The premise of this site is that survival in groups is preferable to survival as a lone wolf. A highly skilled and prepared lone wolf may very well have an excellent chance at getting through a very bad time, though I question what kind of an existence that would be. A highly skilled and prepared group has a better chance, I would maintain, simply because of the range of skills and abilities available. Medical knowledge, mechanical knowledge, knowledge of crop raising, hunting, animal husbandry, fishing, and organizational skills, as well as security knowledge and skills, are going to be higher in a community group than in a single individual in most cases.
What Do You Need
Thinking in terms of a community means much larger requirements for food, energy, water, everything. Unless you have formed a group of likeminded preparedness oriented people, the only way you get a community is if you bring your existing community along with you. You aren’t going to be able to take care of all of those people’s needs. Therefore you need to look to the community for internal resources.
I am going to engage in a mental exercise and I am going to start with what I consider to be the best circumstances. The process I am describing in this article will be much easier to accomplish in a small rural community than in the middle of a big city. It will be more applicable to smaller satellite towns that provide workers for the city. I DO believe you can take these principles and apply them to almost any situation, but there is no doubt that things will get hairy in a large urban area
Very few of us really know our own community in terms of survival resources. We probably know a few folks that live around us, but we don’t know much about most of our neighbours, most of the businesses or even our own municipal organization.
Resources Are All Around You
Let me tell you a personal experience from this past winter. I arrived at our local Civic Centre for a presentation I was delivering about 6:00 pm, just as it was getting dark. The town I was entering has a population of about 1200. I pulled up to the door of the centre, got out, entered the building and realized there was a noisy engine running outside. The maintenance guy who was there and who let me in told me it was the facility’s generator, which had kicked on automatically when the power outage struck. It was just starting to get dark, so I hadn’t noticed the lack of lights in the houses as I entered town. It turns out that this Civic Centre was also the emergency resource centre for the town in a disaster. There were a certain number of supplies stockpiled there and the generator had enough fuel for three days of continuous use. The generator could power the lights, the kitchen facility, and the library upstairs with its computer stations and internet hook up etc. Used just four hours a day, the fuel supply would be good for 3 weeks and that would be enough for hygienic purposes, food preparation and to provide relatively comfortable shelter purposes for a lot of people. The town had a large water tower so the water supply would be available through gravity feed until the tank emptied.
I didn’t know that the Civic Centre had this secondary function even though I had lived in the area for 10 years. This experience got me to wondering what else I didn’t know about my community.
Local Community Resource Inventory
As I said before, the area I live in is rural, so here is a list of things I think I should know about:
Cattle farms, dairy farms, chicken/poultry operations, pork operations, sheep operations, cash crop operations, market gardeners, orchards, grain storage facilities, game farms, apiarys, antique/vintage agricultural equipment museums or clubs or collectors, fuel depots, farm supply stores, farmers co-ops or feed stores, firewood suppliers, feedlots, abattoirs, refrigerated storage capabilities, food processing operations, metalworking or repair shops, gun clubs or firing ranges, firearms or ammo retailers or suppliers, greenhouses, fish hatcheries, outdoor adventure tour operators, RV parks, public or government land, parks or woodlots, solar cell arrays etc.
I could go on for quite a bit, but you can probably understand where I am coming from. My small community probably has everything it needs to take care of the local community for over a year but also enough extra for a large influx of people. One small beef operation might have 30 animals. An average 1200 pound steer will provide about 500 pounds of boneless meat. But in an emergency situation, you wouldn’t be throwing out the bones. A lot of them would wind up being cooked up in soups or to make broth. Let’s ignore that for now though. Thirty animals would yield 15,000 pounds of meat. A sedentary man needs 56 grams of protein a day. He can get that from about 1.2 pounds of beef. Using the sedentary man requirements as representative of our population as a whole, men, women, and children, those cattle meet the protein requirements of the whole town for about 10 days.
Well, that’s not much help, is it? The truth is, not many people meet all of their requirements for protein from eating nothing but beef. In an emergency, beef could be used to make other sources of protein more palatable. Checking on livestrong.com, we find this:
“Black beans and rice served together form a powerful nutritional team. A 1-cup serving of cooked, long-grain brown rice contains 5 grams of protein, 45 carbohydrate grams, 2 grams of fat and 216 calories. The same serving size of cooked black beans without salt has approximately 15 grams of protein, which is 30 percent of the daily value set by the FDA based on a 2,000 calories per day diet, 41 grams of carbohydrate, less than 1 gram of fat and 227 calories.”
Two Cups of Rice and Two Cups of Beans
So a cup of beans and a cup of rice will provide over a third of our required daily protein. With two cups of rice and two cups of beans a day, that small herd of cattle is suddenly good for a month. And that ignores everything else that might be available in peoples pantries, freezers, refrigerators, root cellars, or available from other sources. Think back to that list I compiled at the top of the last page; in addition to beef operations, I listed dairy farms, chicken/poultry operations, pork operations, sheep operations, cash crop operations, market gardeners, orchards, and grain storage facilities along with numerous others. It’s not a lack of resources that is the big problem. It’s coordinated action involving the resources that are available.
In my local area, there are a pile of agricultural operations that could wind up in dire need in a grid down situation. Not only would they need feed and water, but with no or limited access to electricity, they will need labour and cooperation to continue operating.
In a truly widespread disaster, when it takes people a while to get organized, and when the scope of the disaster isn’t recognized, many of the possibly useful resources in many of these locations could be wasted or ruined. Most agricultural operations are going to have power and fuel for several days at least. Whether they have large portable generators or depend on PTO driven units they can hook their tractors up to, they can power ventilation units in their poultry barns or run the machinery for their dairy operations for a while at least. But in a situation in which distribution channels are tangled or stopped completely, a lot of nutrition could go to waste at the same time a lot of people are going hungry. An organized list of resources on the one hand, and needs on the other, could go a long way to solving a lot of problems.
Recognize, I am not suggesting creating a list of places that are targets for looting in a disaster. I AM suggesting we all need to look further than our downstairs pantry to find our way out of a serious grid-down situation. This is especially true if we are located within a weeks walking distance or a two-hour drive from a major urban area. If you aren’t thinking in terms of a major disaster will create refugees, you aren’t thinking ahead enough. We have had years of the Syrian conflict and also years of having to deal with Syrian refugees Europe as a partial example.
Admittedly, for most of us, I am talking about a low probability event. But what if an incident is widespread enough and lasts a couple of week or more? Think of the Northeastern blackout of 2003 that affected 55 million people for two days, because of a tree branch rubbing on power lines. What if it had been caused by hackers who selectively targeted hard to replace high voltage transformers? You aren’t replacing high voltage transformers in two days; weeks or months are more likely. The fact that it is low probability doesn’t mean we shouldn’t think about it. But we should consider it in terms of an extension of our existing preps. And simply because it would affect so many people, it makes sense to think of a community response.
Let me know what YOU think. Use the contact form to send me your thoughts, or get in touch with the Survival Harvesting Facebook page.
Resources
All Hazards Preparedness for Rural Communities: https://www.cfba.org/images/resources/all-hazards-preparedness-for-rural-communities-book.pdf
Farm Planning: Emergency PReparedness on Farms:http://wvats.cedwvu.org/media/1560/emergency-preparedness.pdf
Planning for and Responding to Disaster in Canada, An Approach for Farmers: http://www.ablamb.ca/images/documents/resources/planningforandrespondingtodisastersincanada.pdf