My father retired 4 years ago as a regional manager in the lower southern states for a large trucking company. The portion of the company he over saw was the distribution of “soft food”, such as bread, baked goods to chains of grocery stores, and places such as burger kings, etc. The same part of the trucking he over saw was a 1/2 billion dollar a year business. He told me to make sure I was keeping up with my food storage because there is only 3 days worth of food in any state!! If state boarders were closed, such as on the day the twin towers came down (I live in Mass. and all New England state lines were closed to trucks) and no trucks could come into your state to bring food, or if the distribution centers were damaged or whatever ;your state or city would have no food after 3 days.
Take a good look at what happened in New Orleans, and Mississippi, the federal government did not respond quickly when it came to food and water. The people in those areas were feed and watered by outside help from private citizens who saw their plight on tv.
There is a reason we have been asked to be prepared, whether its to help ourselves or someone else we will be blessed because of it.
Patrice from Massachusetts

Now that was barren ;)

In Plano we still have gas, prices are dropping back down. We have a family from Nolo and one from Houston (they are going back Monday) in our ward. The local Y is filled with families from Houston, they will be returning as well.

When the big blizzard hit Denver in 2003, it effectively severed I-70 for at least 48 hours. As far as I could tell, nobody *ran* on the stores in Grand Junction (where I was holed up, trying to get to Denver), but the produce was certainly gone, and a number of other aisles started to look sparsely stocked. I don’t know what it looked like later after I gave up and went back to Utah.

I wonder about things like this as I see more and more farmland converted to real estate developments. The desert may be made to blossom as a rose… but can the condo park, office complex, and strip mall? We trade away independence for interdependence and comparative advantage. Is there a way to do that and remain prepared for the day we may need to be locally or regionally independent?

“I used to think it is going to be me against the world and all the elements combined. I am going to hole up in some safe place with my food and water and gun and wait it out. But the reality is that it will be us, yes us, against whatever comes. What we need to preserve and develop is networks of social associations and resources that are likely to be useful in a crisis….Neighborhood block parties might be as important as bushels of wheat in the basement in a crisis.”

Brilliant post, Mike.

Very true. I spent my three years of law school living in southeastern Wyoming. The main transportation corridor up there is Interstate 80. Driving back and forth on that interstate on our trips to see family in Utah, I saw an almost endless stream of semi-trailers. There was some non-commercial traffic, but these commercial trucks predominated most of the time.

I never noticed these trucks before (simply because they are so commonplace). But one Thanksgiving drive, I started thinking about what those trucks contained and the sheer mass of material moving across what are literally our nation’s arteries.

The drive along I-80 is almost breathtakingly bleak as you pass isolated communities surrounded by the harsh, treeless, waterless, windswept Wyoming steppe. I wondered what would happen to these lonely communities if someone should happen to sever I-80 just east of Evanston and just west of Laramie. Or what if the fuel pumps and all those trucks just simply stopped one day?

I wondered if they could survive it.

But driving into the Wasatch front, I realized that the Utahns weren’t much better off. Just another isolated pocket in the middle of an ihospitable desert. Oh, of course Utah valley looks nicer than Rawlins Wyoming. But the trees, lawns and fountains shouldn’t be taken seriously. They are only a silly illusion that a mere 6 months of human neglect would strip away.

Are any of our cities’ positions any better?

I think sometimes we forget our own mortality and our own dependence on the elements. We wake up in our centrally heated house, get into our car parked in an enclosed garage and drive to work surrounded by our car’s air conditioning. After this we spend the rest of the day in a climate controlled and pressurized office building after which, we drive home in the afformentioned car, to the afformentioned house. It is entirely possible to spend days without ever feeling a genuine breeze. It’s easy to forget that nature even exists (except for controlled depictions in television advertisements).

Yet we forget that we live on an improbably thin shell encasing a terrifying ball of fire, swept by winds containing more energy in a single day than all that produced by mankind over a century. Our place here is tenuous.

People need to keep in mind that we live here by the grace of God, or not at all.

“Yea and the day of the Lord shall come upon the cedars of Lebanon … and upon all the oaks of Bashan;… And upon every high tower and every fenced wall; … And the loftiness of man shall be bowed down, and the haughtiness of men shall be laid low; and the Lord alone shall be exalted in that day.

And the idols shall he utterly abolish.

And they shall go into the holes of the rocks, and into the caves of the earth, for the fear of the Lord shall come upon them and the glory of his majesty shall smite them, when he ariseth top shake terribly the earth.

In that day a man shall cast his idols of silver, and his idols of gold, which he hath made for himself to worship, to the moles and to the bats; … For the fear of the Lord shall come upon them and the majesty of his glory shall smite them, when he ariseth to shake terribly the earth.”

2 Nephi 12:13-21

The context is both the First World War and, indeed, the influenza pandemic. The personal tragedy to the Prophet involved the following: “Just weeks before, on 23 January [1918], his Apostle son, Hyrum, then only forty-five years of age, was struck down in his prime by a ruptured appendix. It was a devastating blow from which Joseph F. never fully recovered, compounded as it was with the further sorrowful news of the death of his daughter-in-law and Hyrum’s wife, Ida Bowman Smith, just a few months thereafter.”

As to the war, the description strikes a chord for me, as it mentions John McCrae’s poem, written in the poppy fields of Flanders (= my home, the Northern part of Belgium). John McCrae also died in 1918.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days go
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

You ever noticed the date on D & C 138? I read somewhere that it is a direct result of the 1918 pandemic (the prophet had lost someone close to him and hence was pondering death), but I don’t have a souce handy on that.