.”

:::shaking my head:::

I grabbed an empty garbage can from under my desk and said “Follow me please”. We walked down the hallway to the maintenance closet where the slop sink was. I filled the itty-bitty wastebasket with about a gallon or so of water.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m going to show you how to flush a toilet with a bucket. Lets go.”

We walked into the bathroom. “Throw some toilet paper in there.”, I said, pointing to the bowl. She did as I asked.

“Ok, now watch. Slowly and then all at once.” I slowly poured the bucket into the bowl and then dumped the rest in. The water swirled, and -whoosh-, water and TP disappeared. I turned to her, “Ok, that’ll do the job and it uses a lot less water than filling the tank and flushing. Got it?”

After I got back to my desk, I forwarded her the YouTube video you see above.

It’s not her fault, I suppose. No one ever taught her this sort of thing, and its not the kind of thing that it ever occurred to her to investigate on her own. But, still, five-gallons of Culligan drinking water that we pay a guy to deliver should not be used to flush the toilet.

Shes also cooking on her grill but needs propane. Because I’m a soft touch, I pulled two barbecue bombs from my stash and four Scepter cans of water and brought them to work over lunch and loaded them in her truck. (Her husband is outta town on a job for the week and she’s left wrangling kids and job.)

We shall see if I get them back or not.

As for me, I’m using this learning opportunity to reinforce a few things. I’m picking up another couple flats of bottled water to distribute among my freezers, and I just ordered a bunch more Scepter cans.

Still not outta the woods

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Interestingly, there are still large parts of town without power. Normally power is very seldom disrupted for more than 24 hours. I’m reading that a major substation took some severe damage and that may be the contributing factor.

Me? I’m happy as clam. Power never went out in my neighborhood and even if it did I have the brains to have planned ahead. I’m reading the local Reddit threads and am unsurprised at the amount of absolute dumbasses who say that they fully expected Northwest Energy (NWE) to drop the ball on this situation but, despite expecting this sort of thing, had no plans in place to mitigate it.

I know this is familiar country to you and I, but here’s some observations:

If you have any empty space in your freezer, it should always be filled with water bottles. I see people talking about how they need to buy bags of ice to keep in their powerless freezers and while that works, as that ice melts your freezer turns into a swamp of thawing food and ice water. Bottles are easy, self-contained, and you can drink them when they are no longer frozen. It’s the best way to store extra water and increase the thermal mass of your freezer at the same time. And, in non-crisis times, they are cheap cheap cheap. I just picked up a couple flats of water bottles at CostCo last week and distributed them through my freezers.

My boss couldn’t’ get to work because she couldn’t get her electric garage door open. Those of us with a y-chromosome know the solution to this, but for the rest of you – that little T-handle hanging on a rope from your garage track will disengage things allowing you to manually pull your door up/down.

Anytime it looks like there might be a loss of power, start charging your devices. Or do this. Or charge from your car. Or have a USB charger that runs on AA batteries.

Have cash. ATM’s arent gonna work and you don’t want to be driving around town any more than you have to.

I have a few people in my office who are very screwed…no water, no electric…unable to shower, cook food, have air conditioning, do laundry, etc, etc. You have an alternate method, right? It may be an unpleasant alternative…taking a shower with a garden sprayer, for example…but its better than nothing at all.

Will people learn anything from this? No. Invariably, they’ll tell their ‘war stories’ about how the suffered mightily and when I politely ask them if they’ll be buying generators or doing anything else to mitigate a repeat performance of the event they will say “Oh no, this sort of thing almost never happens”. Even though it just freakin’ happened.

And that, mi amigos y amigas, is why, collectively, we are doomed. People like you and I are outnumbered by orders of magnitude by these idiots. But they have the numbers and the collective gene pool of humanity will suffer because of it.

109-MPH winds

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Thats what they are saying we were hit with last night.

I was out to dinner and around the tail end of things some clouds rolled in and the wind picked up like nobody’s business. The lights in the restaurant flickered a few times, and then *pop* a transformer exploded outside. Lightning hit a nearby tree setting it ablaze. I flagged down the waitress and said I was leaving, gimme a check. All payment options were dead and even with cash she didnt have the ability to print a bill. I had her handwrite a bill, give it to me, and told her I’d be back at lunchtime the next day to square up. The Zero is not getting caught away from his heavily fortified home in a time of crisis.

