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The Coming Storm
I tend to do what I do best, procrastinate. Well, to feel better about myself, I like to think I am prioritizing. Either way, I have felt compelled to write about this supply chain crisis since White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki claimed President Joe Biden saved Christmas on Dec. 22. Nothing gets my blood boiling more than utter lies thrown in my face. How can someone say something so stupid, and how can so many people actually believe it? We have all seen the empty shelves for randomly illogical items, starting with toilet paper and now cat food.
With a very small engineering firm, there is a larger supply chain crisis that will be coming to a head in three to six months. We can’t get parts. I could go off on tangents, but let’s focus on just one major device. A PLC, or programmable logic controller, is a computer that runs actual stuff. Not things like a washer and dryer but how about the water that comes into your house, the water that leaves, the drawbridge that needs to go up, the MRI you desperately need. Almost everything you touch that is manmade uses one of these controllers at some point in the process.
To fulfill orders, my competition and I have been looking for other sources and substituting wherever we can. This is from sketchy suppliers to used parts on eBay. Now these people jacked the price up tenfold, and they are running out. New bids, which are mostly municipal, are getting a huge surcharge because we have no idea what something is going to cost or even if we can fulfill it. Many parts now have a six-month lead time. That means we won’t deliver, but we will be glad to take your money.
My medical controls experience is limited to a heart catheter surgical kit. It isn’t much, but I can’t change a fuse on the machine without a trail of paperwork, and don’t even try substituting anything. Major production companies will start slowing or shutting down because they are unable to get spare parts.
In the wastewater industry, most communities have 20-year-old equipment and older. That’s like 105 human years. Should one piece of this system fail, they may find replacement parts are just not available. When this happens, all you’ll hear on the news is there was a water main break. Here is an insider secret. It is almost never a water main break. It’s usually someone like me who hit the wrong key.
Other machines and systems are not so dramatic. But the problems are starting to add up and will soon hurt you in ways you will never know. Perhaps they are a product of these random shortages we are seeing. Toilet paper and cat food use the same controller. The terrible thing is we have a lot of work pending and are about to lay off workers that have nothing to do because we just can’t get parts. I have never seen anything like this, so I can’t even speculate.
Published in General
Sure, food, water, a way to keep from freezing to death. But, think how dependent we’ve become on our phones. If we don’t have transportation energy and can’t communicate (with our bank, our doctor, our family, . . .), we’re screwed. I don’t think we can prepare for what might be coming.
Mr. C and I have set up the crudest of emergency communications — we’ve agreed on a drop box (our valve well) to leave a message in case of the need to get out in an emergency. “Honey, I’ve taken the kids and the dogs and I’m going to get as far as I can on the tank of gasoline I have. Head [north] [south] on this route and try to catch up. Our final destination is [Texas] [South Dakota] in [this] city if we can make it. If not, we’ll see you somewhere along the way. Love you!”
I think that’s largely true, and not just because of dependence on phones etc. I’ve stockpiled some canned meats and a few other things, and I have a 2-year reserve supply of the prescriptions that I take (which is something I suspect too many people haven’t thought about). But I don’t think it makes a lot of sense to try and be a “survivalist” the way things have been going for too long. There’s value in being able to get by “on the margin” for a while, but if the stores truly go EMPTY for any significant length of time, people are going to have much bigger things to worry about than whether their truck has a full tank of diesel.
And by the way, unless you have something like an older Mercedes diesel with mechanical fuel injection and manual transmission that can be push-started, any vehicle you have will likely be dead after an EMP no matter how full the tank is.
I hadn’t thought of this – great idea that I will steal. Once every year or so I update an emergency contact list for everyone in our family (27 people, not including grandkids) with phone numbers, addresses, email addresses, etc. We even have a blog where a group message can be posted. And a landline where we can all access the VM, and an out of state and out of country contact. None of which will matter a damn if cell phones and the Internet go down.
Ten bucks says all my nieces and nephews have the info saved on their cell phones, but we oldies have printed out and laminated copies.
When I moved from Phoenix to my new place, I had written down some directions. Which turned out to be a good thing as most peoples’ GPS is from cell-phone service and there was no cell-phone service for much of the trip.
I’m dark-grey pilled on surviving more than even 6 months if there’s a real crisis, s/a food distribution or EMP.
@WesternChauvinist, you frequently mention that this is spiritual war. I think sharing is important if the S ever hits the F and people are starving. Beyond that, anything can happen.
Yup. I’d take that bet.
If people are starving, they will likely need more food than any particular neighbor etc could provide while taking care of themselves. Too many people aren’t taking any precautions at all.
I have lots of space now for food and fuel and even replacement appliances, but I only have disability income and it doesn’t go very far.
