What Happens When the Grid Goes Down S1E1
Seventy to ninety percent of people who live in the cities will not survive power loss for over like three months. What if we had three months? They're not going to survive because they can't possibly shelter in place.
Voiceover:If the lights go out, you'll need to know the information to prepare from Survivor Joe. Welcome to the Survivor Joe podcast.
Joe:Hi, I'm Joe Alexander, veteran, author, and survivalist. This is my wife, Deborah, who's also a veteran, a survivalist, and an author. And we're here today to talk about our book and sheltering in place and what really got us into this. Now in my military career, I had several different trainings in survival. But when I got out of the military, I started questioning why am I learning how to survive in the woods or in the jungle or in the swamp?
Joe:If anything happens, you're gonna have to survive where you live in your own home. So what are you gonna be surviving from? And that is what we're talking about in our book is a total loss of power. If the electrical grid goes down, how do you survive? And you have to understand that when the electrical grid goes down, everything goes down.
Joe:You don't have water. You don't have sewer. You don't have natural gas. Of course, you don't have lighting or heating or air conditioning. And your cell phones also go down.
Debra:This is our book, Lights Out America. And the reason that we wrote this, it took us about a year to write, is to try to share with everyone our knowledge and our experience in survival. And people ask us a lot of questions about why sheltering in place. Why would what would cause you to shelter in place?
Joe:Well, the big deal is, like I learned in several of my trainings, including a jungle training, is survive out in the woods. Well, why do you wanna go out if if you lose power? You're not gonna go running out and live in your back yard or live in the woods. Everything you need is in your home. And we have a thing in the book called the rule of threes.
Joe:And the rule of threes is three hours, three days. The three hours is if it's now we live in Georgia, so it's not really applicable except during the winter. If it's a cold winter and it's rainy or whatever and you have to survive outside without any protection, you're gonna survive about three hours before you go into hypothermia and die. Three days, you can survive about three days without water. And then for the three weeks is food.
Joe:You can serve a normal person can survive at least three weeks without food. So the sheltering in place is stay in your home. Doesn't matter how cold it is. You've got blankets, you've got coats, you have all your clothes around you, you can survive in your home. But one of the things we get into in another section is how to obtain water.
Joe:Okay? Because if you lose power, you're not gonna have water. So we're gonna get into that in in later podcasts. It's in our book. But going back to why we're worried about power.
Joe:I was a lineman once I got out of off active duty. I was a lineman for twenty six years. And, Howard, I can tell you that back when I was younger, I was climbing poles till I was up in my forties. You had guys who were maintaining the power systems, and that's not going on right now. You can't get kids to get off of their cell phones.
Joe:They're not getting out there and fixing the the power lines and everything. So our grid is weak. And then we just found out this week, this is kind of technical, but when you have a solar panel system or you have a wind turbine system, they have inverters which turn the DC generated power into AC for use on the power lines. Well, those inverters are primarily manufactured in China. And we just found out nation, actually worldwide, that the Chinese have been inserting bugs in them.
Joe:They can control them. They can turn them off remotely. Now the power I gotta look at my sheet here. I can't remember. It's 14% of our electrical grid is powered by solar panels and wind turbines.
Joe:If they decided to shut down 14% of our power, our entire grids would go down because we could not manage that load. So we would lose all the power all the way around. So our grid is fragile. And so our the premise of our book is if you lose all power, how are you gonna survive sheltering in place?
Debra:And other reasons that we we did a lot of study in, our knowledge comes from reading and studying about solar flares and grid disruptions, EMPs, the electromagnetic pulse that could destroy our country from within.
Joe:We have what what Deborah was saying is that there's two basic types of events that could disrupt the grid, natural and man made. Now natural would be solar flares, a large storm.
Debra:Which we had a solar flare last year, March a year ago. There was a solar flare.
