We've all seen the charts, explanations, etc of what every level would be, from 1 to 10. Obviously it is the higher end of the scale that keeps me awake at night. (Anyone else having trouble sleeping? Question obviously not directed at completely unaware idiots...)

Seeing as I am an English teacher, I need to hear from some people what they think a 10 would be like in prose form (not a chart). In other words, what would the population of the US look like? I know this is speculation, but then again, the whole chart/sytem of the 1-10 is basically speculation, too.

I can't help but wonder how many people I know will still be around if it is anything above an 8 or 9. For instance, I have 97 students. Probably 1 or 2 of them, at most, have parents who are aware of these issues and have prepared accordingly. Probably 75 of my students live in apartments and around 95-96 of them are blissfully unaware of any potential problems as are their parents. I guess I worry (and have trouble sleeping over) the possibility that, IF Y2K is more than a BITR, I may never see them again. I know that sounds really depressing, but no one on this board seems to talk about that. It used to be mentioned quite a bit (I have frequented this board since it was an infant). For instance, we get out for Christmas break December 17 (a Friday) and aren't scheduled to come back until Jan 3 (Monday). If Y2K is really bad, I despair of seeing my students. I really don't care if I get paid or not, we have enough resources for a year and in that time I'm SURE we would figure out how to support ourselves. New paradigm and all. Recently I realized even if things are really really bad, I will always be a TEACHER. I just may be teaching only 2 or 3 students and it might be in my home and for payment of things like eggs or fresh bread or meat or something. (We would still need to educate our children.)

Any thoughts on this? I can't be the only one walking around with a sense of dread and wondering if I am going to see this person or that person again. Am I?

-- Preparing (preparing@home.com), October 27, 1999

Answers

Preparing. I hate meeting nice people and thinking they are going to die soon or have their lives totally disrupted with a sudden, inexplicable jolt. I sleep well, however. You can't be anxious constantly. Or, you can, but you *shouldn't* be. Not yet.

-- Mara (MaraWayne@aol.com), October 27, 1999.

The lights are not going out; gas will go higher; the market will drop, but not crash; most will still have a job; the IRS is not going away; there will be only sporadic shortages; the doomers will be upset even though they say they won't be; gold will not go over 400 dollars an ounce; pollys will claim early victories before some of them are laid off for the recession, but not depression.

-- Fencesitter (fencesitter1@peachnet.net), October 27, 1999.

Eventually you get used to the idea that such things are possible. (Used to it, not comfortable with it.)

Possibility is not certainty.

-- Tom Carey (tomcarey@mindspring.com), October 27, 1999.

You stand alone and scratch your head;

Past friends and lovers lying dead...

You thought it might just turn out well;

but now your lifes a living hell...

Those of us that knew ahead;

prepared to minimize the dread...

Our families warm and quite well-fed;

but thats the best that can be said...

A new day dawns, what shall it bring;

a lasting hope or horrendous thing...

We worked and worried, rang the bell;

the whole world said go straight to hell...

The others scoffed, enjoyed our follies;

now look at them... decaying pollies.

-- Patrick (pmchenry@gradall.com), October 28, 1999.

For adequate (indeed, verbose) prose descriptions of general social/economic conditions pertaining to a "10" you can refer to the following well-known books:

• Patriots: Surviving the Coming Collapse
• The Postman
• Lucifer's Hammer
• Long Voyage Back
• Alas, Babylon
• Into the Forest

-- Count Vronsky (vronsky@anna.lit), October 28, 1999.

Since a 9 is another great depression, a 10 would be considerably worse. Markets and commerce totally disrupted (mass starvation), rioting, looting, and martial law, lack of sanitation (so plagues), and rebuilding the economy from small factories.

The good news is, that the US would be leading the world recovery. (That's also the bad news).

-- Mad Monk (madmonk@hawaiian.net), October 28, 1999.

Preparing --

Okay, you asked for a '10' scenario in prose, you got it. (Note: Before reading further be aware! I have previously stated something like this and been flamed unmercifully for it. But you did ask. I believe that the 0-10 scale chart is geared primarily toward financial or economic difficulties. Most of it is linked to things like depression, recession, layoffs, bank failures and the like.

I am not very worried over such things. If the infrastructure can be made to keep working, I look at that entire scale as something between a 1 and 5.

