I still think that everyone is overestimating the speed at which everyone else will try to bug out after a national crisis. If they’re not prepared, and the rest of the country is in the exact same state, where are they trying to go?
Plus, the “normalcy bias” would keep people sitting around until it got very bad.
What about side roads? Of course major highways would be impassible, but I see no reason why regular, smaller roads would become completely impassible. We had a hurricane that knocked out power for 2 weeks for most people, much longer for others, and there was not this mass panic despite many roads made impassible by fallen trees. Maybe it’s different since people knew it was coming and it’s a lower population than where Sandy hit, though it is a capital city. While bugging out, small roads would have increased hazards, but the volume of traffic would be lower, which likely means progress.
Finally, I still can’t reconcile preppers’ belief that one day everything will be normal, and the very next day it’s Walking Dead season 3. I think TV shows have been gasoline on the prepper fire, beginning with History’s “After Humans” or whatever it was, and more recently with “Doomsday Preppers.” This current doomsday business really began with global-warming alarmists. Remember “The Day After Tomorrow?”
I love self reliance. And I understand the legitimate need to be prepared for the unexpected because we’ve been completely coddled and were born into an environment of convenience, but I also don’t think the entirety of the United States will crumble to dust overnight. Look how long it’s taking other economies to do what we’re doing.
More importantly, I find the eagerness of people to begin their amateur rodger-dodger paramilitary maneuvers sort of alarming. It sounds like lots of fun to go creeping around and staring down your sights at suspicious “civilians” after an event, but killing people is not nearly as much fun as it looks in the movies.
I would have said that, too, until the power suddenly went off in hot summer and I had to get my husband out. I was astonished when we got on the freeway in pitch dark about an hour after power went out. As far as I could see, the freeway was jammed and that is flat ground and a straight highway so I could see a far distance.
To me, the whole world was on that highway getting out of Dodge. I would not have believed that could happen so fast until I saw it and was in it. We had to stay in that about 10/15 miles until we got to a farm to market road going west. I was mighty glad to get off that freeway.