I had a long drive this weekend (9 hrs) and was thinking about the idea of survival only working in a community. It doesn’t matter what the reason is, no gas, no electricity (EMP), or government shutdown. Unless we are already friends and I trust you a lot we are not going to team up and create a community. If it all hits the fan my community is going to be people I already know. Neighbors, folks from church, families from my kids school. people I have watched for years and know. But even this is not true. In a true total meltdown five miles is a long way to consider staying connected over. If we don’t live within a mile or two we might as well be in different states. I live on the edge of a large city I will not be able to grow food until about 80% of the population has left or died. All the deer will be killed within a month of people getting hungry. As far as water, as soon as the power goes out the water will stop. All of that to say unless we already live together in a community before anything happens. People are going to hunker down in family units until the population can be supported by the land. Let me know what your thoughts are.
I agree. There are those who think they'll live off the land (and those they can take from) which is terrifically naive and lacking in experience. Camping once in a while for even weeks is not the same as having to do without, or take it if found. The priorities are shelter, food, water, then equipment. Equipment won't be easily replaced. I also agree about the size of communities if the SHTF and infrastructure collapses. Lack of the means to simply motor in to Gresham (only nine miles away) to shop will be a real stopper, as well as safety from human predators. And we all know human predators are far more dangerous than any animal species. So your local community will have to step up its game and learn to function as a much smaller society than before, simply to be able to provide some measure of security from those human predators. The idea of wandering the wasteland like "The Postman" or "Eli" is an attractive and romantic idea, but that only works well in the movies. The "John Matherson" series by William Forstchen that starts with "One Second After" is an excellent modern primer.
You can put food away, for example buying a freeze drier and putting your own stuff away as it goes on sale or as you can afford it. You can stock up on ammo, and arms as you can afford them, inherit stuff and so on. You can practice your survival skills by taking classes in person and on line, and practice on your own. What you cannot do is stay up 24x7x365, nor overcome overwhelming odds. Being in a group obviously improves your odds plus shares the burden for any watches, physical labor, etc. As I age, physical conditioning is also very important.
A most excellent analogy that makes sense. I'm right along with you and given the turn of events since the new administration took over, I'm more concerned than ever before. I'm sure you get my drift. Dangerous times we're in now... Ears to the ground, noses to the air, heads on a swivel.. Lay low move slow blend in, know what you know and know what you don't know. Conspiracy theorists I do not want within 100 miles of me.:Q Anon and the ilk are felonious dysentery. I go strictly on facts and not rumors.
unless you plan on relocating post serious SHTF - relocating to an area that will have land available and ready for gardening >>> your plan is immediately flawed .... takes seasons on seasons to get virgin gardening plot land growing convincingly -
That’s a sobering and painfully honest reflection...and I think you’ve touched on something many of us feel but rarely say aloud. You’re right. When collapse truly comes, it’s not going to be a Hollywood scene of strangers banding together to rebuild. It’ll be quiet, tense, and fractured. Trust won’t be built in the moment, it has to already exist. And if it doesn’t, most folks will default to their blood, their closest circle, or no one at all. Five miles is a long way when there are no cars, no phones, and no fuel. People underestimate just how isolating distance becomes without the infrastructure we’re used to. And resources... In urban and suburban areas, there won’t be enough wild game or clean water to go around once desperation sets in. By the time you can grow a garden, you’ll need to defend it. And that’s not community...it’s survival, and it's brutal. The grim reality is that unless you’re already embedded in a trusted, prepared community, one physically close, emotionally bonded, and mentally aligned, your best bet will be to hunker down with your own. Ride out the storm. And only later, when things settle into a new kind of hard order, will something like “community” be possible again. Thank you for putting these thoughts out there. It’s not defeatist it’s clear-eyed. And in a world full of wishful thinking, we need more of that.
You make some brutally practical points — survival truly boils down to pre-existing, hyper-local trust, not just good intentions.
While in survival we usually talk about the big 3. 3 min for breathing, 3 hours for shelter, 3 days for water and about 3 weeks for food. There is another and often over looked set of numbers in survival. 3 days for the average sheeple. Almost ever one can live the first 3 days. They will have some resources in their houses, sleep in their cars if on the road, Stay in a work place etc. A very few resources will help you in this situation and for most of us we will experience it a few times in our lives. Snow storms in New England and Northeast are doing this as I type this in Feb 2026. Going all out Mad Max will get you in prison when things return to normal. This storm is also affecting the power systems. About 600,000 places have no power and even with help from areas outside of the storm, it may be days before power is back. We had an ice storm a few years back in our area and it took 14 days before my power was back The crew that reconnected my power was from Canada and they were working with a crew from Georgia. My wood heat kept me warm and also prevented the plumbing from freezing and saved me the several hundred dollars my neighbors spent for plumbing repairs and kept me out of the local shelter. People got together and used the locally available resources, most have chain saws and a few have tractors with front end loaders, I have both, and we were able to clear the downed trees off the road and have a round about way to the main roads cleared in a few hours after the storm. A local member of the volunteer fire department made an overlay on the town street map showing which roads were open. enough of us had low powered radios that a relay system was set up to replace the phones until more fuel was found for the cell tower, The community, semi rural, and basically a bedroom for those working in one of the nearby urban areas, came through like a champ. The nearby urban areas did not do as well as they sat in their houses and screamed at people for not doing something. This points out the wisdom shared with us by oliviabrooks. In the short term it is always going to default to your choice of the community you live in and the relationships built up before the event. A neighbor's wife was on dialysis for cancer. A road was cleared for her husband to drive her to the hospital, the local fire department used its radio system and the emergency net to be sure the hospital, 50 miles away, was doing chemo, and the hospital had emergency generators to allow the chemo to