Bill’s Commentary:

“Grizzly checks in with his thoughts on a power outage”

Long Absence

First off, I apologize for the long absence. No excuses. Just nothing urgent was really brought up by anyone or came to mind through inspirations or external proddings.

Couple of things for this week.

1. There’s lots of chatter about cyber attacks occurring pre-election on comms or power grid. One wonders what the nationwide AT&T outage was all about last week?

Anyway, let’s run that scenario out for a bit – Power outage. Since a week or possibly two shouldn’t be a big deal for us, let’s stretch out to 1 month without power and some thoughts surrounding that.

Thirty days without power is a MAJOR event.

Within one week, we could expect a total societal breakdown. Grocery stores will be long since empty. Gas stations will be inoperable for weeks by now. Hospitals will be out of secondary power. Cities will be dark and inhabitants will be “dwelling in the valley of death” that David wrote about. Even most people that have done a pretty good job of preparing will be pushing their limits.

As always – first things first.

Water – we determined that 3 gallons per person per day is a realistic number. So a family of four will need 360 gallons in this period. Not horrible. We should have this covered. The tank below is what we suggested in January.

https://a.co/d/2c7f4OM

Food next. We should have this covered as well with a combination of freeze dried food, canned goods, freezer stock.

Along with keeping the freezer food though goes generators. We’ve discussed this as well but please have solar generators, gas generators, a whole house diesel or propane generator – or all of the above.

Cooking source – we’ve covered this to from propane camp chefs to Woodstoves, even jetboils for any overwatch situations where you may be eating where you’re living.

So – water, food, cooking, power sources – covered.

Lights – covered but depending on location, light discipline will be a major concern.

Biggest concern for me?

Societal collapse and need for around the clock guard duty. Even before these 7-10 million illegals that have come here the past 3 years it would be a huge concern, but now it’s critical level.

Here’s where good communities and teams of prepared families will be an absolute necessity. Within a week people will be starving, desperate to feed themselves and their kids, out of medicine, freaked out and panicked, and absolutely possible of doing anything to survive. Our places will be targets. We’ve discussed force multipliers such as night vision, thermals, early warning systems, etc. All these will need to be utilized. Comms within the group and loved ones will be important – radios, Garmins, Sat phones will be needed.

So – I think we’ve covered what we need to do. This might happen quickly when it happens. It will be hard to know if it’s s brief outage at first – there’s no way to know. This is always a concern. If we delay too long, thinking it was a short term event, we may be stuck where we are and our extended families and friends stuck where they are. I’m certain the emergency broadcasting we’ll be listening to on our radios will say that the power outages are regional and coming back on as repaired. I’m not sure I’ll buy this.

So. Keep filling in gaps and doing the best you can, thinking you may be stuck where you are and prepare as best you can. Good neighbors will be key in addition to our preparedness items.

1. The second thing to discuss today is for the Colorado residents receiving these reminders. There’s a bill coming soon to be voted on, sorry I forget the HB nomenclature. Basically it’s a semi-auto ban. Given the balance of power in both CO house and senate, it’s a pretty good bet that this will pass. So, if you are short on any AR platform battle rifles, I would add them to your arsenal ASAP. Also, as this bill also will ban transfer of ownership, I don’t believe they will be allowed to be transferred to a trust, so they aren’t forfeited upon your death. So, if your concerned about this, set up the trusts now and transfer ownership to this trusts. I have concerns about naming everything in a trust so personally I won’t do this but perhaps it’s more appealing to some of you.

That’s it – just a kind of review through the lens of a 30 day power outage. Just don’t get lax. Keep these thoughts in your head and follow your plan to become more prepared next week than we are this week.

God bless.

Keep your eyes on the horizon and your face in the wind.