I believe (you saw the thread) that we have infinitely greater potential problems. (There's that word again, potential. Won't anyone come out and say flatly what they think? Oh, you, not being 'The Engineer' don't profess to having a working crystal ball and so, will not make unqualified statements? Hmmmph!)

without further ado, here is my 'worst case' 10 scenario. (Be forewarned, I think Yourdon and Milne are 'incurable' optimists on this, and that infomagic is 'merely' and optimist.)

Ready... Steady... Go. (You asked for it.) (Remember this is the 'worst case' 10)

At, or about, midnight on the first of January, the power goes out. There is no dial tone when you lift the phone to report this. The water stops in the next day or so. The sewage treatment plant isn't treating sewage. Some cars won't start. Others will, but the pumps at the gas station don't work. And there aren't any deliveries of food, or gas, or anything else.

I shouldn't think it would take a great deal of imagination to figure out what happens from there. As a note, I base this on what I consider to be the absolute worst case, which is that the embedded chip situation is every bit as bad, or worse, than I think it might be. See the earlier thread.

I am under the impression that the average family has between 4 days and 1 week of food in the house at any one time. Some have more, some less. Some pick up tonight's dinner at the market this afternoon. Some go to the grocery store once a month. If this is the case, then under the above scenario, we would probably see it play out something like.... In the north, say a city like Chicago, or Cleveland, apartment dwellers have a REAL problem. The apartments typically don't have a fireplace, due to building codes. Same thing for cookstoves. There isn't any sanitation. There isn't any water. Those that don't burn down first because some moron dropped a kerosene lamp or tipped over a candle, or tried to start a fire in the bathtub to get warm and the fire department, if they can be summoned, had no water pressure to fight the fire with, will become uninhabitable fairly quickly. The government and relief agencies, like the Red Cross, will be unable to respond, as they have the same problems with power, water, and communications as everyone else. The outcome of this scenario depends a lot on your view of human nature. Wandering masses of freezing humanity is one extreme, Riots are another. Your guess is as good as mine, and neither response from the ends of the spectrum are very useful in the situation. But the end result is likely the same. Apartment dwellers, for the most part, will not be contributing much in the way of solutions. (In fact, they will probably be contributing a LOT to the problem, particularly in the area of health. There are several potential problems in that area, beginning with sanitation and moving right on up to plagues.)

People living in the city also have a big problem. The average city, unless it is located in the farm belt and is lucky enough to have a large food processor, with an on-site warehouse, among it's tax base, has about a 72 hour supply of food within it's borders. (This is an estimate, based on a number of different articles. They are pretty liberally scattered throughout various websites, including this one.) This being the case, a lot of folks are going to get very hungry, very soon.

There may not be widespread starvation. Remember, the gas is off too. Without heat, most urban homes are not going to retain heat for very long. (The last time a snow storm killed the power in an area I was living in, depending solely on gas heat, I discovered that without electricity to power the fan, the heater wouldn't work. I seem to recall that the temperature outside was about 20, and the inside temperature was about 10 degrees above outside within about a day and a half.) So there may be people freeze to death in their homes.

And keep in mind, the water is off. People are going to be getting thirsty. What will they drink? Maybe the water in that inviting pond over in the park? (The one the sewage treatment plant has been dumping raw sewage in for the last 4 days.) This leads to the health arena problems mentioned above. Dysentery, typhus, cholera, and the list goes on.

Down south, things are a little better. Sanitation is the main problem with apartments. (True of homes too, but it doesn't show up for some weeks.) But the water situation is the same. (Maybe worse, the temperature is higher here, and there are some bugs that respond poorly to cold that won't necessarily be a problem up north). And the food situation is the same. I suspect that the death toll simply shifts cause, and possibly is strung out over a slightly longer period of time.

And there is always the ever-present danger of fire. Man's greatest tool. How many tipped over candles, or dropped lanterns does it take starting fires that the fire department cannot put out before the resulting inferno looks like the fire-bombing of Dresden? (Think, 10 million people in New York City. Giving them the benefit of the doubt and assuming that only 1% are drunk on New Year's Eve, and only 1% of those chose to try to light up their lives with a candle or an oil lamp, that is still 1000 drunk people playing with fire. If only 1% of those are klutzes (which I think is being VERY generous) you could still be looking at as many as 10 fires. And no way to notify the fire department. And not much they can do about when and if they get there. (no water pressure, remember). Now you are at the mercy of weather conditions. You hope that it is a still, calm, night with a pouring steady rain. And pray.

