Who Will Die First when SHTF

[Briarbrow]

I've lived all winter or at least the coldest part w/o hot water and only wood stove in the past. Taking a cold shower is something you get used to after a short time and imho is often good for health, and general acclimatization to living in the cold

Now of course when I had hot water i would take a very long one, and as well- more often.

 

[Gadgetaholic]

You don't have to imagine that - just look at the city where I live - Christchurch, New Zealand.
4 September, 4:35am, a 7.1 mag earthquake hit us. That is the same magnitude as the Haiti quake.

From all accounts Christchurch coped quite well, despite the amazing amount of time that the aftershocks have gone on for. When that hit I was camping in the snow near Waiouru, alongside a bunch of people from all over the country (including Christchurch) at the Cold Kiwi Motorcycle rally. I heard about the quake on the news and was surprised that it was Christchurch rather than Wellington that got hit that hard.

But imagine if something happened to the power over several cities in the US where their population is much larger than ours and if it was multiple weeks without power for millions of people - that would be much worse than the situation in Christchurch. Imagine New York without power for several weeks - it'd be chaos.

If Auckland lost power I'd just head down to the Waikato and stay with my mother for a few weeks but with over 1 million population here it would be hard for everyone to find somewhere to go. If several tens of millions of people in the US were without power then it would be that much harder to provide help - it's easier to find the resources to help a couple of hundred thousand people then 20 million people. The bigger the scale of the disaster the harder to help everyone.

 

[HandofCod]

In Australia SHTF consists largely of environmental disasters - floods, cyclones and bush fires.

The last one, bush fires wiped the town that I grew up in from the face of the earth. Of a town of 800+ people, only a handful of structures remained and 30 people died. You don't need to worry about zombie junkies out to kill your family for drug money. You need to worry about the 50meter wall of flames rolling towards your house like a jet engine. Being immobile would have been a death sentence though if you were at home so she is on the money here.

The hippies and the yuppies suffered just like everyone else though which is a conservative old logging town. The chief of the local fire brigade (a volunteer organisation) had to make the decision to keep fighting the fires where he was or go home to defend his own family. He stayed to defend those in need and lost his wife and child.

I say this not to illustrate that certain people are going to 'get it' when the event happens, quite the opposite. It's peoples natural heroism and selflessness that comes out at these times as people gather together. Rather than the depiction in the video which is basically every man for himself.

Granted, being prepared is critical but that's not what the video is about.