What To Do If The Shit Hits The Fan!

Whether it's a zombie apocalypse, a super-typhoon, alien invasion, a pandemic or total economic collapse, there are some core things you can do to help ensure the survival of yourself and your loved ones in a disaster.

I'm talking about a major collapse here. The kind where, for whatever reason, you're on your own. The authorities are taxed beyond the limit, power is out, you have dwindling water reserves, no food distribution, the fear of anarchy, and so on.

I'm pretty good at disaster response shit. I'm qualified in Infantry Communications and did some work in disaster response simulation and training, in case you're interested. But enough about me...

Now, I'm NOT going to talk about things like stocking food, water filters, weapons, flashlights, generators or anything technical. There's a ton of info on that on the web (paper books are better). You can easily find it and choose what you'll do so far as that is concerned.

There are two basics things you need to focus on: Teamwork and Communications.

Teamwork
This is your most core fundamental need. You need to build local community. That's LOCAL community. I don't mean a bunch of Facebook friends or LinkedIn profiles. Those people are scattered all over the place. Godspeed to them.

What I mean is to build a real community! Connect with the people you live in physical proximity with! Your neighbours, who you've rarely met. Across the street or across the hall. You need to meet those people and start to build friendship and common interest with them now, because they are your real community if the shit hits the fan. Contrary to the apocalypse movies, ordinary people... people who were strangers moments ago but are now in a crisis... people bond together in real disasters. People form spontaneous communities and try to keep each other alive. That's what history has shown in real disasters. So remember that! Build your community. You'll survive a lot longer working together than going off on your own. In fact, the sooner you start this conversation, the better. Start it today. (Even if it's just a get-to-know-you.)

Meet with your neighbours and talk about a disaster plan. You need to build trust, work together and stay cool. You need to pool your resources and take inventory, somehow, of all of the skills, resources and capabilities you have as a group.

You're not going to have time to vote on everything. Seriously, the shit has hit the fan here! So elect your leaders, such as the following:

• The overall leader: When disputes arise, this person has the final say. He or she needs to be creative, active, stable, intuitive, trustworthy, a natural leader, and so on. 
• The planning chief: This person is constantly gathering info, is updating your situational picture and your disaster plan, has contact info for everyone and keeps your maps up to date. Your disaster plan will be constantly changing, and you'll need to quickly write down what you'll do in the next period -- which could be anywhere from the next 12 hours to the next week or whatever, depending on the pace of your disaster.
• The money chief: This person controls whatever financial or bartering resources you have gathered (if applicable).
• The logistics chief: This person coordinates the acquisition, storage and deployment of your stuff.
• The healthcare chief: Enough said. Any doctors or nurses in your group? Even first aid is important and can save lives. Something else: crisis counsellors...
• The safety-security chief: To keep valuable things safe, your area monitored and to be in close contact with police (if possible).
• The operations chief: This person knows how to get a lot of the physical, techie work done, including transportation, backup power, and so on.
• If your disaster is longterm and ongoing, then you may need assistant chiefs in each of these areas so you can function 24 hours-a-day in shifts.
• Put a limit on these leadership terms. Perhaps a certain duration or until your local authorities can assume responsibility again.

You need a situation room. It should be a room with a big table, chairs, a good source of power, landline telephones (see communications below) and a radio if possible. A community center, maybe. A shopping mall. A high school. The dining room in one of your neighbourhood homes, if your community is a block of houses. One of the units in your building, if your community is an apartment complex. Whatever.

All of your leaders need to stay in the situation room and coordinate things. From there, they need to take in information (we'll get into communications in a second), delegate tasks and update the larger picture. Occasionally you leaders can visit the frontlines, but when you're away from the situation room you're less able to provide your vital function as a leader.

You'll need to create teams and delegate tasks. People are going to have to work hard on unpredictable, quickly-arising jobs.

You need a staging area: a place where you control and store your pooled resources. It should be close to the situation room and your labor pool area (see below). It should also be close to open space where you can rally and organize teams to go out on tasks.

Create a labor pool: a meeting place where workers and volunteers can wait for new tasks, then briefly rest and regroup once tasks are over and wait for the next. Try to inventory their capabilities. When the leaders need a task done, they need to call the labor pool, find some people with the capabilities, make a team and then delegate the task to the team. You'll know what tasks need doing as the event unfolds. The labor pool should be close to your staging area and your situation room.

