(Note: This may seem like a departure from my usual Second Amendment musings; but my “Shaking Up the Zombies” blog was also meant as a home for occasional discussion of emergency preparation and self-reliance. That’s definitely relevant here.)
Superstorm Sandy as seen from space.
When my wife and I got on the plane to travel from Austin, Texas where we lived at the time to the town of Frederick near the Maryland/Pennsylvania border, we knew there was a storm coming but didn’t yet know we were heading for ground zero. Four days later we found ourselves hunkered down in a pitch-black house while gale force winds shook the walls and howled around the windows. Along with my son, his wife, and his two little girls, we lived one long night watching and listening as the trees thrashed and twisted and sheets of horizontal rain driven by the mutant hurricane Sandy throbbed against the siding.
While wives and babies huddled under the covers to keep warm ahead of the creeping cold that the knocked-out heating system no longer held at bay, my son James and I stayed up into the wee hours to make sure everything stayed battened down. Our only entertainment was watching electrical transformers flash blue and die against the horizon. James’s power was among the first in the area to go, even before the main force of the storm officially hit. Four days later it was still out – and would be for another week or more. Thankfully, other than the electricity, no serious damage resulted in James’s neighborhood.
Monocacy River before and after Sandy.
But, along with the rising Monocacy River which had taken out the power poles for James’s subdivision, came some startling insights as well—among them just how unprepared many Americans are for even relatively limited emergencies. James had spent several years as a Boy Scout and should have “been prepared.” But the demands of keeping pace with modern American life had caught up with him and his family. Knowing that under normal conditions the power was always on and one could just run out to the store for whatever one was short of, he had few food reserves, only one working flashlight, and no way to cook food or even heat a cup of water during a power failure. For room light he had only decorative candles.