Oh, yes, that’s true. And when people are starving they eat zoo animals, so I think they won’t be respecting property rights.
My favorite guy President Trump did take some steps to protect us from EMP attacks, and thank the Good Lord this executive order was not on the lists I’ve seen of Trump’s executive orders that Biden overturned. I followed the EMP issue for some time because we had a writer (I forget if he was a contributor or member) who wrote often about this vulnerability, saying how ridiculous it was to live this way because the fix was unbelievably cheap.
From the article dated April 26, 2019:
See also this important article about important steps he took in May 2020.
I keep everything–passwords, usernames, account numbers–in a Word file that I back up and print out every once in a while so I can put my hand on it. I still get paper statements for my accounts because it is simply too easy to change an electronic record of any kind.
My kids keep their records on their devices or in the cloud.
Do they believe “the cloud” isn’t really some kind of Amazon computer in a big building somewhere?
I wonder if used appliances or appliances in general could be a source for parts for manufacturers. The useful life of appliances has shortened tremendously over the past few years so there are a lot of them in a trash heap at our local dump that could be mined for parts or materials if manufacturers could ever use them.
No. They know what it is. I think they have built in some redundancies in terms of storing their data among different places and backing it up such that they are confident they’d be able to restore their systems and their data.
An EMP would take out “the cloud” too, of course. As well as making their own systems un-restorable.
Make sure you have vitamins, protein bars, medicines, and first aid products including aspirin, cough med, band-aids, alcohol and peroxide, etc. toilet paper, seeds to plant a garden if possible. This is a good time to get out of debt and make sure you and your neighbors communicate.
That is a good idea – review your routes and have a system to communicate – after 9/11, I was told by some folks that worked in DC that if they heard a certain phrase, they were to activate the bug out protocol, as in get out of Dodge and have your bug out kit ready and with you. My sister lives in a mountain town and it was one of the areas where they were told there would be evacs from DC and Baltimore. She had to go through training on how to set up and run a shelter – Homeland trained all the state workers.
An old neighbor of mine (ex-military) with kids in the armed services learned how to make his own fuel and collects used cooking oil from some restaurants. They have always had an RV ready to go.
If the RV isn’t diesel and can’t be push-started, it will be useless after an EMP.
Fiberoptic cable would be safe, I’m sure, but the electronic components at either end would likely be fried.
Is this for everyone? Or just for the government few? :)
Don’t throw out your dog sled and burro cart.
You keep saying this. Big lead-acid batteries and the starter hardware/wiring of typical diesel engines are not susceptible to EMP. Nothing delicate to be fried by induced currents. If the stuff that permits the engine to run survives, the starting hardware certainly will too. (Same for gasoline engines.)
That depends. Electric start requires some more delicate electronics than the starter motor itself etc. Especially if there are computer-controlled circuits involved, such as for electronic fuel injection. Which is why I specified earlier the mechanical fuel injection.
To be clear about my post I never intended that in 3 to 6 months we would reach the prepping point. I can see random empty shelves, “water main breaks”, and things just out of the ordinary. This is for the average consumer. Devastating to my company and to infrastructure projects relying on people like me.
With that being said an EMP would be devastating. In a nutshell anything with a 5v chip will be fried. Old cars and tractors will be fine. Wire won’t be damaged.
Before personal computers were big I worked for the now defunct Prime Computer in Framingham, MA in the RND/test facility. It’s long after the fact so I can now talk about it (I hope). It was so much fun. We had a test field. We put a xxx computer in the middle and blasted it with all kinds of radiation you can think of. We did everything we could to destroy it. When we did find a problem we fixed it and did it again.
Basically it comes down to a Faraday cage. You can put anything in a box with copper mesh but don’t leave more than 1mm of air space. Any chip, plugged into something or not, without sufficient mass in front of it will be junk.
Just for those who mandate mask and jabs for everyone, but don’t do it themselves.
I don’t know – I was thinking everyone. The gov. would go to probably Cheyenne Mtn. or CO.?
Most understand your post to be about shortages – especially chips. Sometimes it leads to the other what if’s and prepping. This is probably natural – it’s good to get all perspectives and be prepared. Your post prompted others working in various industries to report what they are experiencing and I think this is valuable. It certainly isn’t being broadcasted.
Maybe the elites will go to Cheyenne. But the population of metropolitan DC and Baltimore is 7.6+ million. I may be wrong, but this seems like an awful lot to put into camps. It may be just for key government workers. But who knows.
Yes, the comments on supply issues and wait times were eye-opening.
I’ve been in Cheyenne Mountain. There are worse things than death. Like spending the remainder of your days under a mile of granite competing for limited resources. No thanks.