All right, welcome to season four of Inside My Canoe Head. I came in podcasts about individual emergency preparedness, rocking an incredible life and learning to do the things to make yourself more self-reliant in a chaotic world. Sit back, grab a beverage, and take charge of your life. All right, welcome back to the Ottawa studios.
Inside My Canoe Head this week, we are talking about the risk of failure in the systems that support our society as we continue with emergency preparedness week here in North America. We talked to the previous podcast and on a wonderful live that I did last night on YouTube with a bucket list homestead and a bunch of her loyal fans. And we talked about critical infrastructure. We talked about the importance of critical infrastructure as it supports our world and a foundation for our modern, incredibly interconnected, woven, beautiful world.
I mean, we are exceptionally lucky, are exceptionally fortunate that our forefathers and foremothers built a system in our society that provides so many wonderful things for us. But all of that is enabled by critical infrastructure. So today, what we want to do is talk about the different levels of risk that we face of different types of failure in society, what that may look like, and why that should concern you. So number one, the first level of failure we want to talk about today is disruptions.
Now disruptions are normal. You've lived through hundreds of them, and you'll live through hundreds more. These are disruptions that last hours. Think of different types of critical infrastructure.
So when you live in the wonderful city of Ottawa and OC transpose wonderful LRT, light rail, turd or technology, depending how you look at it, fails to work. It shuts down. Absolute gridlock and chaos in downtown for the hundreds of thousands of people who are trying to exfil from work to get back to their families or the inverse trying to infill to get to their jobs to earn the money to go have an awesome life. And it's a disruption.
It's incredibly angering. It's uncomfortable. But in the end, really, the risk of you having a significant loss of ability to meet your basic human animalistic needs and to quote unquote survive, it's not there, right? But the disruption is incredibly angering when they happen.
When there is an outage at Sunwing, for example, and their third party contractor that does their check-in system gets hacked, okay, lives weren't lost. A heck of a lot of lives were disrupted by a number of hours. Now, some people did have longer than that. But in the end, everybody eventually either made it to or didn't make it to, but in the end, nobody had a significant failure of long-term resources or something along that line.
But they're real and we learn or we don't learn to deal with them depending on how you look at it. These disruptions happen. So by building a sense of preparedness into your life, the influence of those are less, but really, preparedness doesn't deal a lot with the small disruptions because they just happen, right? And we just roll with it and go through it.
Now, when we start moving down that sliding scale of difficulty, we start looking at something that I refer to a lot in this podcast, which is called a significant disruption. And it's loosely defined as a failure or a stoppage in one of the critical infrastructure sectors for a period of days. So this is like when you have a transit strike. Now, we had one several years ago in Ottawa and it was like chaos.
This city literally came to its knees because nobody truly understands the number of people who use public transit on a day until they're not using public transit and they're on the roads with you. Then all of a sudden, like it was gridlock, it was chaos. It was, I mean, very few people lost their livelihoods or lost their lives or significant losses personally, but the disruption in your life was marked. It was memorable.
And this is where you're preparing this plan step in. So when you had a significant, like I said, transportation, or you have a bank outage where your bank goes offline for 36 hours. Do you have the ability to access financial resources, to carry on doing your normal things in life, to replace for a short term the access to the financial system? That's where a preparedist plan would step in.
If the bank was out for a couple hours, you're really not worried about it. You'll just go to the store later today. You'll go hit the grocery store later today. But when the significant disruption happens and you're out for days, but we don't have to go far to think about how the significant disruption can be very influential on your life, think about potable water.
If I tell you that for some reason, the potable water out of your tap is no longer available for use, either it's not flowing or what's flowing is unhealthy, then that and it happens for a couple of days. That's going to influence, right? You can always boil water to drink. But when you start having to boil water for bass and you start having to boil water to do laundry, and then can you do that?
How do you insert water into your laundry machine for it to be used when it doesn't come from the tap, right? We don't have that system. So when you start to think how much you use something like water and then all of a sudden it's off, I mean, you probably have canned pops. There's always something in your house that you're going to be able to drink.
The risk is less from you actually dying from dehydration. It's more of you just not being able to do the normal things you do and then it starts creating cascading chaos in your life. So your preparedness plans when you look at the critical infrastructure through that lens, and that's why we use it here at Inside My Canoe Head, when you look through your dependency on critical infrastructure and then you look at these different risks of failure and different types of failure that can happen, you start to say, what's my plan for when the water shuts off? What's my plan for when there's four day loss of water in my house?
What's my plan? And you figure it out again. It's not about money, preparedness is free. It's about you understanding and figuring out a strategy.
We then look at the next step, which is called sectoral failure. So this is a complete failure in one of the critical infrastructure sectors. So we're talking about everything here, but power. So if we think about a longer term, semi-permanent, maybe weeks and months, loss of access to a piece of critical infrastructure.