The wind was outrageous. The interstate was covered in tumbleweeds of various sizes. Taking the off ramp, the traffic lights were all out…of course. There were fallen trees blocking various lanes of traffic as I made it back to my house. Parts of town were in the dark, some parts were not. In one case I got halfway down the block only to encounter a tree complete cutting off the the street. Had to back up and find an alternate route.

Amazingly, the power was on at my house. I staged the generator just in case. Grabbed some iced tea, my police scanner, a flashlight, and an MP5 and sat on my porch watching the lightning and listening to local PD and FD lose their crap. Even if the power didn’t go out in my neighbor hood, that didnt mean it wouldn’t….line crews would, I’d imagine, have to de-energize lines to remove limbs tangles in the wires.

After a while I started working the phones, checking in with the people I care about to see if they had power and if there was anything I could do for them if they didnt. Everyone was fine except for my boss, who did not reply. Just heard from her this morning – power is out at her place and she can’t get her car out of the garage to go to work because of the electric garage door. I told her about that little t-handle hanging off the track and she seemed disappointed…she was looking forward to not coming in. She still might not…no power equals no well pump equals no shower.

Me? Im at work at my desk like a good soldier. I am, however, thinking I may be he only one here today.

Article – Is There a Future in the Doomsday Economy?

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Set on a rise above the lush valley cradling the Lost River in eastern West Virginia, about two hours from Washington, D.C., the 50-acre property backs up against the George Washington and Jefferson National Forests. A handsome guesthouse, built of dark timber slats, anchors the property. Two large, boxy dormitories, also timber but more rustic, as well as a bare-bones bunker, are designed to house more than 100 members. They are each expected to pay $2,000 to $20,000 (depending on the level of accommodation) to join Fortitude Ranch, and another $1,000 per year per person in dues to call this their “home fort,” meaning they will head there when catastrophe strikes.

I am of the opinion that these “tactical timeshares” are snake oil. If you have the money to sink into a subscription or membership to one of these places then you have the financial wherewithal to build your own. Additionally, when the apocalypse arrives don’t you think the ‘Golden Horde’ will think “Hey, there was that doomsday hotel about ten miles down the road…lets go there!” And unless the security guards at that place are scarily armed and determined, those party crashers will probably get in. I would rather take my chances with five trusted friends on ten acres than two hundred strangers on 640 acres.

The real Doomsday Economy isn’t so much these rental bunkers, but rather everything else. The ‘doomsday economy’ is the market for magazines, ammo, freeze drieds, solar panels, batteries, medical gear, training, communications, etc. And, as long as a large amount of people still retain a good bit of their natural instinct towards self-preservation, those tranches of the market will always be active.

 

Paratus in less than 60 days

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This is the annual reminder that Paratus, the holiday by, of, and for, survivalists is coming up in September…..September 20, to be precise.

If you got a card/gift from me last year, and your address has changed, you need to email with your updated mailing information. If I send a gift/card and it gets returned as undelivereable…well…my interest in the matter ends there.  (Looking at you, TOR!)

And, for the curious:

How do I get on the Paratus card list?

It’s pretty simple and blatantly selfish. If you’ve signed up at Patreon, sent me a gift of any kind, are someone I know ‘in real life’, are an ‘internet friend’ with whom I’ve exchanged many emails, or otherwise have interacted with me on more than a casual basis…and you’ve provided an address…you’ll get on the list.

Simply emailing or commenting with your address and “Please send me a Paratus card” will not work.

 

Article – A man kills a grizzly bear in Montana after it attacks while he is picking berries

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This actually didnt happen all that far from here.

A man picking huckleberries in Montana shot and killed a grizzly bear after it attacked and injured him badly enough that he had to be hospitalized.

The 72-year-old man was alone when the adult female charged him Thursday. He killed the bear with a handgun, according to a Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks statement Friday.

The attack happened in Flathead National Forest about 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) north of Columbia Falls, a northwestern Montana city of about 5,500 people, according to the state wildlife agency.

For bear deterrent in the woods, I have two options. A handgun is no one’s first choice for defending against a bad-mood bruin, but sometimes you just can’t carry an HK91 everywhere.

How do handguns stack up against bears? Glad you asked.