Welcome back to Ottawa Studios. I'm inside my canoe head. My name is Jeff, AKA Dr. D.
This week we thought we'd start off with a great little conversation about the power grid, right? So you probably don't care about the intricacies of how the power grids put together, but it does matter to you when you flip the switch and there's nothing there. So sit back, grab a beverage. We're going to talk about short and long term loss of power and argue really ready for it.
Let's go. All right, everybody. Thanks for all of your words of encouragement and your words of commentary, shall we call it? I'm going to suggest in some very interesting as to what we should do in future topics.
So today what we want to talk about is one of those things that happens to all of us. Doesn't seem like a big deal until it is. And then when it is, if you haven't thought this through, it's a really bad day. I don't care who you are, what you do for a living, what your roles and responsibilities are, what your social economic status is.
Power in today's modern society is everything. It is the critical piece of critical infrastructure that underpins all the other sectors of critical infrastructure as defined by the Canadian government, the American government, the United Nations and everybody else. This happened to us here in Canada a number of times. We can go back to the 1998 ice storms or 1999 ice storms and people were out of power for a week or two and some pretty challenging weather.
We had the brown out in 2003 in May. I lived through it for, I think, six or seven days in Ontario in the heat with no power. We looked at Hurricane Juan, came through parts of rural Nova Scotia, were out of power for a couple of weeks. Hurricane Fiona last fall.
Some people for weeks or more without any power at home. It's the real deal. The loss of power is nothing to mess about. We've seen it.
It's a pain. But in the short term, right, what's the big deal? They're going to lose power for a couple of days, right? Unless you've got some really valuable food in the fridge that you can't figure out how to keep freeze or cold in another way, you've got some critical medications that require part of the cold chain to be shelf state.
They're not shelf stable. You live in an area where air conditioning is incredibly important because you may be on a high rise apartment building that has next to no ventilation. You may be losing power in the dead of winter and electricity is how you heat your home. You may use the internet for work or you may just lose it if you don't get your daily access to TikTok and other places.
In the short term, we all generally can be successful. We can just kind of navigate our way through it, fight, kick and scream, cheese off, throw a little bit of food in the garbage. Some people have bad luck. They just get a $600 meat order and then the power goes out in July and it doesn't come back on for four days.
And now you just wrap that whole freezer in a big thing and duct tape and you throw it at the end of the curb because it's just junk. But the majority of us, we muddle through. It's an inconvenience. We probably don't get fired.
We don't reach financial insolvency. And one of our family members doesn't start suffering from malnutrition due to lack of food. Now a good portion of the work people around the world do live in precarious food positions, precarious shelter positions. Today, we really want to talk about those of us who lived in a developed society, who we exist in a place where we pretty much take electricity and the utilities for granted, right?
We plug in, I'm recording this podcast in the studios in Ottawa. It's going to be put through a whole bunch of really cool stuff to come out with a great sounding product. We're going to throw some songs and some music in and some interludes and then we're going to put it out there on this wonderful thing called the Internet and it can be consumed by people around the world. We have 43 nations.
I think we're up to 44 last week now where we have downloads for the podcast. That's great. All of that is facilitated behind the scenes by electricity. We don't care.
We don't think about it. We just carry on when we get a bump in the road and the power goes down. You listen to the news and you would swear the apocalypse was upon us when you listen to how people react to the loss of power for a couple of days irrespective of what time of year it is you listen to them. So part of the reason this started this podcast coming up on three years ago was we were launching into the start of a pandemic.
People weren't prepared for anything let alone a power outage. And so it was about guidance. So we really haven't learned much because I would argue that most people aren't any better prepared to self-manage disruptions than they might have been three years ago, which is very concerning what part of my research that I did for my PhD. But I mean, in reality is what's your plan for a short-term loss?
Do you have one or are you just a risk-tolerant person that says, yeah, I got this, I trust myself. It'll be bumpy. I'm not worried about it. The power go out.
I'll lose a few things. Pain in the air. You might not be able to do XYZ. But you know what, in a couple of days of the lobby back, I don't worry about it, right?
Then we have the other side of us who have the personality who go, oh my, I need to think my way through every possible little disruption that might occur and develop a robust, backed up, preparedness plan to deal with every possible contingency, right? Consider it a spectrum. You follow somewhere on that spectrum from shoot from the hip to chicken littles falling every time the lights go out. You're in there somewhere, your self-efficacy, your self-confidence.
