What's your idea of shtf?

[SpiderpigSpiderpig]

Hi, I'm new to this section, only just found it.
I've had a read of a few threads and a few people go on about skills/equipment etc for when shtf.
What is your idea of that?

For me, it's issues that are too big or awful to contemplate preparing for them or trying to influence their aftermath. Other people will doubtless have other thoughts.

Here is the Cascadia subduction zone. Google it and panic for me!

Hi from waterlogged Louisiana Mrs Prepper heaven round here right now...

SHTF for me are basically huge disasters that I cannot possibly prep for :

EMP bomb
A huge, deadly epidemic
Nuclear war

I tend to prep for smaller events, like power and water cuts, anything that stops me getting food from the shops (strikes, illness,...), fire, etc.

I'm interested that anyone has heard of the CSZ, MrsTerry.

AGirl.

Are you all safe?

We live on it very near it, cozie. You too?

Not at the moment. All (!) I have to worry about is a nuclear holocaust. (Bye bye Western Europe.)

How are property prices holding up?

Property prices are through the roof. People are very blind to it. We just got our house quake-proofed (for a billion billion dollars) but no one else in my street has.

I teach housing stuff and people frequently tell me that there will never be a down tick in prices or an increase in vacancies. There will if the big one hits...

They just haven't got a clue.

If I were across The Pond and not able, in practical terms, to move, I just know I wouldn't take a new job in Seattle. (Well the Pacific North West and Alaska, to be honest.)

The tsunami is also a worry. Home and school are fine but DHs work is a problem.

For Japan etc also, I fear. Has DH's work got a tsunami plan? (Or is one such not practicable?)

He's a runner so he plans to run like stink at the first wobble. Should be enough delay to get him to high ground. He's pretty good at not standing around saying, "was that an earthquake?"!

I wish him good luck. I heard, once, that the only reliable way to escape a tsunami - other than not being there in the first place - is to get the heck out. No eg waiting or trying to help others.

That latter might come difficult to some, though.

Thank you all for this fascinating and educational thread. Sorry some of you are closer to needing to prep for catastrophes, but this is that 'how did I never hear about that?' kind of feeling I used to get from Mumsnet all the time. Or maybe Mumsnet has taught me about everything

Clearly Mumsnet has not taught me to do this >>> properly though

We have checked and some areas have 20 minutes in a low lying area so they're done. DHs office area has maybe and hour from quake to wave. Enough to run home. We're on rock and high so should be good.

He won't wait. He's been in a few quakes and doesn't wait!

cozie Yes, thanks! It stopped about 15/20 mins to the west of us. We were drenched but not flooded. But so many have lost everything, its completely heart wrenching to hear people who walked away with nothing from Katrina, to have nothing again after the Great Flood.

To put it in perspective, it was a regular school day, people got up, went to work, we knew there was a lot of rain coming but by evening entire parishes had their world swept away. Areas which have never flooded were knee deep within hours, nobody could believe how fast and torrential it became. A friend's family are farmers who have lived on their land for near on five generations and they've never flooded. They lost everything including a lot of livestock.

Due to the historic lack of flooding, the majority of homeowners did not have flood insurance. As someone said, they had as much chance of prepping for this event as they did for a undetected meteor

I'm very sorry for them - although pleased that you're safe. Was there levee failure at all?

PS - are FEMA involved at all?

My definition has a big range:

• unexpected large bill
• unexpected income reduction due to illness/redundancy
• extended loss of electricity or water
• having to leave the house very quickly due to a fire/gas leak/civil unrest
• having to exit another building/public place very quickly in adverse conditions (fire, terrorist attack) and get home
• having to survive independently of usual infrastructure for some catastrophic, widespread reason

I don't bother thinking about the big apocalyptic stuff that requires a nuclear bunker stocked with years' worth of supplies.

No levees in these areas, hence no failure. And FEMA under Obama is a very different beast from the one in 2005...

Ah well.....

But yes, they were very quick to get boots on the ground

For me it would be, on a longer time scale, so not necessarily tomorrow, I imagine, some sort of combination of the stock market crash of 1929 combined with some variant of the Savings and Loan Industry collapse in end of the last century, and especially if one imagines added to that some sort of big-scale variant of the dust bowl of the 1930's from world-wide overuse of underground fossil water sources and perhaps on top imagine forest fires raging like those in Russia in 2010. Imagine if such events combine with widespread heat-waves like those in Paris in 2003 killing people from heat stroke and dehydration. Plus antibiotics being less effective from bacteria resistence, and perhaps some virus spreading like avian flu, and the phosphorus crisis I heard about. That's sort of my image of a shtf event, I guess.