How do you prep in a power outage due to an over-capacity system and the heat/humidity combination is no longer compatible with human life?
3 years ago by DevCat to c/preppers
The whole pandemic experience eroded my faith in humanity. There's no doubt that when humanity works together, we can accomplish much. There is also no doubt in my mind that there's somebody whose first thought is to hoard toilet paper.
I suppose if we could all work together on enlightened harmony, the Kyoto Protocol would have fixed the climate back even it could have saved lots of people.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/...
Psychologist Craig Anderson used archival sources from cities across the United States to gather data on the rates of murder, rape, assault, robbery, burglary, and motor vehicle theft. He confirmed that violent crime increases with temperature but that nonviolent crime does not. In such field studies, hotter regions of the world and hotter years, seasons, months, and days are all linked with more aggression. Some studies even suggest that baseball pitchers throw more aggressively in hot weather, as there is an increase in the number of batters hit by pitches on hot days.
What is wet bulb? I'm from the dry Canadian prairies
Essentially, your body cools you down by sweating, but if you reach a combination of sweat and heat above a certain degree, your body is unable to cool you down by sweating, as the air already has enough moisture and its hotter than your sweat.
Then you lose the ability to regulate your heat and you rapidly head towards a heat stroke.
Ok I found this I think I get it https://en.m.wikipedia.org/...
So this is a measure of how cool someone can get through perspiration?
Or go near big bodies of water, big lakes or ocean. Then you can cool cause there is temperature difference. If closer to mountain, then just go up to avoid heat build up(reduce 0.65 Celsius per 100 meters altitude)
Underground might not be feasible without AC if you don't have good insulation. During BC, Canada's heat dome 2 years ago, you lose ambient cooling slowly, and then everything starts to feel warmer even in the basement parking.
For urban area, just prep the shopping center into cooling centres(including local stadiums ) that can help cool many people with emergency AC/resting place.
So through other comments I understand what it is, but can someone explain why you couldn't just sit in a bath of cold water, and keep filling it with new cold water as it heats up from your body?
I'm sure that works if you have access to cold water. But I could imagine someone living in a large building where the 'cold water' is just room temperature due to the water not coming straight from the cooler ground.
It depends. If you're on a system like I used to manage, gravity will get you water. We had no pumps for delivery. But the rest of the system required power, including pumps to get the water from the source into the water treatment plant. That means even the untreated water would eventually run out.
Do your cities not have backups? I'm in Canada and we have mandatory generator systems in all our water plants to ensure continued operation even with power outages - more meant for winter storms than summer blackouts, but same effect. They have a decently long minimum time they need to be able to operate for - a few days at the minimum. And summer brownouts typically (at least up here) are rolling, so they can just keep the water plant fully supplied while residential/commerical power is cut
This sounds false. Aren't there places in Africa where it gets to like 120⁰f and few have AC?
It isn't the temperature, it's the humidity.
Wet bulb is a way measure how much evaporative cooling you can have. Once wet bulb gets to 95°F even a healthy fit individual will die given enough time even in the shade with a fan. It might be 112 but as long as the wet bulb stays below 95°F your body can cool with sweat. Any higher wet bulb the human body only heats up from the environment and can no longer cool, eventually leading to fatal hyperthermia (heat exhaustion and heat stroke).
Interesting. Thanks for explaining
"It's a dry heat" isn't just a cliche.
That is exactly the conditions humans are adapted for: high arid heat. We are the world champions of sweating to stay cool, but that does nothing in humid weather. At high humidity, the temperature only needs to be near body temperature to kill you.
Maybe I'm ignorant, but couldn't you dig?
I know that here (Canada) if you dig 6ft, temperature goes down to the year average, so here like 6c.
You would do your outside activities in the night or at sunrise.
But at that point the problem would probably be crops and wildlife dying en masse. So food would be the issue.
If you want to survive, invest in fungus and cyanobacteria
I do my own building, construction and renovation ... did some commercial work but never enough to want to do it for a living ... I know enough to do my own but not enough to call myself a pro.