Joe:Yeah. So there's a lot of things that can end in, of course, we're talking about the man made. China's trying to do it. If we make someone mad enough like Iran or Russia and they decide to set off a nuke in our upper atmosphere, it'll cause an electromagnetic pulse and could knock down our grid controls nationwide. So we're on the verge of I'm not saying it's going to happen, but it could happen.
Joe:So when you're in our book, we talk about after the three R's, we talk about planning. Everyone knows that you got a plan. So what we've come up, this was a military thing that we came that we're bringing up to you and it is the five P's. Okay? Proper planning prevents poor performance.
Joe:I know this sounds kinda kitschy, but it's true. If you plan properly, you'll be able to get through things. But in any planning situation where you planned everything out perfectly, things are gonna go wrong. So what you have to be now this is another this is a special forces thing. I think it's kinda funny.
Joe:That's why I'm showing it to you. Semper Gumby, always flexible. So even though you have planned everything out, always be able to adapt and overcome. If something happens and throws your plans out the window, you're gonna have to be able to change midstream and make things work for you. Things are always going to break.
Joe:You might have a generator, you might run out of gas, it might break. One of the big things is surviving without power. It's kind of strange. We've invented the term because when you lose your power, you're gonna lose your communications. You're gonna lose your cell phones.
Joe:And so we invented the term called incommunicautophobia, and it's what a lot of people feel. And that is they freak out when their phones don't work. I'm sure you felt that way when you've left your home and you left your phone at home, and you got to turn around and get it.
Debra:And part of what we talk about in the book is mindset. A lot of the younger generation is not going to do well without technology. So it's a mindset effort that we are talking about in our book that you have to be prepared to go without those vital things that you're used to: electricity, even gas, water coming from the tap, you know, your phone, it doesn't work right. So the mindset is very important.
Joe:And the issue of electricity, have generators, we have solar electric panels, But if everything goes bad, and what we mentioned in the book is you have to kind of adapt to an Amish type of philosophy. Can you live without electricity? And most people can't.
Debra:But the Amish people have done it for centuries.
Joe:Yes. You don't need electricity to live. You need to secure your water source. You need to have food. So whether you have MREs or whatever, you know, at your house or emergency food supplies, you have to be able to learn to maybe live without electricity.
Debra:And I think part of this is how do you prepare to live in that environment? You know, we try to teach you in the book, store your food up. We'll talk about food at a later time and what to do. But what should you do to prepare?
Joe:One of the things we talk about, and this is for us seniors, if you will, is the the Aesop's fable of the ant and the grasshopper. Okay? That fable most a lot of people know, and I won't say most because it's surprising how many how few people know it. The story is about an ant spends all summer long saving up food for the winter and the grasshopper doesn't. He just plays all summer long.
Joe:When winter comes in, he doesn't have any food and he's starving and he's freezing. And he goes to the ant and he asked the ant, can you give me some food so I can survive? And the ant says, basically, suck it. No. I'm not giving you anything.
Joe:Slams the door. Long term grasshopper dies. Now I've talked to some friends about that fable and they told me, well, of course, I would give share my food with people because sharing is caring. Well, sharing is caring is gonna get you killed. If you have got food in your house and you start sharing it with your neighbors, at they're gonna be nice.
Joe:But then they're gonna come at you and say, I'm hungry. I need the food, and they're gonna take it. And now you will have nothing.
Debra:And it goes back to how to survive sheltering in place. Do you know your neighborhood? Do you have certain people that you can partner with? Do you know your community? Do you know where the water systems are?
Debra:Like a creek, a pond, a swimming pool, any of those things that you might need. Who has fruit trees? Who has vegetables? You know, those are items that you need to know. Map the community.
Joe:We talk about that as draw a map of your community. Is there a nurse that lives next to you? Is there a doctor that lives next to you? Does your neighbor have a peach tree in their backyard, a cherry tree? Do they have a garden?