That underpins your risk-tolerant level, which underpins your whole risk management strategy for life. But what about the long term? And food for thought. So let's put the discussion in perspective, right?
So you're sitting back right now, you got a piece of paper, you got a cup of coffee, you listen to me, you're driving to work, you're yelling at the guy, whatever the world happens to be right now. What happens if the power goes out and a week later it doesn't come back on? Okay? So let's put that in perspective.
We're now in day eight of no power. We're going to frame this into the discussion of critical infrastructure, right? Because we know our society has 10 legs. Think of our society as this big massive kitchen table at Uncle Bob's farm, right?
That's your society. We're all on top of it running around, having a great time. The table has one big center leg and nine other supporting legs. And each one of those legs represent a piece of critical infrastructure that are happening below your sight line, below the table, and they're just milling about and doing their thing and they're holding everything up and everything goes well.
Your big center post, that will ask your power in utilities, right? So once that goes, you can imagine that the rest of the table, you know, the strain on the other legs will be greatly increased, but they'll probably be able to hold it up. But that's not how it works because that main leg is necessary for the other legs, whether it's food, water, telecommunications, financial, transportation, health, manufacturing, government operation, safety, all of those require energy to work. So now we're sitting here at home, whatever our world looks like, whatever your world, how you execute life, power has been out for a week.
You don't have access to sell anymore because most major cell towers have backups. Now those backups usually are anywhere from 72 to 96 hour generators that are built into the main. So your post, your not every cell tower has that level of backup generation, but you can probably muddle about in your neighborhood and pick up the next cell tower that one of the main ones that does. You don't have the internet, right?
Because Rogers, Kojiko, Shaw, whomever provides you internet requires power to generate the signal, right? It's not only power in your house to run your computer or to run your phone or to run your router in your modem. It's the fact that the guy on the other end doesn't have power to create the system called the internet or to allow the signals from around the world to carry through and you to have access to. So think about what your world looks like right now, how you operate, how you interact with the world, how you conduct life in today's society.
If I told you you did not have access to the cellular networks and you did have access to the internet and you couldn't go somewhere to pick up Wi-Fi that they were no longer available to you carry on with life. What does that world look like for you? I mean, be quiet for a couple of days. Please don't misunderstand me.
I get that, right? But seriously, think about how that impacts everything you do. What is your backup when you can't access cell and internet services for a week? A week, folks, not overnight, not a good, not time to pull out one of that book you've been waiting to read and snuggle by a candle with a hot cup of coffee you made on your portable stove.
I'm talking a week. Think about your financial point of sale, right? So any store you purchase from, I don't care whether it's the weed store, the booze store, or the grocery store, they all run on digital POS, right? So a point of sale system is not a piece of whatever, right?
So all of the scanning barcodes within all of your grocery stores are electronic. If their computer system doesn't work, they can't record the sale. When I used to work in a grocery store way back when in the 1980s to date myself, we had little stickers on there. So somebody could pull out a portable battery-powered calculator and add up the prices of your goods.
That capability does not exist in the modern store. So there would not be a way to utilize a point of sale system. Obviously, you're not buying stuff at the internet, but you couldn't go to the corner store and ring up the price of hostess chippies or to get your vape pod refills or to get your pipe tobacco. I love pipe tobacco.
Whatever it may be, those point of sales don't work. And by the way, most places are now digital and cashless when you go to venues and places, which means they don't even have a cash load to begin the process of making change for people and accepting cash. So they may not even accept cash because if they don't have the safe and secure places to store the cash, they're not about to start selling things and accepting cash, right? And by the way, there's no law in Canada that requires an organization to accept cash.
You don't have the right to walk in someplace and demand that they take cash from you. You may want society to look like that, but that's not law in this country, right? So you can't access to purchase things, but you can't get money either because your paycheck, let's just put it this way. Even if you're old school and the company you works for prints checks, they do it with a computer system that requires power.
Even if you got a handwritten check to cover your pay for a period, or you were one of us regular folks who get it in electronic fund transfer and EFT into your predetermined bank account, the bank system is all electronic and it's built off protected internet. There's no access to your bank account. It's digital. They don't have print out books every night of what your bank balances.
They have no idea if you have money in your bank. They have no way of accessing it. In fact, they can't open the bank. The bank simply won't be act.
It doesn't matter how much of your money you want to get out in cash. It doesn't matter how much you want to deposit. It doesn't matter if you have a check in your hand from some company worth X amount of dollars. None of that matters.
