Hmmmm…8.9 earthquake on the other side of the planet. A nice reminder that some Bad Things are just totally unpredictable (at least, in the sense of knowing where or when). I mean, if you live in California you have to know that someday The Big One is coming…you just dont know when. My particular part of the planet isnt know for massive earthquakes but they have happened in the past. Last biggie was around the 1955-era. Yellowstone Park is always threatening to go off, and Mount St, Helens is a few hundred miles west and we did get plenty of fallout from it when it let go.
Still, the most Ive ever felt has ben a 2-point-something that basically shook the bed a little bit and left me wondering ‘what the hell was that’? The Californians who read this will snort and say that they dont even get out of bed for anything below a 3.5, Im sure.
However, having said that, I wonder how many Californians take seriously their responsibility to be prepared for earthquakes. I know that theres obviously a certain amount of government-mandated preparedness in the form of gas valves, house construction, etc, etc. But I wonder how many Californians actually keep the usual stock of food, water, ammo, batteries, etc.
Short of the house collapsing on top of my head, Id say Im pretty well covered for just about anything short of a direct hit. But theres always more stuff to buy…(grumble).
If Yellowstone goes, the whole human race is fucked. If you’re far enough from the blast, the only supply you’ll need is 1 bullet and enough liquor to get yourself drunk one last time.
Thats Krakatoa youre thinking of, man…….
yellowstone is a supervolcano also in theory it could also be an extinction level event or at least close to one.
I rode out a 7.x one in Northern Japan once, it was, shall we say, less than fun? Californians make fun of me, the last one I was in out there, I stood in a doorframe. Everybody else stayed where they were and laughed at me. Bitches.
Nah, the human race survived Krakatoa. Just a few years of hard winters and bad crops. When Yellowstone goes, there’ll be be chunks of rock raining down from the primary blast in Tombstone. And after the freeze is over evolution will have to start all over.
The Lava Creek Ashfall (median estimate 665,000 years ago) and the Bishop Ashfall (median estimate 760,000 years ago) each put a foot of ash in the geological record at both La Brea, CA and Topeka, KS. (Note that I am beyond the radius-of-incineration of Yellowstone.)
That makes Krakatoa’s land bridge annhilation in 536 AD/CE look tame.
And Black Death.
But evolution didn’t have to restart even after the Deccan Traps lava flows. (Which resurfaced about 10% of the land area of the Earth. Impressive, until you realize that Venus had a 90% resurfacing at the start of Earth’s Cambrian era.)
One of the many upsides to moving back to CA is that my boyfriend no longer thinks I’m a crazy survivalist nut for wanting to be prepared for emergencies. 🙂 We live a mere few blocks from one of the major faults in the Bay area, so a couple well-stocked bugout bags, food, water, and alternate power supplies, and knowing how to turn off the gas are pretty important. He works even closer to the fault line, and while they provide him with a fanny pack for emergencies, I need to convince him to let me augment it–I think all it has is a bottle of water, an MRE, and a lightstick. Maybe an evacuation map, too.
quick little article about yellowstone for ya
http://www.backwoodshome.com/articles2/silveira85lw.html
To be perfectly candid I don’t even know of anyone else who has *water*. There’ve got to be some. Maybe they’re smart enough not to advertise.
at least you’ve seasoning enough for a few good batches of jerky
I don’t store any at the house, but I usually have a 5 gal container of drinking water in the truck. Does that count? Oh, yeah – 5 gal of water AND a roll of TP in a ziplock. 😉
Great. Now I’ve got REM’s “It’s the end of the world as we know it” rolling through my head. Thanks.
Yes indeedy…next batch I make, I’ll vacuum seal some up and send it to you.
Storing water is a pain.
It’s much simpler to be set up to purify independently at requisite quantities [5 gallons/person/day for Kansas heatwaves] indefinitely. I need to soak some capital into completely closing the loop. (I’m set up for viral/chemical without consumables, but currently need consumables to handle bacteria/mold).
Yellowstone National Park is the floor of the caldera of an ancient volcano whose sides weathered away a few millions of years ago. When she blows, Nebraska will be a pretty flat place
Most of my friends down here in Los Angeles are in denial, and laugh at me for stocking supplies… yet, who do you think they’ll come to if the next one disrupts the grocery store supply system?
And yes, anything less than a 4.5 is scarcely worth comment out here… a quick mention on the evening news is typically all you ever get…
Not awfully seismic in the foothills of the Sierra, east of the Bay area, but the same preps for earthquake are the preps for everything else (bugging out for forest fire, earthquakes in the bay area drive stampede of liberal wierdos toward us, etc.)
Thousand-gallon water tank. Doubt if I have as much of an armory as you do, Commander, but it is worthy of the name “armory”. Food. SHTF bags in each vehicle, the biggest in my 4WD GMC.
And in this little former gold town, I’m more the rule than the exception.
California isn’t really as wall-to-wall Berkeley as it might seem. They’re just the loudest contingent. For the people who are pretty sure that when the Big One goes off we’ll end up with oceanfront property (but who would want it), we keep our heads down and let them blather on, oblivious to their doom.
Kind of like Missoula, I bet.
What? How hard is it to store water? You goto Kmart, buy a couple five gallon jugs, fill them, sit them in a corner and forget about them for six months to a year.
Even at one gallon/person/day, it’s much less voluminous to store food for N days than water. Several of my target scenarios (earthquakes: New Madrid/8, West Coast/9; regional electric grid collapse comparable to Southern Ontario/August 14, 2003) must handle water for over a week for my immediate extended family, even with continual daily highs of 105°F or higher and no electricity. This is realistic in August, in Kansas. I need a much smaller storage space for water when purifying.
Montana has definite advantages here. The chances you’ll be faced with three weeks of 95°F plus weather (justifying three gallons/person/day without air conditioning) are fairly minimal. In Kansas, that’s very common.
I dunno..we get a week or two of 95+ in the summer. However, to be fair, your hot water tank usually has 35-40 gallons so you can factor that in, and the pipes in the house will hold another few gallons if you open the faucet at the highest point and lowest point and let them drain out. I’ve some blue 15-gallon jugs and they really dont take up that much room.
That gallon-a-day thing is a bit much, IMHO. IF I were working hard and IF it were 95 degrees then maybe a gallon a day. But in terms of consumption by drinking (as opposed to washing, bathing, etc) I think it would be less. Obviously, if it were 95 degrees Id try to not exert myself and probably stay someplace cool (basement). On the other hand, Ive hauled 40# packs for miles and miles in July and emptied a 100 oz CamelBak in just a couple hours.
For a scenario of staying put, not exerting, and basically just keeping a low profile I think a gallon/day is more than enough and 1/2 that might be more likely. Next summer I’ll monitor my intake and we’ll see what the numbers say.
True, said stealth storage does help.
I generally drink about a gallon of water (misclassifying juice as water) in a day when I’m working intellectually in air conditioning. I usually let it drop when I’m not working. Since the numbers seem to work in casual use at room temperature, I don’t have a problem following my references upwards.
Of course, I could be incorrectly generalizing from intellectual work to physical work….