be given. While it may seem a minor thing, at least 50 people not only thought it was important, but stepped up and did what was necessary. In most cases at the 3 day point you will have a good feel for what is going to happen in the future and you will have to make plans for that future. Things are going to go back to normal and other than replacing some stored food , nor real changes in your life style need to be made. At the 3 day point some serious decisions have to be made. In my semi rural area, the town has about 5,000 people living on 36 square miles of land. We are about 60 miles from Boston, a long but doable commute, and have no real food resources. I have one of the very few greenhouses and there are no large scale farms. At the present time our locally available resources might support 100 people. My wife has passed away, I am 88 and in poor health, and I am not doing well in medium term food storage. That given, my long term storage foods, used to be enough for 4 people for 5 years, if properly prepared, would feed the town population for about 1 day. It was meant to keep my wife, step daughter and her husband, and a selected group of friends, alive until the gardens and greenhouse would support us, If things fell apart in August, until next August. Should these resources be shared or kept for your personal survival group? That decision I think should be based on the 3 week point. Most people with even a little food can survive for 3 weeks if they have water and shelter. A few bowels of beans and rice may make life more comfortable, but they will be alive without it, At the 3 day point you will have to consider the 3 week outcome. If it is an ice storm, narrow band of outages, no problem, help out. Same way for regional flooding, hurricanes, forest fires, etc, things that are both localized and in which you can reasonably expect out side resources to be available after some period of time. During my lifetime I have never had to make the 3 day decision on the 3 week outcome. I pray to God that you do not ever have to make that decision either. I have always been able to share with at least my friends and neighbors. I will admit that I have had choices in who I shared with, but I have shared. If it looks like the system has collapsed and no outside help is going to be available, then you must in order to survive in the long run ration your resources at the about 3 day point. If not you will be in the massive die off at about the 3 week point. This will require either a very well equipped defense force or being very grey and with your resources well hidden. If you do decide to "hoard" those resources you put back while your neighbors went to Disney World or bought that new snowmobile, you will face an almost unlimited number of people who wish to use your resources to stay alive another week. You will most likely not only be endangered by your hungry neighbors, refuges from the cities, all levels of government trying to "redistribute" your resources, but by the local person trying to maintain their version of order, Might be the military, local government, gang, FEMA, etc. They will not only be willing to acquire your food but also your weapons, any means of food production and anything else you may have put aside and to consolidate you into an area that they control. If they can not supply food it is most likely that you will die. If no outside resources are available the next major decision point is at about 3 months. By this point the stored resources of the community are gone in most areas. Some rural areas that have not been strip mined by either the urban areas around them with the help of the government, hoards of refugees, or the local gang or warlords may still be doing well. In most areas only those that have prepared with serious long term storage foods will still be supplied with food, water, and the ability to continue producing it. The continued possession of it will depend in most cases on either the use of military type force or an ever more effective ability to hide and to be grey. At some point after about 3 months, even being alive indicates that you are indeed a prepper and thus are a source of resources. At this point I think it will be in fact a necessity to be part of a group. You simply can't stay awake 24 hours a day to protect it and you will need help in using your land and resources to produce enough food and fuel to survive to the 3 year point. At this point in time you would need at least a 1 year supply of food, seeds, supplies, etc to survive the next period until you can replace your long term storage foods with food grown and processed after the SHTF and to be able to both defend the production facilities and keep the food. This will have required someone , hopefully you, to have had a major amount of preps before the event. If you have had the resources to survive the 3 month die off, then you face the 3 year point. Things will most likely be back to the new normal. Some food production and shelter has had to be reestablished or you would have died. This is the hardest objective for most preppers to achieve. In our fiction we find many different answers. They range from a new and reorganized government that takes us back to our roots with most of us living freely in a society that is at about the 1890's level but with better health care, to being forced into barracks behind barbed wire and working 12 hours a day for the local warlord, FEMA, UN, or some country that came in to "aid" us but ended up in control. But to even reach that level of development requires that you both have the resources to live thru that first year, but to sustain that thru the second year. That requires land, animals, seeds, etc. In the past that has best been done by groups organized around some common cause. Example are the LDS, the Amish, several organizations the established colonies in under populated area as the Pilgrims, etc. In the prepper fiction we often place our attention on those individuals and small groups that are able to achieve the 3 year point and gloss over the society necessary to sustain the over all order needed to make that group possible. In history a massive change in society has not been pleasant for the average individual. Lenin in his infinite wisdom, starved millions of farmers in the Ukraine and elsewhere, who had grown food, had the animals, had the fuel, and were well prepared for the winter and the next 10 years. He did this to feed his political base in the urban areas. Mao in his great leap forward did the same thing in China as did Pol Pet in his country. The breakup of Eastern Europe has not been pleasant either nor has the random chaos of the Middle East and Africa. While the numbers aren't good, even preparing for a 3 day event can make your life more comfortable and preparing for a 3 week event can save your life. In much of our past history, the survivors at that point have joined together and often with outside help, been able to survive for the long term. Being able to survive for 3 months may well allow you, as a small percentage of the population remaining, to be a part of some longer term survival solution. If the event was caused by a disease or major death event, you may well be invited to join or be able to use the stored resources of others. I feel that if you can survive for the first year, the remaining groups will both need and welcome people that are proven survivors and willing to work. Thus I believe any level of preparing greatly increases your chance of survival.
