If there is a grid collapse, insurance won’t help. Their systems will also go down, as will the banks, credit card, and normal retailers won’t be able to transact.
There is no benchmark for this bar WWI and WWII, even with Ukraine today, but Ukraine has international support. So it is really bad there, but not as bad if there was no support at all.
In SA, an attempt at a comparison, look at KZN with their riots a while back. a very good benchmark.
Then the storms there, the breakdown in infrastructure, and the effect that had on daily lives. Again, there was support rendered in the aftermath.
Now take KZN and multiply it over SA with no support coming from anywhere.
correct - no outside help, that’s a bonus and should not enter the survival equation; that includes corporates , police, and any other ‘grid-tied’ entity
the above is one example of the wheel which need not be re-invented… the importance is though to adjust for personal and local eventualities as they differ
The one thing that I realized, the people living on the street, or in squatter camps, are light years ahead of “surviving on the street” with no water, electricity, or regular accessible food/medical assistance.
Dentists …
We live in our “protected castles”. We have no idea how bad it is even though we “see” it around us every single day. That is if we care to even look.
Personally, I do not see how the majority of comfortable living people, myself included, can fathom the depths of depravity that can head our way when the power is gone.
Who of us will dig in dumpsters looking for food for our kids?
Who of us will shoot another parent/s to feed our kids?
How will we go to relieve ourselves, en mass, with no toilet paper, the resultant sickness spreading due to masses not focussing on proper sanitation?
How far will you go?
We don’t know. We have never in our lives experienced this level of desperation.
Some will be lucky seeing the "warning signs’ and “get out”. The majority won’t for various reasons.
Most of the prepper advices and lists are USA based, a massive country with vast open spaces.
And more extreme weather.
To do that in SA, a whole new set of planning, due to the “numbers” and space to move out to, where there is water.
Unless one works as a “community”, a very close-knit group in secret, it gets really tough, if near not impossible, to survive for an extended period of time.
indeed, a shona from zim who ocassionaly helps me at home - he has the muscles an i contribute some grey matter - did just that until recently! he has a wife + 3 kids, sent them back to zim last week - safer there!
The Zim/Malawi (etc) people sending their kids/families back home, is due to SA Xenophobia.
What is telling though, is when there are no more “foreigners” left, all gone back to their respective countries, who would be next on the “purge” list?
The 24/7 survival mode will become the de facto standard to live by.
Hopefully the political leaders who made cheap, easy and ultimately false promises.
Consider the UK where lots of things were blamed on having to allow free movement of people because of EU rules, and where, or so some said, 325 million pounds a day that could have gone to the NHS was being sent out of of the country.
Post-Brexit Britain just had it’s record year for LEGAL immigrants, is still running short of labour, and has an NHS stretched like never before with the 325 million pounds per day never having materialised.
You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time, and poll after poll shows that an increasing number of people, including many who really wanted Brexit, have had enough of the party that has ruled for a decade or so.
… will ??? there is a quote:
“Monarchy is like a splendid ship, with all sails set it moves majestically on, but then it hits a rock and sinks for ever. Democracy is like a raft. It never sinks but, damn it, your feet are always in the water.… and in ours gangrene has set in edit - but lets return to the solution, at least the survival one - pondering the demise will do nothing
That couldn’t have been proper / real radio amateurs, or you’ve been lied to.
Over that distance they would have used VHF around 145 MHz or UHF around 430 MHz, using those frequency bands you can cover that distance with a portable hand radio and less than 5W of power, simplex direct radio to radio, no repeaters needed and even if they tried the repeaters, there’s no way all the repeaters scattered around Gauteng would have been off air at the same time.
Also over those distances the solar cycle makes a negligible difference, plus around the year 2000 was at the top of one of the previous solar cycles, the best solar cycle for radio propagation in years in fact, over that time you could probably communicate to the US or EU on HF using only 5W of power.
Yes true not all frequency bands will work for communication all the time, but that’s the thing with radio amateurs, we have access to a very wide band of frequencies. For example this time of day I won’t be able to communicate with someone in CT using 7 MHz, but I’ll be able to get them on 14 MHz, tonight after sunset I’ll get them on 7 MHz again but 14 MHz will be dead between us.
Well this is what happened in the situation I’ve been describing. The big corporate I’m not mentioning by name was forced to consider a really bad situation, and so they sprung into action.
Quite possible. I wasn’t involved in the recruiting of these guys, nor was it my idea. I just watched them twiddling dials and curse all night.
But I do think it shows that comms via radio isn’t quite so straightforward. These guys were there, with antennas and with radios, and they literally couldn’t talk to each other across a distance that you say could have been dealt with by hand-held sets.
It ain’t that easy. A whatsapp chat is easy. Radio requires some actual skills and the right equipment for the job.
True, but there used to be a time the skill was more ubiquitous than it is now. The knowledge isn’t lost, and you only need one person in a community to be able to send and receive important communication. You wouldn’t be sending memes over radio.
