The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch (6 page)

Another key consumable of modern life, and one that will remain crucial for transport, agriculture, and running generators during the rebuilding, is fuel. There will be huge reserves of gasoline and diesel fuel for the surviving population. The fuel tanks of millions and millions of cars, motorcycles, buses, and trucks offer a scattered repository that can be tapped into. Gasoline can be scavenged from abandoned cars by siphoning it out of the tank, or even more simply by hammering a screwdriver into the tank to drain it into a waiting receptacle. The underground storage tanks of gas stations also collectively hold a vast reserve. Without power, the gas pumps won’t work, but it wouldn’t take much to jury-rig a pump with a 16-foot pipe to drain it. Each gas station holds a subterranean lake of fuel of typically around 30,000 gallons, enough for an average family car to drive more than a million miles along post-apocalyptic roads.

The wider issue is how well that fuel persists. Diesel is more stable than gasoline, but even within a year, reactions with oxygen would begin to form a gummy sediment that clogs the filters in engines, and accumulated water from condensation would permit microbial growth. If well protected and filtered before use, stored fuel might still be good for a decade or so before you’d need to start finding ways to reprocess it for continued use.

Motor vehicles themselves can be kept rolling as components wear out and fail by cannibalizing replacements from other automobiles, or improvising. Cuba offers a good contemporary example of this. The 1962 US embargo abruptly isolated the island from imports of
American technology or machine components. Many of the cars still on the road today are classic models, nicknamed Yank Tanks, dating back to before this cutoff. The only reason these vehicles are still working fifty years later is the ingenuity of Cuban mechanics, who improvise repairs or harvest replacement components from other cars “parted out.” These repairmen are forced to be increasingly ingenious as the pool of working parts steadily diminishes: a pattern that will certainly be repeated on a larger scale during the grace period following the collapse of civilization.

While fuel stocks and cannibalized parts will keep cars, planes, and boats going for a while,
the modern GPS navigation devices we have become so reliant upon will malfunction surprisingly quickly after satellites lose the regular uplink from their command center. Positional accuracy will drop to about half a kilometer within two weeks of the Fall and around 10 kilometers within six months, and the system will be utterly useless within just a few years as the satellites drift out of their precisely coordinated orbits.

Medical supplies will be yet another crucial foraging target in the aftermath. Ensuring access to classes of pharmaceuticals such as analgesics, anti-inflammatories, antidiarrheals, and antibiotics will help keep you and your companions comfortable and healthy. Deserted hospitals, clinics, and pharmacies are not the only repositories of vital drugs—you should also look in pet shops and vet practices. Antibiotics marketed for farm and pet animals, and even for fish aquariums, are exactly the same as for humans and should not be overlooked in your scavenging.

Other everyday items will also be worth gathering, as they can be reappropriated for medical uses. One of the earliest uses of
cyanoacrylate adhesive, better known as superglue, was for rapidly closing wounds of US soldiers during the Vietnam War. This application would become very important again in preventing life-threatening infections in a post-apocalyptic world if you don’t have immediate access to sterilized suturing needles and threads. The technique is to first thoroughly wash out the wound and cleanse it with antiseptic, perhaps purified ethanol that you have distilled yourself (see
here
). Then pull the lips of the injury together and administer the superglue only along the surface to bridge the gap and hold it closed.