You can't get money. What does that world look like for you after a week? You can't go to the store and buy anything because none of the stores are open. Your grocery stores aren't open.
They don't have the ability to accept cash in large scales and they have the no ability to ring up prices. Very soon, those groceries are going to figure out a way to do it. It may be a long drawn out process, but very quickly, they won't be running point of sales systems because they all run off the internet. If the internet doesn't work, they can have all the backup generators they want.
I'm sure they have a way in the short term, but after a week, the grocery stores are not going to be something that you can access. The stores are not going to be something that you can access. You won't be able to go out and purchase food from restaurants. You won't be able to purchase food from grocery stores and corner stores.
You basically won't be able to go out and buy food unless you happen to be lucky to have this happen to you in a season where farmers are selling fresh food for cash by the roadside. Your water supply is eventually going to turn off. Maybe not depending on where you are. If I had this happen to me, if you're on a well, it runs on power.
If you don't have backup power for your own well, it's going to take about five seconds and then you just ran out of water in your house. If you're in a municipal system, depending on their backup contingency plan for water distribution within that municipality, it may last longer than a week. It may not before they run out of fuel to run the generators to maintain the pressure in the system to ensure that both your water and sewer continue to flow. You can't get money.
You can't cash a paycheck. You can't go somewhere and buy anything. You can't be really in modern day world unless you have the craziest of devices, which is the landline telephone. You can't talk to anybody without physically going to their house.
Now how are you going to get there? Well, gas is pumped out of the tanks with power. Yes, most gas stations have limited backup power and generators to be able to, but they need fuel in the generators to be able to run the pumps to get the gas out. Oh, by the way, how do they charge you for gas when all of their systems are hooked up to the internet for point of sale?
So now gasoline becomes a cash only business because the company can't accept credit cards and debit cards because their access to the internet has gone away. So they may be able to pump gas with a generator, but they're going to be requiring you to pay cash and not all gas stations have that capacity as we've seen in previous power outages. We have limited and in some smaller towns, one gas station, incredible long lineups and the odd brew, as we used to say in these goes, breaks out over gasoline. The fuel for the trucks.
Remember everything runs around this world. How many 18 wheelers and construction equipment and all that stuff? You've seen running that all runs on diesel and diesel requires transportation to move it around. That comes grinding to a halt.
When you're talking about fuel standards, most nations and sub national governments have an emergency fuel allocation program. It goes by many different names and it basically means that once we're about a week or so into an emergency or earlier, if the government is aware that the emergency may not be solved in a short order, there will be significant restrictions on access to gasoline and petrol oil and lubricants to protect critical infrastructure, military and government operations. So even if you had a wad ton of cash, you may not be able to access gasoline because the government has allocated it for things like generators at hospitals and various other places like that. Think about what your world looks like when you can't take the car anywhere because you've only got a little bit of gas and you need to protect it for emergency, like a real emergency evacuation type.
The public transit system has stopped working. What does your world look like when your only motive transport is non-mechanical or by foot? How does that change how you conduct life? How does that change how you interact with the rest of the world?
We think about healthcare. You know, a lot of hospitals have contingency plans for short-term operations, but once a hospital gets into week one, maybe even week two, week three with no power, how does that work? How does access to surgeries happen? How does access to emergency care?
How is that conducted? They have their own cold chain medicine and medical equipment supply chain that has to be maintained. They have power for that entire system. All of those electronic systems that keep people alive in the ICU are power hogs and they need power.
So they have to run generators and that generator requires fuel, which why they're part of the government emergency plan and they're a high priority to get fuel. But how are you going to get access to your family doctor? Because most family doctors now use digital records and the internet's down and there's no power to turn on your computer to access the digital records that may be stored on a local hard drive. So your doctor is, unless they have a great memory, is not going to know much about your history.
And it doesn't matter if your doctor wants to give you a prescription. What pharmacy are you going to? Shoppers Drug Mart isn't going to have any power. They're not going to have access to their drug stores.
They're not going to have access to your available refills. All of these systems that you consider to be normal required and you take four granted, start to cascade and cease to be available. I don't like societal collapse and all the talk about everything coming down. I just want to pose it to you to look at through the lens.
What and ask yourself the simple question. What does my world look like when I no longer have access to mechanical transportation? I know how I'm going to have access to any type of health care. I can't I can no longer go to a store to purchase anything that I wish.