I suspect that the suburbs aren't that much better off, with the exception that most people there live in houses, with yards, so the sanitation problem doesn't arise for some weeks, if at all. But the water problem is still there. So is the food situation. At least the housing density is low enough that there is little likelihood of a 'fire-storm' potential fire.

Rural communities *should* fare much better. This is where I would suspect that the idea of 'community preparedness' would come into play. Doing something with a town of 1000 people, all of them within walking distance is a lot different than the same task with 10,000,000 people, living in an area of 300 square miles. Most communities have a certain amount of continuity also. Again, the water, sanitation, heat, and food problems exist, but quite possibly to a much lesser extent than in the cities or suburbs. It depends on how close they are to their roots. If you are looking at a large number of people who still do canning, or believe in keeping a certain amount of supplies at home, in case of power outages, winter storms, hurricanes, tornadoes, etc, then you may have a good base. I suspect, however, that a lot of people have been seduced by the consumer society, and the tremendous ease and speed of taking advantage of the division of labor. If so, then these will simply be the suburbs writ small.

Rural residents and farmers *should* fare the best. At least, that is what one would reasonable and logically expect. After all, the food is right there. Most have wells for water. (Assuming they have a way to draw it up, and aren't totally dependent on the local electric coop.) BUT, see the last couple of sentences in the previous paragraph.

Bottom line? Worst Case? With REAL LUCK, maybe 1/2% percent of city dwellers, 1% of sububanites, 5-10% of rural communities, and 5-10% of rural residents by the summer of 2000. (Note, this is in the US. The US is apparently 2-3 YEARS ahead of the rest of the world in preparation. Whether that makes a difference I don't know. It cannot possible hurt.) Now for the bad news. Most of those folks are going to be totally dependent on the local crop. (The navy has a term called 'skillage'. This relates to the minimum number of necessary skills needed to get the ship to port. As an example, a destroyer might have upwards of 200 in the crew. And perhaps 16 of those are in the engineering division, and another 16 or so in the bridge division. As it was explained to me, you could lose every other man on the ship but those, and still get home to port. But 16 casualities, concentrated in one of those, and you are toast. You no longer have sufficient skills to get home. I suspect you would see the same sort of effect here. With casualties so high, and concentrated in the cities, where most of the technical talent resides, there are unlikely to be sufficient technical people left to run a complex technical society. Voila, instant peasantry.)

If there are storms, early or late frosts, floods, droughts, etc. then the community which suffers them is in big trouble. If lucky, they will get two or three years to establish themselves and create a surplus before things like this happen. If not, the attrition will continue.

Not pretty. But you did ask.

-- just another (another@engineer.com), October 28, 1999.

---Sam lay quiet, listening. He knew they were coming back, their last attempt had infuriated them, so they had gone to find tools. He was monitoring their progress with his light intensified black and white remote tv system, and he was mad. Mad that he had to use up one of -what his wife called-his toys. Watching them attach the heavy chain to the concrete barrier in front of his door, he prepared his "surprise".
Opening a panel, he armed a relay, and then settled back to wait. "those fools" he thought, "all the evidence was there, why didn't they listen?"
As the barrier was dragged out of the way by the "borrowed" schoolbus, he got ready. The small gang was determined, but not very bright. They didn't notice the openings far overhead on either side of the narrow alley. They walked quite calmly up to the steel door, wheeling the acytelene rig that came from one of the gang's "businesses"-a chop shop where mercedes and lexus auto's where stripped for the parts. They popped the torch, then adjusted the flame, and set to work on the door. Sam sighed, knowing he would probably lose one vidcam, or maybe two, then flipped the toggle switch with one finger, while holding down the cutout with the other. Over head, the propane gas spewed out under tremendous pressure, from half a dozen ports.............................

-- zog (zzoggy@yahoo.com), October 28, 1999.

late nite posting...sorry.....hehehehehe..

-- zog (whoops@off.whoops), October 28, 1999.