Your main concern, however, will be
how long a stash of medications would last before they expire. In the early 1980s, the US Department of Defense found itself sitting on a $1 billion stockpile of drugs that were about to exceed the printed expiration date, and facing the prospect of having to replace that reserve every two to three years. They commissioned a study by the Food and Drug Administration to test more than a hundred different medicines to see how long each one remained effective. They found that, astonishingly, about 90 percent of the drugs tested were still effective beyond their supposed expiration date, and in many cases their actual persistence was substantially longer. The antibiotic ciprofloxacin was still good after a decade. A more recent study found that the antiviral drugs amantadine and rimantadine remained stable after twenty-five years of storage, and theophylline tablets, prescribed for respiratory diseases like COPD and asthma, still exhibited 90 percent stability more than three decades later. On the whole, it is estimated that most drugs will still be largely effective several years beyond the expiration date given by the pharmaceutical company, even if the sealed packaging has been opened. And with modern blister packs, which protect each individual pill from degradation by moisture and oxidation from the air until the moment it is needed, the persistence could be substantially longer. So if you’re facing a potentially life-threatening infection, you should almost certainly
take your chances with a long-expired pack of antibiotics. Although the potency of a pharmaceutical will decline as the active ingredient in the tablet chemically degrades, there’s no great risk that it’ll harm you.

You might think that the worst thing about any city is the other people: dense swarms pouring along the streets and jostling one another onto the subway, all immersed in the roaring soundscape of traffic, car horns, and sirens. After a catastrophic depopulation the silent tranquility of a deserted metropolis would be pretty eerie at first, but might become very pleasant. Yet while the dead cities will be phenomenal resources for scavenging the materials needed for rebuilding, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to continue living there after the Fall.

In the immediate aftermath, the major problem with built-up areas will be the huge numbers of bodies of those who died in the catastrophe. With no organized service to remove and dispose of corpses in a sanitary way, not only will the stench of decay be unbearable for the first months, but the rot and decomposition will pose a severe health hazard. As with any disaster, transmissible diseases from contaminated water supplies will be a big concern.

But after a year or so of touring the countryside and looking for other survivors, why not move back into town with all its amenities? The fact is that the glittering skyscrapers of modern cities, and even modestly tall apartment buildings, will become practically uninhabitable with the fall of civilization: they function only with the support of modern infrastructure. With no electricity grid or natural-gas supply to run the air-conditioning units or heating system, you’d find the indoor climate uncomfortable and difficult to control. Water mains will have lost pressure, so you’d need to find some source of groundwater in the
city and carry several gallons a day back to your apartment, schlepping it up the staircase with no electricity to run the elevators. With enough determination you could fix many of these inconveniences by rigging diesel generators to run the elevators, air-conditioning units, and water pumps, for example, at least for the time being. You might even briefly entertain some fantasy of moving into a plush penthouse apartment, surveying the serene, deserted city around you through its floor-to-ceiling plate-glass windows, and cultivating all you need to eat in a dense permaculture in the roof garden. A more plausible model for post-apocalyptic city dwelling would be to live immediately adjacent to a major park and plow up the turf to cultivate crops.

In some cities, the environment will quickly become uninhabitable once the technological bubble bursts. Places like Los Angeles and Las Vegas have been incongruously built in very arid or even desert locales, and will rapidly wither as maintenance fails on the aqueducts supplying them with water from afar. Washington, DC, on the other hand, will face the opposite problem, as it was built on former swampland that will begin to revert to its original state with the loss of drainage.

I suspect, therefore, that you’ll find it far easier to leave the cities for good and move to a more appropriate site: a rural location with fertile, cultivable ground and older buildings better suited for off-grid habitation. The sort of location that would be good for settling again would be coastal—although be mindful of the inevitable sea-level rises due to continuing climate change—allowing access to sea fishing, and near woodland. As we will see, trees have an enormous number of different uses, not just as firewood or timber for construction. You’ll be able to send foraging parties and salvage crews into the dead cities, but you’ll find it much easier living in the countryside. And once you’ve resettled, you’ll want to resurrect basic technological infrastructure as far as possible, beginning with a localized electricity network.

Unlike food or fuel, electricity cannot be stockpiled—it is provided as a continual flow, and so will disappear when the grid goes down within a matter of days after the apocalypse. To retain an electricity supply, the community of survivors will need to generate their own, and we can learn a lot about what is needed by looking at those choosing to live in a self-sustaining “off-grid” way today.

