96 Hours to the Stone Age: How Quickly Our Connected Lives Crumble When the Power Goes Out
26th November 2011
How will you handle even simple purchases without power, communications or cash? As we increasingly transact via credit cards, online and even cell phones, cash has become much less prevalent. If the ATMs are down, and you don’t have enough emergency cash on hand, what do you do?
Already, it seems that for a broad range of demographics, especially those under 25, cash is already dead. Or, if there are emergency radio broadcasts and the broadcasts says that emergency help is located at a certain park in a certain city, what good is that information to a GPS reliant person who never learned to read a map and doesn’t own any maps?
Mormons will be fine; they’re required to have a year’s supply of food on hand. The rest of us, well….
November 26th, 2011 at 17:44
Some of us are preppers.
November 26th, 2011 at 23:34
Bad link.
It’s not unusual for those of us on the Third Coast to have extended periods without power (e.g., Hurricane Ike). Not only do you learn to make do, some things actually improve. The kids in the area were particularly unhappy after the power came back on. They were having fun playing ball and tag with the other kids during the outage, but found that sitting alone playing video games wasn’t nearly as fun.
November 27th, 2011 at 05:26
Fixed now.
November 27th, 2011 at 07:51
I suspect that 80 – 100 years ago, there were people warning that if the cars stopped working, people would be stranded, since they wouldn’t know how to hitch up a wagon or saddle a horse.