From what I've learned about underground building is that it is very dangerous and a health hazard. You have to constantly monitor and create safety measures for gases and oxygen levels. Even with the best setups ... actually with super sealed setups ... it can be very dangerous without active monitoring. Carbon dioxide, monoxide, and many gases will naturally want to drift to lower levels and displace oxygen which wants to move up ... if you happen to be unlucky to have a generator or car running next to your exit/entry hole ... your underground space quickly loses oxygen and without monitoring equipment or alarms, you just get dizzy, fall asleep and die .... very gentle death because you will never know what happened.
There was a news story a year or two ago ... in Australia I think? .. of a farmer that crawled into an underground reservoir that was empty to repair it ... his generator or vehicle was running nearby and he lost consciousness inside and died ... it's actually a common enough occurrence for farmers and industrial workers and construction workers
Anyone who is even thinking of building anything underground has to know and understand this dangerous fact
Uh! Makes you think. So the idea would be to have a lower underground room which you could "pump" out the gas?
Assuming energy is an issue, a passive pump might be able to be built through usage of a copper pipe by creating a thermosiphon (the exposed copper pipe outside would heat up creating hot air which would "siphon" the bottom air).
I guess the issue with living underground sre many: moisture, possible radon, water infiltration, pest, no good way of making a fire, etc...
a supply of chemical ice packs could work as a short term/emergency response. Use them to survive short term (hours/days) while you leave the area / get the power restored / AC fixed / or the heat breaks?
They have a shelf life, but it's 1-2 years, so you would have to stay on top of expiration.
One option, if you live somewhere where this is a likely event, is to prep an ice room - an underground room that is small, with thick well insulated walls. That alone will keep it ~5c which is good, but it can be lowered further by freezing blocks of ice and stocking the room up when the power goes out/heat waves hit.
Note this requires a number of things - a large Chest freezer to freeze big blocks in (small blocks melt quicker. Bigger the block, the longer the room lasts). It also requires a basement you can modify, and a floor drain for when the ice slowly melts.
It's a lot of work and likely not worth it unless you Need to use it regularly, though with climate change it may become more useful. As always, consider radon readings in your basements, as well as a CO monitor. Bad air sinks, and the whole point of this is you don't want to die
Thanks for the reminder to buy a generator.
Consider a portable power station too - they're quieter, can be used indoors without CO risk, and prices have dropped a ton (check out gearscouts.com for comparisons on the best value LFP models per watt-hour).
Don't believe everything you read on the internet. Not everyone has AC and they didn't die.
@lemmy.ca
Also about survival, urban survival, grey man, Preparedness, Self-sufficient, Resilient, Adaptable, Low profile
A place to share information on emergency preparedness as it relates to disasters both natural and man-made.
Would you survive in the event of economic, political and social collapse? What natural disasters such as tornadoes, earthquakes or hurricanes are prevalent in your area? What can you do? What should you be doing now? What do you need to know/have?
This is a community for those who think that it's better to be safe than sorry, and that we need to start preparing now.
go to feed...
@lemmy.ca
Also about survival, urban survival, grey man, Preparedness, Self-sufficient, Resilient, Adaptable, Low profile
A place to share information on emergency preparedness as it relates to disasters both natural and man-made.
Would you survive in the event of economic, political and social collapse? What natural disasters such as tornadoes, earthquakes or hurricanes are prevalent in your area? What can you do? What should you be doing now? What do you need to know/have?
This is a community for those who think that it's better to be safe than sorry, and that we need to start preparing now.
go to feed...
My greatest fear with the chaos and challenges that are going to happen over the next few decades in terms of environmental change is not the weather, not the heat, not the cold, not the tornadoes or hurricanes ... the thing that scares me the most are people.
As the environment becomes more extreme and we experience more and more emergencies, people are going to start panicking .... panicked people are going to do some crazy things ... the worse conditions get, the worse people will become.
save