The simplest short-term solution will be to scavenge a bunch of mobile diesel-powered generators from roadwork or construction sites. You may also be able to jack in to any tall wind turbines dotted along nearby hills to keep a renewable power grid going as fuel runs out. Just one of these can provide over a megawatt of power, enough for around a thousand modern homes, until it requires maintenance that you are unable to perform without dedicated equipment or precision spare parts.

Mechanically minded survivors shouldn’t have too much trouble cobbling together rudimentary windmills from salvaged materials. Thin steel sheets could be cut and curved into the radial vanes of a large fan, mounted on the hub of a wheel, and the torque could be transferred by a chain and bicycle gear set.

The principal step is to convert that rotational energy into electricity, and for that you’ll want to salvage a suitable ready-made generator. A source of particularly handy and compact versions is so ubiquitous in the modern world that you would be forgiven for overlooking them. There are around a billion motor vehicles on the planet now—with the US having the most of any nation, around a quarter of the total—and each of them has a salvageable alternator. The car alternator is an ingenious mechanism. Spin the shaft and a perfectly steady 12 volts of direct current appears across its terminals, regardless of how quickly the
shaft is turned, making it perfectly suited to be repurposed for post-apocalyptic small-scale power generation. Simpler alternatives would be to salvage the permanent magnet motors from power tools such as cordless drills, or from the treadmills in gyms. If you forcibly spin the motor spindle it will work backward to generate an electrical current through its terminals, although the output will vary with speed.

Solar panels can also be salvaged and, unlike a diesel generator or wind turbine, have no moving parts and so survive remarkably well without maintenance. The panels do deteriorate over time, though, from moisture penetrating the casing or sunlight degrading the high-purity silicon layers. The electricity generated by a solar panel declines by about 1 percent every year, and so after two or three generations of survivors the panels will have degraded to the point of being useless.

Storing this generated electrical energy for use is your next problem. In fact, one of the first places you’ll probably want to head to after the apocalypse is the golf course, not for a relaxing 18-hole round to help ease the stress of the end of the world as we know it, but to gather a crucial resource. Car batteries are very reliable, but are designed to give a high-current, brief burst of power to spin the starter motor. They’re poorly suited to providing the sustained, steady supply of electrical energy that you would need for powering your new off-grid life; in fact, they are easily damaged if persistently allowed to discharge by more than about 5 percent.

An alternative design of rechargeable lead-acid battery, known as a deep cycle, discharges at a much slower rate and can have almost its entire capacity repeatedly drained and recharged without problems. It’s this kind of battery that you want to forage for in the immediate aftermath. Try caravans and other RVs, motorized wheelchairs, electric forklift trucks, and golf carts—hence the recommended trip to the course. The direct-current output from your bank of storage batteries can run many appliances, such as small fridges and lamps, but you’ll
also want to recover a device called an inverter that will convert that DC into a 120-volt alternating current suitable for powering other appliances.

INHABITANTS OF GORAŽDE, CUT OFF FROM THE GRID BY SERBIAN FORCES IN THE MID-1990S, JURY-RIGGED RUDIMENTARY HYDROELECTRIC GENERATORS TETHERED TO A BRIDGE.

Electricity generation and storage setups like this are used today by Off-Gridders and Preppers steeling themselves for the collapse of civilization. But recent history has also shown us some compelling examples of ingenuity from everyday urbanites in maintaining an electrical supply during adversity. For example, during the Bosnian war of the mid-1990s, the city of Goražde was surrounded and besieged for three years by the Serbian army, and was forced to become largely self-sufficient. Although the inhabitants received airlifted UN food supplies, much of their modern infrastructure was destroyed, and they were cut off from the power grid. To generate electricity, Goraždeans built their own makeshift hydropower installations: platforms floating
in the Drina River moored to the city bridges, fitted with paddle waterwheels driving scavenged car alternators. These were strangely reminiscent of the flour-grinding ship mills in medieval European cities, moored off bridges in the fastest current in the middle of the river, but the modern innovations were feeding electricity back to the riverbanks along suspended cables.