One of my goals with this piece was to keep it pretty short, and the cause of the blackout is intentionally left ambiguous. My understanding is that so much of the world now runs on networked data, that a major cyber attack could leave our infrastructure unable to respond to the correct commands. Trains derail, water treatment plants run incorrectly, etc. Anything that causes the EBT system to collapse can lead very rapidly to massive urban riots following store looting.
The urban centers that will be the focus of these massive riots are also critical distribution nodes, so the food shortages will not be contained to the cities. In that scenario, violence spikes to unprecedented levels and the police and military are overwhelmed. Many will desert, including critical infrastructure workers who also have families living in dangerous conditions.
Once the infrastructure is untended, due to urban riots plus deserting infrastructure workers, the food and fuel distribution machinery will stop entirely. Some of the lost infrastructure will seal the deal, so to speak, such as the communication satellites that will lose their ground links in a few weeks, and become unrecoverable in many cases. It becomes a reinforcing cascade of disasters, both on the human and machine sides. It all works perfectly, when it’s working. But if the machine stops, even for a week, it may all be FUBAR once the cities explode, and they will.
My point is you cannot look at one system in isolation and say, “Well, if that element broke, here is the solution.” Take the nuke plants as an example. All of those cooling ponds full of hot rods require electricity to run the water pumps. What happens when the workers depart to protect their families, and don’t return? How long can our 100 nuke plants remain safe in a grid-down situation, after the workers start slipping away?
Another flawed “one element” view would be to say, well, X thousand trucks can restock X thousand looted supermarkets in X days. Wrong, and you can by now list the reasons why it won’t happen according to plan. Lack of security, out-of-fuel trucks stranded everywhere and looted, drivers who took off on foot, city highways that are much too dangerous for resupply trucks while the remaining LE and military is overwhelmed, etc.
That makes sense. The hardware and system failures are as much if not more the RESULT of the EBT/Economic riots, as the reverse situation.(The cyber attack could be one initial trigger but would not have to be the only scenario to cause this cascading effect.)
In my mind, that raises the statistical odds of all this happening to a much higher level, than if we were just saying, this all might happen due to an EMP. That is probably a fairly low likelihood, but an economic disaster that causes riots, that causes people to leave their posts in various infrastructures, that causes further collapse, etc, etc is much more likely. Thanks for that explanation.
And I agree that putting it in a short story form will be more effective for getting the word out.
Even the economic disasaster might not necessarily lead to this societal collapse, if our society was still moral, self controlled and united. We got through the depression without turning into something like Nazi Germany because the soul of our country was still turned to God.
Not anymore, that’s why the outlook is so grim.
Some months ago, I read info. from the trucking industry itself and they said if the internet doesn't work to transfer money, no truck will leave the loading dock. Forget lack of gasoline or anything else, the money has to change hands before a truck leaves and no truck leaves if the money can't be transferred by a click.
So, you can reevaluate the food delivery or medicine delivery or ANY truck delivery scenario - it will stop sooner than you have thought.
My mantra has long been since 1998 when I began to prepare, “When trucks stop, it's over.”
I think you are right on target with an unspecified network / communication disruption as the catalyst to a major upheaval. In my current adventure driving a truck for a large national carrier, I had the interesting opportunity to observe first-hand the impact of a network error on trucking - one of the largest truck stop chains suffered a "computer problem" that prevented them from processing payments for fuel (a chain-wide error, not just a localized one.) For drivers on national accounts, the staff would manually collect our payment information for later submission, since they expected the problem to be resolved quickly and had every expectation that they would be paid for the fuel. Everyone else seemed to be cash-only or out of luck. Lines at the fuel islands were long, and the lines at the register were even longer. A process that usually takes me less than fifteen minutes to complete went more than an hour that day, and I was still one of the lucky ones.
It is not hard at all to imagine how quickly our commercial transportation system would grind to a halt if that same scenario were expanded to the top three or four chains at the same time or, even worse, a specifically-targeted attack (denial-of-service or network hack) on a company like EFS, a major fuel-card payment company. No fuel - No trucks. As you mentioned in terms of just-in-time delivery, one small disruption in the system can domino into a major catastrophe. Much of what I deliver is not a consumer product at all, but is merely one small element needed to keep a plant running. However, if that delivery does not arrive in time, the entire production line is at risk of shutting down. Your story is an excellent reminder that "just-in-time" is remarkably similar to "hanging-by-a-thread", which seems to be an apt description of the thin veneer of civility that lightly covers American society.
Thanks for all of your work!