So think about again, let's talk about water. So the potable water system has been taken down by cyber crime, which it can. And it is no longer available to you. And it's likely going to be off for the next 30 to 45 days before the utility can get it back up and running, flush the pipes, and have it useful.
What's your plan? How do you replace potable water for 30 days in your household? You don't necessarily have to have 30 days of potable water in your house. You need to know how you intend to replace that access to water.
How are you going to go the bathroom when you flush the toilet? Nothing fills up the tank. How are you going to wash your clothes when you have no access to potable water? You start to think through different ways of understanding the exposure, and then you think about the different ways that you're going to address the problem, shall we say?
So a sectoral failure is rare. We've had a few of them in, let's talk about other than power. We've had sectoral failures in water systems in some places where flooding occurred, and what you had is a coming together, shall we say, of the water and the sewer system. I'll just leave that to your imagination.
And therefore, the water system and some municipalities has been out for a number of days up to a week, while all of that gets flushed out, while all the pipes get cleaned, and they get super chlorinated to make sure all that feces is no longer in your tap. That has happened on multiple occasions around North America. It actually happened several times a year. We saw in the British Columbia storms they had earlier or late last year, or early this year when we had the infrastructure failures when it came to transportation.
When we had the floods and the landslides that cut off highway eight and a number of highways in British Columbia, that's a sectoral failure of transportation for a lot of people that weren't directly impacted by living in that area. Their lives were impacted on outlying and communities that were further down that line of communication, the road or the rail system. That was no longer available, and it took months for these lines to get back up to running anywhere near level, even normal C4, economic related transportation, so the shipments of goods around. That's a sectoral failure.
We saw, we've seen recently, what that happened. So what does your world look like when there's a sectoral failure in transportation? When you live down, down road, down range, whatever you want to call it, in a community that has really one point of access, and that point of access is no longer available to you. So if you get caught on the wrong side of it on the outside, what's your plan for getting to your house when the road to your house is no longer available?
It's an honest question that you think through. What's your plan when you're at your house and the road out of your house is no longer available potentially for months? People will say, well, that's just catastrophic thinking we don't go down that road, but those are sectoral failures that are real. They happen in our modern society within the last year, so by blissfully ignoring it, it does not mean it's not there, and it does not mean it can cause you significant problems.
So look and think about sectoral failures, right? Then we move on to what is likely the most dangerous of all, which is a multi-sectoral failure. Now, this is where several or more of the 10 sectors of critical infrastructure fail in a cascading format, or they fail collectively at the same time. This has occurred, and this is based normally on the loss of the one most principal, most important critical infrastructure, and that's power.
When power goes down, and I don't just mean for a short period of time, if you have a significant failure of 30 days of electricity delivery to a modern city, that has a cascading effect. You won't be able to run the public transportation infrastructure, because scheduling and everything like that simply won't be available. You can do the best you can, but it'll be significantly impacted. For the most part, you won't be able to pump gasoline out of the ground into cars or diesel into trucks to move goods around.
You'll figure it out. There are national strategies, and I was part of a team that helped put together Canada's National Petroleum Oil and Lubricant Transportation Strategy. It's with several years old, I have no idea what they've done with it now. But these strategies exist by government.
How to deal with that? The issue is, is that you're generally not going to be part of that discussion. When power goes down for 30 days, it takes down everything with it. It takes down eventually the internet.
It will take down most of your cell phone communication towers, the principal ones, not all of them, but the principal ones have backup power generators that are good for about 72 hours. Now they'll keep going as long as generators are attached to them and fuel is supplied. But again, when we start having to ration access to fuel, where does the generator for cell phone usage come in in the lines? Now this is a national strategy.
It has nothing to do with you, but somebody else has figured this out. Now if your life so totally depends on access to the cell phone, for example, if you're a content creator that makes all of your money by creating content online, and you can't do that for 30 days because of a power outage, somebody is just for all intents and purposes taking your job away from you. What does your world look like? What's your plan when you don't have access to the internet for 30 days?
It depends who you are. Some people like the fabulous people I was speaking to last night and having a great conversation with about preparedness and the majority of them are all some form of homesteaders. They're probably going to have less of an impact on their day to day life without power, but it's still going to be significant, right? It's not going to be inconsequential.
There are going to be effects of that loss of power. So that cascading multisectorial, we had a feeling, an exposure to it. I mean, it isn't well, several years ago, but in 2003, there was a brown out because of a cascading failure in the electrical system in Ontario where I live, and it went for about six, six and a half days. We had the ice storms in Montreal, Ottawa region in 1998, 1999.
Power was out in some cases for seven to 12 days. We had Hurricane Juan hit Nova Scotia, Halifax, my hometown many years ago, and that caused, depending where you lived, you were up to two to three weeks on the outskirts before Nova Scotia power was able to get you hooked back up. All you have to do is look at Hurricane Katrina. All you have to do is hurricane Irma.