Joe:Okay? Be in your community, but be aware also, Matt, is there a crazy living down the street from you? Now I've had some people tell me when we're researching the book about preparing, And one of them kind of amazed me. He was former Green Beret, and I was talking about preparing and getting all of this. And his his idea of preparing was, I've got a gun.
Joe:That's my preparing. I'm like, I don't get it. He says, if there's something I need, I'm just gonna go take it. I'm gonna show up with my gun, and I'm going to take it. And I was like, it's an interesting way of looking at it, but people do look at it.
Joe:They're they're prepping that way. Just guns and bullets, and they'll get what they need. And we suggest, as Deborah was saying, to plan your neighborhood. Maybe you got some crazies in your neighborhood. Do you have people because right across the street from us, we have people with swimming pools.
Joe:Now, at that water, it's a salt swimming pool. You really can't drink it, but after it's rained a couple times, it dilutes it down and you could distill that or just boil it or whatever and then drink it. But know where the water sources are. Do you have a creek down the street from you? You can go there and get water.
Joe:You have to treat it, but you can get it. So plan your neighborhood. Another thing that we talk about in there is before an event, and you understand don't all flood out and do it at once, call 811 and have the utilities in your yard marked. If you're gonna be surviving in your house and your sewer systems quit quit working, you're gonna have to dig for trains in your backyard. You're gonna have power lines in your backyard.
Joe:Now granted commercial power is gonna be gone, but you might have someone down the street who's running a generator, and they don't have it set up properly, and they're back feeding a certain amount of power through the power lines. If you get in your backyard and you have buried lines and you cut it, you're gonna be in for a serious surprise. Okay? You're gonna blow yourself up. That's not fun.
Joe:Been there. Done it.
Debra:People ask us what we do personally to shelter in place. And Joe and I built a rain barrel system. We also have a solar generator. We have two fireplaces outside. So and and he teaches our friends and family how to start fires.
Debra:So all of that is important when you're sheltering in place.
Joe:We have a garden. We're joking around about a peach tree. We have a peach tree. We have raspberries and we have a lot of blueberries. So we're learning how to can.
Debra:And herbs. We do have herbs for medicinal purposes.
Joe:That's Deborah's thing. She she cooks with the herbs and then I love what she does, but just feels like I'm eating grass half the time. But when you can't we're gonna can our fruit starting this year when we have blueberries. We have blueberries last year. I was ready to can them, and we paid someone to come in and just trim up our yard a little bit.
Joe:These guys didn't know what blueberry bushes were. They had blueberries on them, and they decided to trim them. So we had very few blueberries last year. Know, I left my peach tree alone, but we're gonna see how that goes. But anyway, you plan your utility so you know where it's safe to dig in your yard.
Joe:A lot of people would say, oh, I'll just dig a well. Well, the water level is well below five feet below ground, and you have to dig down pretty far to get usable water. So don't think that you can dig a well. Find somewhere else to do it. Anything else?
Debra:I think I think we get into storage of food and things at a later time, but the big thing is understanding why we are doing it because 90% according to the government, 70 to 90% of people who live in the cities will not survive power loss for over like three months. What if we had three months? They're not going to survive because they can't possibly shelter in place.
Joe:Let's think about that. You're in a high rise building. You lose all power. You lose all water. Where are you gonna get your food?
Joe:You know, everyone has some amount of food stored in their pantry. But after a couple weeks, the food's gone. They're gonna have to walk down five, ten flights of stairs just to get to the street and there's no water there. Even if they do get water, they gotta haul it back up those stairs. Same thing with food.
Joe:So the federal government came up with these numbers, not us. It was a congressional study that came out and said seventy to ninety percent of the American population in a long term power loss will not survive.
Debra:We also say strive to survive and then strive to thrive because you have to have a goal. What is your goal? You wanna stay around, of course, you wanna live.
Joe:When she talks about striving, what that means is striving is you have to put effort into it. Survival is a challenge. You're just not gonna sit on your couch and say, I'm surviving. No, you have to work at it. So you're striving to survive.
