I got interested in what was then called survivalism while I was involved in municipal government in a small California town in the 1980s. I took a look at our emergency preparations, as I was required to do. I soon found that our planning, like that of most municipalities, did not extend beyond about 3 days at most. This was based on how long it would take to fix things, or for FEMA to arrive in force, whichever came first. I thought about what would happen if we were on our own longer than that, or if outside help would not be available at all.

To make a long story short, I found that a number people outside the survival sub-culture, serious academics and emergency professionals, have quietly researched these longer-term scenarios, and their conclusions are very different from those of the preppers. The latter operate under a set of assumptions that reflect their personal and (mostly libertarian) political biases.

The chief fallacy is that groups larger than a family or a small pre-disaster “club” could not, and would not, be formed after a major breakdown. The only exceptions in their view would be gangs of looters and scavengers who would have to be held off with rifle fire. This view is based on limited and generally biased observation of actual disasters like Hurricane Katrina. It is fallacious partly because it is based on biased observation and partly because it ignores the fundamental differences between those disasters and long term societal breakdown. In fact, if outside help and intervention were not anticipated, most people would look to any shreds of authority and technical knowledge that happened to survive, and they would cooperate to maintain these remnants. Criminal elements would be eliminated early on.

One common set of prepper fallacies involves the fragility of our technical infrastructure, particularly the electrical grid. The collapse of the national electric distribution system does not mean the end of electricity forever. Preppers assume it does because they have seen local grids go down in a regional outage. In fact, it would be possible under many circumstances to isolate any part of the grid and bring it back online independently if there is a power plant within that portion of the grid. This isn’t done in regional outages because it takes some time, longer than is needed to bring the larger grid back up, and the work would have to be reversed at the end of the regional outage, which would take more time.

A good fictional illustration of this is the nuclear power plant in Niven and Pournelle’s Lucifer’s Hammer, written in 1977. This facility becomes an island of civilization in a world that has been essentially destroyed by an ultimate catastrophe, a comet impact. For some reason, the authors did not extend this logic to gas fired plants that happen to be located near gas wells, or coal fired ones near coal mines.

This kind of improvisation can occur with other elements of technology as well. Here in Lubbock, for example, we have a lot of oil wells in and near town. There are no refineries but there are expert petroleum engineers in the academic community who would know how to improvise one.

What might be left of technological civilization would vary with the nature of the disaster, but there would always be something, especially in isolated areas, and people who knew how to make use of it. An individual family or a small prep club would probably not have the necessary skills, however, nor could they move freely outside their fortified compounds to do the work.