-- still me (keep@trying.sorry2.com), October 28, 1999.

"if you give that bitch and her rugrats one more bite jerome, i'm gonna shoot yer dumb ass." I looked up, not quite sure what to say. craig stood above me, annoyed, he cradled the AR-15 like a baby, his trigger finger tapped the trigger rest like a nervous woodpecker attacking an old oak trunk. "God damn you," i thought. I looked over at brandy, she had a spoon of rice and veggies halfway from her little sister's mouth, I reached out gently and took it and the steaming bowl back. I began to eat the rest, aware of her little sisters staring at me intently as i ate. They were getting pretty thin, so I fed them. After I was done, I returned the metal bowl to her and stood up. I couldn't get used to ed's place like this, it was a big neo-colonial house, witha tent pitched in the living room. Ed was of course our neighbor before the crash, but, beigna friggin' idiot I had to shoot him. So now, brandy and her sisters lived in his house. I didn't want to do it, god knows ed was worth more than these three little girls, But we all had our own delusions didn't we? For example, my dad wouldn't let me shoot the dogs. My dad's dead now of course, diabetic, but that's not what got him, he just up and gave up around february. Anyway, he said the dogs could hunt and live off table scraps, I said that was bullshit, we had three dogs, chained up their whole lives, what would they hunt, rabbits? how many would they need? I mean WE needed the damn rabbits! table scraps? Maybe ONE small dog, but not three large ones, once they got skinny and mean though... Guess who got to shoot his own dogs? I wasn't about to eat them though, not when we had chickens ad penned rabbits, no I traded them, plenty of dog eating neighbors. Don't get me wrong I had my own delusions, I had maxed out the cards got a stash of bulk foods, I mean tons, i'd never seen so much rice in my life, we had to make trips to costco in a damn u-Haul. I laugh now when i think about it. "see, when it hits they'll be panicked, and we can give them enough rice to make it to planting season, our neighbors will help us fend off the refugees." it seemed like such a god idea, don't feed them everyday, just once, enough food for each of the twenty families on our lonely country road, we'd be heroes, or, as my brother liked to say "post apocalyptic warlords" hmph! sometimes he's sucha nitwit. anyway, human nature being what it is... well, let's just say we have a few neighbors who stuck with us, and a few new graves. actually though the refugee problem never really materialized. being 20 below for a month cured that problem, now we just have to go through houses on "body patrol" to bury all those stiffly frozen in their beds. better to do it now in march rather than in april when they thaw out and come apart on you. brandy looked at me with those big blue eyes, well sunken now, but i thought they were so cute before y2k... I shrugged and shuffled outside in my winter cammo, it came in really handy, if you stopped moving, you were pretty much invisible at 20 yards, that is unless you were standing in front of a brick wall. I shouldered my bedsheet wrapped AK-74 and followed him out of the house. I glanced at the frozen mound of earth that held ed and his family. "ed you dumbfucker, just because I had canned goods and you were eating flour slurry..." my brohter and I marched out on partol again, maybe this time we'd run into some guard troops... active anyway, and not rogue, that was the real terror, rogue troops. We hadn't seen any guard since the end of december, helicopter's humvee's the whole works, a big show for the soccer moms back then, but when the big cities flared up at midnight, chicago was ours to watch, it looked like a rising sun all night, every night for a month, well, then the guard just melted away, like, like, a snowball in june. nowadays, I am just waiting to see something grow in the spring, really really hoping. I just wanna see something grow, it's been a long winter.

-- jeremiah (braponspdetroit@hotmail.com), October 28, 1999.

test2

-- yep (test@keeptrying.net), October 28, 1999.

Mohawked ex-yuppies will steal your food and rape you analy as a punishment for not trying harder to convince them that y2k was a threat.

-- zoobie (zoobiezoob@yahoo.com), October 28, 1999.

Preparing,

I feel just as you do, and I'm not sleeping at night either (maybe because I spent the last couple evenings downloading Kearny's _Nuclear War Survival Skills_.

I may be able to help w/ your request for info if you tell me more particularly what it is you want to know. My Ph.D. thesis was on female servants in London, 1660-1745.