Leadership is important, but good followership is important too. Good leadership is not egotistical bossing: it's serving the community and the mission. Good followership is not blind obedience: you can question a plan, but question once then get on with the team. You don't have the luxury of endless debate here -- seriously, it can rip your group apart. Moving forward on what you feel is a poor plan is better than being paralyzed trying to make a perfect plan. You can always adjust a moving plan as things proceed. You can't adjust a plan that has been demolished from in-fighting.

The last thing is that, if your municipality is on top of things, they will already have these positions and so on, taken care of. But if they are overstretched -- if this is a really huge event -- then you may need to build this infrastructure quickly and on your own. If you do build your own community team, you need to work with your municipal authorities.

Communications
Next is communications. You need good communications to coordinate your activity. Communications break down quickly and this can cause mayhem. (I'll indulge in a little prepper talk here because I know this stuff and it's vital.)

First, pay attention to how you speak and how you listen. No matter how good your comms tech is, if you're speaking a mess you'll confuse people. Whether you're on a phone, a radio, sending written notes, or talking face-to-face, be concise and communicate in short sentences. And speak in plain English (or whatever language you're using) -- don't use codes, slang or jargon that others may not know. And listen! Listen carefully! 

Second is the technical comms issue: Cellphone networks and all that expensive, delicate stuff will likely go down. Basically, this is your core principle in communications: be ready to "step down" to more and more "obsolete" forms of communication. If you can't get through to someone, don't just sit there paralyzed! Do the following:

• Go down to landline telephones. Yes, that means you should maintain one of those, and you should have one of those in your situation room. You can get through to the authorities with landlines, and they are more reliable than cellphone networks (they stay on in power failures). Businesses and institutions will still have landlines. Here in Ontario, the landline telephone infrastructure is still very reliable. That's not always the case in certain other regions. (By the way: get a paper phonebook.)
• If those aren't an option, use radios.
• If that fails, send messengers -- by car, motorcycle, bicycle, horseback (if available), even on foot, if necessary -- with written notes on paper. (Yes it will take more time, but the message will still get through.) If you are sending out vehicles to bring back supplies, use that opportunity to send messages as well.
• Use improvised signals: Flags, caution tape, paper signs, spraypainted signs, handsignals on the top floors of tall buildings, if necessary.
• If you're relying on messengers, have them meet at specific times and places, agreed-to beforehand.
• These are all things people did to communicate in the past and you may need to do them now.

Navigation is related to communications. In the absence of GPS and so on, you need to learn how to navigate. Get paper maps. If you don't have first-rate topographic maps, transit maps, even many tourism maps will work quite well. Use pencils, stickpins and so on to locate 1.) the tasks that need doing; 2.) which teams are where; and, 3.) where the major hazards are (to avoid). You need to try to efficiently coordinate the larger picture.

Using these maps you need to navigate and understand where you are or where others are. Here are the basic principles of navigation. When you feel lost, do the following:

• First, stop and fix your location on your map. Don't just keep moving; stop and find out where you are! You can ask local people, or use your map and consult streetsigns, prominent landmarks, and so on. (If you're a skilled navigator, you don't me to tell you this. It's always a good idea to learn how to read a map and how to navigate with a compass.) If you can see two big landmarks, orient your map to face north (remember: the sun rises in the east and sets in the west... d'uh) and then you can use a pencil-and-ruler (with a compass hopefully) to draw two lines and triangulate back to your location. (If that big hill on the map is to your north, and that tall, prominent building is to your west, you can get a sense of where you are on the map.)

• Second, determine your route. Straightforward. Think about potential hazards on the way.

• Also, find guides: find people who know their way around certain places.

The Intangibles
It's very important to stay calm in a disaster. Wipe away those images of apocalypse, which you see all the time in the movies. If you stay cool, this event may become merely an intensely uncomfortable experience, involving line-ups, waiting, rationing, crowded conditions, uncertainty, hunger and so on -- but with you all still making it through more or less intact. In fact, you may find it becomes an intense experience of sharing and newfound community with others.

