The premise
More and more of the infrastructure that keeps us alive is run by software, and increasingly by AI systems that nobody fully understands. Power grids, water treatment, logistics, hospitals, payments, the phone network. A failure in those systems — a bug, an attack that moves at machine speed, a model doing exactly what it was told — could take several of them down at once, for longer than anyone has planned for.
We hope that never happens. Hope is not a plan. Being ready for a bad week costs little and is useful in every ordinary disaster too: storms, outages, floods, a broken water main.
Three things we take for granted
Water
Tap water is pumped and treated with electricity. When the power stops, the pressure holds for hours, maybe a day, then the taps run dry and what comes out is no longer safe. Emergency guidance says to store one gallon per person per day, for at least three days and ideally two weeks. Most households have a few bottles in the fridge.
Electricity
Food in a refrigerator is safe for about four hours without power. A full freezer, about two days. Hospitals are required to be able to run on their own for 96 hours. After that, they depend on fuel deliveries over roads served by pumps that also need electricity. Nothing in a modern house — heat, water, cooking, light, money — works without it.
Communication
Cell towers run on batteries for a few hours when the power fails, then go silent. Landlines are mostly gone. 911 rides on the same network. In a real outage you will not be able to find out whether your family is safe, where help is, or what is happening — unless you arranged another way beforehand.
What we do
We are in the planning and outline phase.
Right now the work is thinking, not stockpiling. We are mapping how a community actually hardens the infrastructure it depends on, so that a disaster is something it absorbs rather than something it discovers. Four systems, in the order they fail:
- Water. Where it comes from, what stops when the pumps do, and what a neighborhood can hold in reserve.
- Food. How far it travels to reach us, how long the local supply lasts, and what is grown or stored within reach.
- Hospitals and care. What our facilities can sustain on their own, and who nearby has medical training when they cannot.
- Communication. How we reach each other once the towers go quiet: meeting points, check-in times, radio.
Nothing dramatic. We are not building bunkers. We are working out what is worth doing, writing it down, and doing it with the people who live near us — because when the network is down, your neighbors are your infrastructure.
That outline is what the newsletter is for. It is being written in the open, and it is early enough that what you know changes it.
Join
Two ways in. The newsletter is occasional and short. The Telegram group is where things actually happen.
You are on the list.
That did not work. Try again in a minute.
We store your email address and nothing else. No tracking, no third parties. Reply to any message to be removed.