I am not prepared, and it is one hour after the grid went down
This is written from the worst possible starting point: no stored water, no torch with batteries, no radio, eleven dollars and a quarter tank of fuel. Every day is one more day of the same emergency. The techniques that keep him alive are real and cited; the mistakes are the ones people actually make, which is why they are in here.
Day 0 and Day 1 are live. A new day is released every morning — the roadmap below is the whole arc, so you can see where it is going.
Rationing is not a plan
Two days of water left and a bathtub I cannot use. Why counting litres per person beats hiding the bottles. Live now.
The toilet question nobody wants to ask
Sanitation is the part of a grid-down week that actually gets people sick.
Cold at night, and the one warm room
Building a heat trap out of a bedroom, and why the car is not the answer.
Food that needs no flame
What I can actually eat, and the canning rule that keeps it from killing me.
Cash, fuel, and the first trip out
A quarter tank, eleven dollars, and the queue at the one open shop.
Information: what is true and what is rumour
Three counties of rumour, one real number, and how I finally got a radio.
The week-one wall
Tired, cold, and making worse decisions. The human failure is the one the books warn about.
Water from the ground
Snow, a creek and the filter question — and what boiling cannot fix.
The medicine problem
A prescription with four days left and a pharmacy with no power.
Light discipline and the first theft
Someone is walking the street at 2 a.m. What a lit window tells them.
Cooking without power, safely
The one appliance I can still use, and the two I must never bring inside.
Heating one room, without dying
Layering, ventilation, and the carbon-monoxide arithmetic I keep coming back to.
The neighbour with the generator
What a working generator really costs to run, and why the CO rule almost got broken twice.
Two weeks in: what I have learned about my house
An audit done by living in it, in the cold, for a fortnight.
The baby, the elderly, and the sick
Why the standard 72-hour kit does not fit a household with a diabetic in it.
Injury without a hospital
Splinting, closing a wound, and the 12-hour rule that decides whether a cut becomes an infection.
Hygiene, laundry, morale
The unglamorous work that keeps people functional.
False hope
The power comes back for three hours, and everyone stops being careful.
Barter and the neighbourhood
What actually has value when money does not, and what I had worth trading.
Getting the water heater out
151 litres sitting behind a valve I did not own the hose for.
Fuel: the quarter tank and the siphon
How much is really in the lawnmower, the car and the cans.
The one bad decision
A fire in a cold house, and how fast a bad night becomes a catastrophe.
Keeping children sane
Schooling, boredom and fear, when the routine is gone.
The community hub
The hall with the generator, and why the town is functioning while my street is not.
What the cold does to a well and to pipes
Rural water after a fortnight of frost.
Three weeks of bad sleep
The decision quality problem nobody plans for.
What I will never do again
Four specific things, in order of how close they came to killing us.
Preparing during the emergency
Buying, storing and fixing while the thing is still happening.
The end in sight
The crews, the estimate, and the risk of the last mile.
Day thirty: the list
What a prepared version of me would have had on day zero, costed honestly.
The point of the serial is the list at the end of it. Everything he wishes he had on day zero is already written down — 75 scored questions across ten domains, and the spreadsheets that turn "I should get more water" into litres and a date.
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