You may want to run for the hills and leave the world to its fate. If it's something like a super-hurricane, and the authorities have indicated so, you may need to evacuate. But maybe the option to get away just isn't there. So it may be smarter to stand and face the disaster where you are.  Again: if you coordinate your community, you can make it through in one piece.

Anticipate and be proactive. When you're creating a larger picture of the situation, look at the hazards and challenges facing your community and nearby communities. Now think: What will likely be needed? Get that or send that now! Don't wait to be asked for it. If you wait for people to "pull" things to them -- instead of "pushing" things beforehand -- what happens is everything moves exponentially slower and help doesn't arrive until things are critical or even until the time to help has passed. During Katrina, entire fleets of school buses were left unused, even when there was a huge need for evacuation. A little anticipation -- "Hey, do you think we might eventually need to evacuate here?" -- might have resulted in those vehicles mobilized just as the flooding hit. Use the active push philosophy, not the passive pull one.

You'll be faced with dilemmas, not problems. You can solve a problem. You can't solve a dilemma -- you can only make tradeoffs.

What you need is more important than what you want. Enough said. If you don't know the difference now, then you soon will.

Move at medium speed. Obviously, you'll want to move fast --- but the urge to rush around doing things can stir up confusion and cause fatal errors. Sometimes you'll want to move slow -- but too much caution might doom you. We don't have a good term for "medium speed" -- we tend to say "fast" or "slow" -- but balance speed and caution.

Know when to help, but also when to stay out of the way. One of the things that causes mayhem in disasters is too many people rushing in to help.

Be specific in your requests. Another thing that causes mayhem is requests like "Send everything you have!" Either you get so much stuff that it jams up the works (this has happened in disasters), or you get nothing because your irrational request is ignored.

Han Solo isn't going to assume anything here. Neither should you.

Thinking in circles or assuming things gets people killed. People die in disasters because of ridiculously minor problems. Some famous last words: "You thought I was taking care of that??? I thought you were taking care of that!!!" "Too many people have looked into that for there to be a problem." Remember when Luke Skywalker didn't return from patrol on the Planet Hoth? The deck officer assumes, "It's possible he may have come in through the south entrance." Be like Han Solo: "Why don't you go find out! It's getting dark out there."

Don't mirror others. Others are panicking, so you panic too. That guy is angry at you, so you get angry back. This person is really casual (and sloppy) about this task, so you'll be casual too. Etc. A corollary to this is a kind of inverse mirroring: "The more angry that person gets, the more frightened I will be of him." "The more they push me away, the more I'll force them to understand." "The more that person desparately wants to tell me something the more I'm going to ignore him." Those are all forms of mirroring. It's circular-thinking. Don't do it. De-reflect. Step sideways and reboot the situation.

Give all tasks roughly equal attention. Pay attention to detail, of course. We know this. But when tasks are huge, and our lives at stake, that rattles us and we tend to reflect their urgency in a kind of feedback loop. Then as one person screams for more and more help, the other tunes them more and more out.

Everyone ignored Kyle Reese when he screamed at them about the Terminator because he sounded too crazy. That guy in The  Invasion of the Body Snatchers?, same thing. Nobody believed him.

As both speaker and listener, de-reflect the situation. Don't let the situation go into emotional feedback. Break the feedback of panic/fear/anger, etc. Dig in. Stop what you're doing. Think.
 
Basically, this is a fancy way to say "be cool".

Sun Tzu said that, in general, small issues should be treated with more importance than they deserve, and really important issues should be handled with a little less urgency than they deserve. This is the spirit.

Tend to psychological needs. Debrief each other. Check each other out. Do you have any personal counsellors among you? Also, things like paper books, magazines, boardgames, etc, may become in-demand items if your event stretches out.

Having a conversation at your municipal level now is a very smart thing to do. What you need are the core things for survival -- water, shelter, food, power, and so on. Your municipalities already have that core infrastructure now, more or less, so working with that may be better than everyone trying to build his own bomb shelter to bunker in.

And one last thing: talking about disasters does not cause disasters. (De-reflect.)

For all the various technical issues to do with what type of disaster you're dealing with, again, there are lots of sources of info out there on that. You may want to do that planning now.

So anyway, if the zombies or the robots start to come, these are some core tips to keep your world in one piece. And may The Force be with you...

--- Tim "XFunc" Carter