Now we have manufacturing, which is just in time for most of our things and we start to see supply chains break down. You know, the toilet paper was a hilarious thing. It doesn't matter what happens. We'll ever run out of paper products, but the system was set up for a very predictable and deliberate delivery system.
A bunch of panic people come in. They buy three weeks of toilet paper off the shelf in two days and it looks like there's a panic and a supply chain breakdown. The supply chain didn't break at all. It did exactly what it was supposed to do.
It's the people that broke and bought a whole bunch of things that they thought that they might need. So when you have a manufacturing shortage or stoppage because they can't make toilet paper without power. So the toilet paper facilities stop making it. You look how much is in the distribution centers, but then the distribution centers can't distribute them because there's no diesel for the trucks to move it about.
You start to see where things come down. And the last part is government much maligned, but there are a lot of people in our society that require government services sometimes on a daily basis and payments to individuals that are come from government are important to keep people in their fight, whatever that may be. All that goes away. So you have to think back and consider it seriously.
Take the time with a great cup of coffee or your favorite beverage with piece of paper and a pen or however you like to record things. I like to use apple notes, whatever it is and ask yourself, the power goes out for a week. What does my world look like? What catastrophes am I going to face right now if the power went off exactly where I'm sitting and it didn't come back on for a week and I lost access to all of these services.
What's my plan? Do you have a plan? Probably you should. And all the plan means is that you sit back and you work through what does my world look like.
Am I okay with it? Do I need to do something? Is there a change requirement? And that's a beauty about making a preparedness plan for you, your family and those people you are responsible for.
You can't download a PDF online and expect to take somebody else's plan, implement it in your household and get similar results as the individual who wrote a plan. That's idiocy. That's stupidity. So you sit back and you say, okay, there are 10 sectors of critical infrastructure and you can Google them if you don't remember them.
You look at each one and say, okay, how am I exposed as a family member as an individual to the financial sector, point of sales, ATMs, that type of thing. What happens if I lose it for a week? Am I okay? I'm in my family, in my circumstances.
How am I employed? How do I do my business? Do I need emergency funds? A lot of people say you should have like $500 in five dollar bills or something like that sitting in your home and say, well, that's great.
If you're going to need to utilize cash when the power goes out for two to three weeks and you've looked through all the sectors and you're like, you know what, I'm good. I don't need anything. I'm actually good. I'm okay.
Well, maybe you don't need $500. Maybe that's change drawer that's sitting around your house is probably enough, right? So you don't need to go out and acquire things, buy things, order things, create things just because some Yahoo says you need to have them in the basement. And here's the top 10 things that you have to buy for a power outage.
You need to go through your own personal exposure, your own family situation and determine what your world looks like at that week point. We all get through the short term once they happen, boo, ha ha, bad luck, whatever, wah, wah, cry me a river, have your pity party and you get on with it, right? It's the less likely, but the more significant events of a week. And then we start talking longer than a week.
We start talking, what does your world look like when you're into two, three weeks without power, right? How do you think you're going to operate? What do you think you're probably going to do when you get to an extended period of time? And this is the brilliance of preparedness plans is they don't freaking cost money.
They cost time. It's about higher order thinking. It's about taking responsibility for your outcomes and making sure that you've thought through what potentially could happen so that when it does happen, you have a far more in mind. Advanced starting point.
And if you have identified a critical gap, you've taken necessary measures to close that gap. So a prime example is you may have a family member that requires power to maintain certain medicine at a certain temperature. And that's life important medicine. You don't have the option of being without power for even 24 hours, let alone a week.
I'm not going to sit here and tell everybody to go out by a jackeree 1500 for about $1,700 Canadian because you might be in this situation. That is illogical, right? If you were in that situation, then you've got to find a really good mini fridge that runs on really, really low watts and some alternate power supplies so that you can maintain it for as long as you want to be ready to maintain that power for. But that doesn't mean anybody else needs to buy an alternate power supply, right?
So take the time, take through it, hang out with us here at Inside My Canoe Head. We're going to talk more about this. We got some great guests coming up. If you've got some ideas for shows, I get them on Instagram DMs.
I get them at various other methodologies through emails, responses to newsletters, whatever it may be, please keep them coming. I am more than happy to put together a show on whatever it is you're interested in because other than me ranting, which don't get me wrong, I love to rant, the purpose of all of this is to help all of you on your preparedness journey. So thank you very much. Stay tuned to us on the socials.
Take care. Stay safe and wow, stay warm. It's getting really cold out there.