Joe:Now, once you can survive, you've got to push beyond that. You've got to go to the next level.
Debra:Strive to survive and strive to thrive.
Joe:Strive to thrive. But you have to push it to your thriving. You're going beyond the basic level of survival and you can push forward. At that point you're doing well, you can help other people. One of the issues that's in early in the book is trade bartering system.
Joe:Let's think about this. You've lost all your power. You need gas in your car. Now, off, I'd say keep your cars gassed up. If there's anything going on, you question it all, keep your cars gassed up.
Joe:If you have a gas card, if you got an electric car, you're out of luck. But keep your cars gassed up. But the issue is if you drive, if there's grocery stores that are open, which probably won't be and you go in there to buy something, you pull out your credit card. They're just gonna laugh at you. We have no power.
Joe:We can't process your credit card. You pull out paper money and you say, okay, I've got $20 here. Can you take this? And they're gonna laugh at you again. What am I gonna do with green toilet paper?
Joe:Because that's really all it's gonna be good for. Go in there with some silver coins. Okay? Even if it's just a silver dollar, an Eisenhower half dollar. Okay?
Joe:Or Kennedy half. They might not be worth all that much but they're heavy and they feel like they're worth something. An issue that Deborah just brought up was survival in an urban setting. If you're in a high rise building, now like we said the government said 70 to 90% of the population is not going to survive. Anyone who's in a high rise situation, it's probably even lower than that.
Joe:If you are five to 10 floors above ground and you lose your power, you lose your water, you lose everything, how are you going to survive? You can't live off of a couple cans of beans. You might you might have to go down and get water. Now think about that. Water weighs eight pounds a gallon.
Joe:How much water can you carry up 10 flights of stairs? So surviving in an urban situation is not gonna work. And then we were talking about how long are we talking about being without power? And I understand that the power companies, the military, the powers that be are gonna be trying to re return our power as soon as possible. But there's kind of a catch there.
Joe:If I'm a lineman, I work for the power company, and we lose all of our power, we lose our cell phones, we lose our ability to communicate, how am I gonna go to work? And then how am I gonna get orders about where do I need to go to fix something? You know, let's say that we had terrorists come in and blow up some power stations or whatever. People don't know where they've gotta go to fix things. Now the military does have plans, and there are things called pods.
Joe:It's point of distribution where you will be able to get food that the military will provide. The issue is, how do you know where they are? They might be right in your neighborhood giving out food, but you don't know about it. You can't communicate. We get into the book about backup radios and stuff.
Joe:And that's the only thing that's gonna work is ham radios or FRS handheld radios.
Debra:Crank radios.
Joe:Crank radios for listening to weather and stuff like that. But to be able to transmit, you're gonna have to have a power supply. It might just be a 12 volt battery that can survive, you know, power ham radio for weeks, but you're gonna have to be able to charge it. So hopefully you got a solar panel or a generator to charge it. So we're looking at three to six months primarily.
Joe:Hopefully it won't be longer than that. If you have an EMP and that's a hostile actor setting off a bomb in the atmosphere, it will not knock down generators and power lines. It will knock out the computers and the controls for them. So you'll have to replace those. But if they're even at their store sitting on a shelf with these rated the computers that you need, EMP is still gonna blow them up.
Debra:I wish you would explain to everyone what is an EMP and how does it work? You have a great definition for that.
Joe:We talked about it earlier. An EMP is electromagnetic pulse. It was discovered in the early 1950s when they were testing nuclear bombs out in the desert. And they found out that it was doing weird things to the radios. And they figured out that when a bomb a nuclear bomb goes off, it creates a charged atmosphere.
Joe:And that's what an EMP is. It's a very highly charged fast moving wave through the atmosphere. If you set one off in space close near earth, it will do the same thing. It will get down in the atmosphere and spread that electromagnetic field and knock things out. So the book is about EMPs.
