TEOTWAWKI vs. The Perfect Storm

There’s a lot of attention paid in prepper circles to the TEOTWAWKI (the end of the world as we know it) event: The One Big Thing that changes our worlds forever. Well, we ought to pay some attention to those. They do happen; and it’s Very Bad. It’s maybe less bad if you’re well prepared. Truth to tell though, most real disasters don’t come as the Big One, the .50 caliber round through the engine block of your life. They come as the shotgun blast. Any one pellet would have been survivable; but not the entire swarm. Most disasters are the Perfect Storm.

Clouds and rain are such a common part of life that the Perfect Storm combos create most of our big disasters.

The Perfect Storm is not the exception

The odd thing is that when people notice the real nature of one of these events, they always marvel at it. Why, so many things had to go wrong to cause such an awful disaster! It was the Perfect Storm! <– as if no one should ever have expected such a thing.

But we should absolutely expect it, because that’s the usual face of disaster. Be they the societal disaster that leaves tens of thousands dead or the personal disaster that leaves you wondering how you’re going to cope, it’s usually the collection of buckshot that leaves the deep wounds.

A Perfect Storm of a famine

I was recently, for professional reasons, studying up on the Hunger Winter in the Netherlands. In the winter of 1944-45, roughly 20,000 Dutch died of starvation. Many millions more came very near, and suffered lasting metabolic damage.

When I first learned of this, I read that it happened because the occupying German army snatched all the food it could to send back to Germany. Reading other (German) sources, I read it was because Allied bombing prevented efficient transport of food. Summing across all sources, it seems it was both of these. And planting disruption the spring before from the war. And poor summer weather. And early winter onset. And economic losses that undermined the efficiency of the usual source of supply during rationing (the black markets). And…you get the picture.

Any one of those things, or even two or three, and the people would have found work-arounds. Add them all together and the city people were in a world of hurt. (It wasn’t as bad in the villages. Back yard gardens are hard to effectively raid and don’t require transport. Just an interesting prepper side-note.)

Perfect Storms of personal disasters

As a diver, I study post-mortems of dive accidents as cautionary tales. A big take-away from that is that there is no one problem or equipment failure that’s likely to kill a diver. Here’s a run-down of the most common sort of scenario:

The diver only had a partial tank, but more than enough for the planned dive and she didn’t want to hassle with a refill. She’d noticed a minor glitch in her backup regulator, but had forgotten to get it looked at and it worked fine when she tested it this morning. She usually was good at sticking with her buddy, but she got absorbed watching some fish drama and very briefly lost track of him.

Then she twisted her head to watch a pretty fishie and her mouthpiece broke off. No problem, pull out the backup. The glitch returns and it starts to free-flow, spewing endless bubbles and obscuring her vision. She can’t see where her buddy (her other back-up air source) is. She heads up to the surface, sipping air from the free-flow stream as she trained. But then the tank runs dry …. 

No one malfunction will usually kill a diver. Letting storm clouds pile one on another might.

Keeping a weather eye out for the Perfect Storm

So what’s the point of all this? A reminder that we as preppers shouldn’t over-focus on the Big One, the TEOTWAWKI event. We need to keep an eye on the weather and watch for the brewing of the Perfect Storm events. The individual components can slide under our radar if we’re not paying attention. This is especially true if we know we’ve got a backup plan for any one event. Why would a diver blow off taking care of a regulator? Well, you know how it is, she wasn’t really expecting to need that one anyway….

It can be a useful habit to think about the buckshot as well as the .50 cal. What combination of more minor events might combine to real trouble? 

Minor Details and Perfect Storms

Ok, so some elements of these perfect storms you just can’t stop. Invading armies, bombing armies, and bad weather are not within your reach. But what about where you live? What about the potatoes in the ground that are hard for the invaders to snatch? Most of these Perfect Storms are a combination of events beyond and within any one person’s control; so some factors are within a prepper’s reach.

The best defense is to mind the details. Keep entropy from eroding the preps. Check to make sure the housemates haven’t used the spare batteries. Is that flashlight still in easy reach? How about those emergency contact and financial files; are those up to date? I admit, buying a big new prep is a lot more fun than dinking about checking on sixteen minor ones; but the latter is often time better spent. 

Don’t be surprised when the Perfect Storm hits. There’s always weather. Occasionally it all hits at once.