Several things I'd say right off: --17th-century Europeans were more similar to us than they were different. --They lived in a culture in which interpersonal communications were comprised entirely by face-to-face discussion or by letter. --London, the greatest city in Europe at the time, was populated by about 650,000 people. And they called it 'The Metropolis'! lol!

In solidarity,

-- silver ion (ag3@interlog.com), October 28, 1999.

Silver Ion: Thanks for the information. Wow, female servants, huh? Sounds a little kinky, but maybe that is my caffeine-addled extremely tired brain working. Really, the closer we get to the end of the year and the more I prepare and contemplate a life off the grid the more fascinated I become by the lives of people long ago.

Its the end of the six weeks and as if I don't have enough to do, I have to download about 5 million grades into our grading software. (Now who said on another thread that he had no idea what would go ka- blooey in schools to cause them to shut down? PLENTY, I tell you, PLENTY!)

-- preparing (preparing@home.com), October 28, 1999.

Any woman who would not have herself reduced to an object of sexual gratification should buy a gun now. We have a thin veneer of civilization that's maintained by a working comode.When the niceties fall away many of man's uglier characteristics may surface.In such a world a woman without a gun is at the mercy of the strong.A brief history of women's issues show that in a time of serious strife a woman does not want to find herself defenceless. How terrible is wisdom when it brings no profit to the wise.After being forced to watch the rape or mutilation of loved ones it will be too late to reassess ones views on self-defence and firearms as it pertains to a woman's right to not be raped and enslaved.

-- apokoliptik (apokoliptik@yahoo.com), October 29, 1999.

Preparing --

Glad to be of service. Also, just thought that I'd point out that I am *REALLY* rooting for the 'Koskinen' scenario to play out. (You know, the famous, (or infamous, depending on how you look at it), 'Bump In The Road'.

If something like what I described earlier does occur, then it is likely to be worse than the scenarios most paint. We are *not* talking even the 'those happy yeoman' scenarios that the uninformed neo-luddites yearn for. Remember, they at least had functioning communities. An America, for example, with its population reduced by two orders of magnitude, (from 260 million, to 2.6 million), wouldn't be a nation. It would be a scattering of random individuals, except for those very few and very far between oases of prepared communities. Every one else would be on their own.

Where I live, from Jan. 1 to the growing season is 3 1/2 to 4 months. I have run the numbers and even if I took a second mortgage on the house, cleaned out all of our bank accounts, cashed in retirement money, and converted any and all holdings to cash, there is no way I could stockpile enough to feed even the number of *children* on the street facing, the street we are on, and the street backing onto our property. Best I could come up with is about 2 1/2 months, tops. And that is feeding NO adults, including myself. Then what? So all we can do is keep a low profile. But it means, since there are 0 signs that *anybody* else is preparing locally, that if it is in the vicinity of what was described, come spring, we are on our own. There might not be anybody else within 20 miles. And 20 miles is a *very* good days walk.

On a lighter note though, there are things which would be good, assuming that Y2K is only the BITR that all the spin would have us believe. For instance, the next time we experience a power outage, it is no big deal. True, the computer won't work, but we have oil lamps, candles, and can read, play cards, what have you. If we get snowed in, we don't have to worry about trying to drive through non-plowed roads, we have plenty in the basement to last the worst storm imaginable. If a flood takes out the water treatment plant, we have it covered.

Other things. It had been a long time since we had home-baked bread. Boy was that a treat. Been forever since we made hushpuppies from scratch. (MMMMMH!) Or scratch biscuits. I had forgotten how much fun target shooting was. (When in college, I was on rifle team, and pretty good. Got away from it after, and somehow just never picked it up. Bought a rifle a while back. Go shooting with son-in-law and grandkids. Stayed out in rain and light snow for about 3 hours, and only quit then cause we had to go home for dinner.) Or *gardening*! I had gardens as a kid, even rented a plot when I was in college. And the home grown is better than store-bought.

Many things. I guesss the way you have to look at it is that everything is a learning and growing experience.

(Philosophy 101 is now in recess.)

-- just another (another@engineer.com), November 01, 1999.

OH, wife reminded me I forgot to mention one. Even if Y2K is a big fat 0, she points out that she can say, "But name me 1 other woman in America you got her husband to help clean out the basement on a Sunday afternoon during *football* season!" ;-)

-- just another (another@engineer.com), November 01, 1999.