You'll have to look at what happened to Puerto Rico after it got smoked by a hurricane. I mean, power was down there for months, absolute months, and luckily they didn't live in a northern climate where people would die if their house wasn't heated with power. So we have experiences around us and not necessarily to us, but around us demonstrating and showing us the significant effects that occur when you have multi-sectoral failure, which is normally fueled by a loss of power extending up to a month or more. So again, as part of preparedness week, I'll ask you that question, what does your world look like when the power goes out for 30 days?
Sit back, grab your trusted 10 cent pen and your 20 cent hillroyd scribbler or your whiteboard and start jotting down ideas of what your dependency on power looks like and how would that influence your normal family operations for a period of 30 days? This is reflection. It's just free, right? This isn't about running out and buying a bunch of crap.
Preparedness week should never be about that. Preparedness week should always always be about understanding preparedness for what it is, a blanket of insulation that allows you to carry on with an incredible life. And therefore, it's more about reflecting on the risk that you may be exposed to, right? Reflecting on issues that may happen to you because of events that are outside your control.
They're not your fault, right? When the power goes down, it has nothing to do with you. Everything to do with you is what you've determined in advance to deal with it. A lot of people have great self-confidence, great self-efficacy.
They believe in their selves. They have a high level of self-worth. And therefore, they think they can just roll with it. They can figure out, and this is why a lot of people, not the apathetic, necessarily the apathetic folks when it comes to preparedness, but a lot of people don't delve into the world of preparedness because of the type of individual that believes they have the confidence and the ability to deal with life's difficulties as they show up.
And they've been successful doing that. So investing a bunch of time and energy now in looking at preparedness is probably not worthwhile to these folks because let's be frank, they do an exceptionally good job. The vast majority of us aren't like that. That's not me.
I need to do a little bit of preparedness. So think about multisectoral failure. I mean, if you don't have access to water and power and you flush the toilet, nothing fills the back of that toilet, what does your world look like for 30 days? Imagine living in a high-rise condo in downtown Ottawa or downtown Toronto, downtown Montreal, downtown anywhere, New York, LA, etc.
And your toilet stops working and it won't work for 30 days. What do you think the world looks like when that happens? It's worth thinking about it and then figuring out what you would like to be set up to deal with that. The last part we'll deal is a bit of fun part, but this is what a lot of you see on the preparedness channels now, the Apocatoc.
The we are three days or two days away from absolute total societal collapse. So I call this a full spectrum collapse. And this is what happens when you not only have multisectoral failure as we just talked about in critical infrastructure, but you have total sectoral failure in critical infrastructure. This means as well the government critical infrastructure failure fails to work, which means basically you have a pause in normal operations of society.
Basically, all your utilities are gone. The government is not there in any real way, shape or form to help you. The banking industry isn't there. The transportation industry isn't running other than the roads are there.
The rail isn't running. The airlines aren't going. The ships aren't going. The factories aren't working.
This is a total sectoral failure. Now in today's modern society, the risk we face from that is one of two things. One is a total power collapse that is a cybercrime, which is totally possible. And a lot of utilities are working towards dealing with that or having a plan to deal with that now or some type of carigan event, EMP, something like that.
The end result is really, we can go down the apocalyptic stories of how everything comes collapsing down around us. And there's a set of preppers that have been waiting for this and their 10,000 rounds of ammunition. They've been waiting for years for this apocalypse to happen. And they're gnawing for it.
But the vast majority of us don't look forward to anything like that. And for the everyday normal folk like you and I, that is just beyond a little bit. You people become very, people just become very apathetic about it. They just set it aside as that is so small of a risk to happen in my life that I am significantly not concerned about that.
I'm going to carry on. I'm not worried about chaos and the vast majority of people to do. And I really, I do work with a few people who are in the chaos stream, shall we say, but the vast majority of people don't worry about full spectrum collapse, but it's there. So part of the preparedness planning that we do it inside my canoe head is to ask you that question.
What does your world look like when all of your utilities are current are cut off? So if I cut off all of your utilities right now, that's your water, your sewer, your power, your gas, everything that's hooked up to your modern home, your internet, all of that stuff, if I turned all of that off, how long would you be good to go for with your family in your current residence until you had to step outside and request external help? How long could you versus how long do you want to be? And that's the important critical question that we address chaos of full spectrum collapse in emergency preparedness without going down the Apocatoc Road and talking about scenarios where the world comes down for you.
It's a very simple question, but it's a critically important question that I think each one of us have to ask and reflect because if it's a way of, it's a logical way of asking the question, how prepared am I? So inverse the question, put yourself in the situation, look around your house, take down some notes and answer that question. I hope you enjoyed the content this week on emergency preparedness week. Our daily preparedness tips continue to come out of inside my canoe head.
Today's was number 24 on power. This week, we were talking about critical infrastructure next week. We're going to talk about something different. Sign up for our newsletter at insidemycanoohead.ca.
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Stay safe, my friends.