Joe:Also, Deborah mentioned it earlier about solar flares. The sun acts up from time to time and it sends out solar flares and that's a burst of high energy. Our atmosphere deletes a lot of it. But we've had one that we just missed a couple of years ago that went a large solar flare. If it had hit the earth, it would have been devastating.
Joe:But luckily it went the other way and missed us. But we talk about the Carrington event in here. It was in 1885, I think. It did hit the earth. Now the only technology at the time was telegraphs, but it burned up telegraph stations.
Joe:It actually caught them on fire. We haven't had a significant one since that, but if we have today another event like the Carrington event, there's a lot of technology that's gonna go down.
Debra:So back to sheltering in place. Our book, Lights Out America, actually lists a lot of things that people should be aware of and some of the things we've already talked about here. The further you are from a major population center, the better chances are of long term survival. Is there a water source nearby? Do you have a generator, power source, radio?
Debra:Do you have a doctor or nurse nearby? Unstable neighbors. He's talked about it. What kind of medical supplies or medical kits you have? What about the pets?
Debra:Know you have to think about your animals, know stock up for them as well. Does anybody have any special medical needs? We have a friend who's on insulin has to keep it cold. He said I won't survive three months. I have another friend who said the same thing.
Debra:Do you have grills? Do you have propane? What do you store? And have you been maintaining your home? We just watched a movie the other night where these two girls had to survive when all the grids in California went down.
Debra:It's a very scary movie. And they're they kept letting their roof just fall in on them instead of trying to fix it or put tarp over it. You gotta think about maintaining your home so that it will last with you.
Joe:One thing that Deborah, I think it's in the list, but she did not mention was develop a library. Okay. Now we tell you a lot of stuff in the book, but this is the book is designed to point things out to you. Like for example, with first aid, we couldn't have in the book a comprehensive first aid guide. It would be five times the size of this book.
Joe:So you need to be collecting a first aid guide, books on how to plant things, herbal remedies, anything like that. And then one other thing that we'll talk about is the trades. One of the reasons I was saying our grid is weakened and very fragile right now is because we don't have the people going into the trades to maintain it. Learn a trade. Learn electrical.
Joe:Learning plumbing. Now I know you're thinking, why do I own electricity if there isn't any? People are gonna have generators. They're gonna need them maintained. You're gonna need all kinds of electrical stuff.
Joe:Even though I firmly believe that if you have a generator, you're gonna have to keep fuel. You're going to have to maintain it or they're going to break down. So I firmly believe that learn to live without electricity. With plumbing, you have to be able pump water. You have to be able to save water.
Joe:I never said we have a rain
Debra:barrel. And distilled water as well.
Joe:Distilled water. Now the rain barrel takes the water off the roof. And when we talk about the amounts, it's amazing how much water comes off your roof in a half hour rainstorm. But you can't drink that water. All your little birdies are using your roof as a toilet.
Joe:You don't wanna drink that. So you filter it or boil it, filter and boil it before you can drink it. So you have to process it. So pumping, you need to know a little bit about plumbing, about how to main move your water from one place to another.
Debra:And we talk about the trades a lot because we have a severe shortage in this country. It's also an international shortage that we found out. There's over 7,000,000 tradesmen short in this country alone. Thank you everybody for visiting with us today. We hope that you like us and comment.
Debra:You can leave some discussion for us, ask questions. Our book is Lights Out America. It's available on Amazon. And we'd love to be back and visit with you again, answer any questions you might have, and give you more of our knowledge that we have gained over the years. Thank you so much.
Joe:Thank you for watching our podcast, Survivor Joe. And remember, our book is available on Amazon. It's also available from our website, lightsoutamericabook.com. Thank you again for watching.
Debra:See you soon.
Voiceover:Thank you for listening to the Survivor Joe podcast. Be sure to follow and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. The views and thoughts expressed are the opinions of the guest and host alone and are for general information purposes only. The Survival Guide, Lights Out America Book, can be purchased on Amazon or directly from the authors at lightsoutamericabook.com.
