Prepping for a Suburban or Rural Community: Building a Civil Defense Plan for a Long-Term Catastrophe

The electric grid is America's Achilles' heel and Congress has known this for years. Reams of Congressional testimony and federal agency reports confirm that if a man-made attack or a natural solar event took down the electric grid, thousands - even millions of Americans would die. Who else knows about this? Russia and China know about it. Iran, North Korea and terrorist organizations not only know about it, but today are actively working to exploit it. Moreover, our electric grid is unprotected from naturally occurring solar flares - which have a 100% possibility of occurring in the future.

It is no longer a matter if the grid will go down, it is a matter of when.

So what happens when the grid goes down? Everything dependent on electricity stops. No more food will be coming to the stores. Deliveries of fuel will stop. Water, sewer and other services will stop. Supplies of medicine and medical services will stop. Law and order will break down. Americans will die of starvation, disease and societal collapse at first by the thousands and then millions.

This would not be like a regional disaster like an earthquake or hurricane. In a national scale catastrophe neither the federal nor state governments will be able to help you and your town for months or longer. Survival will be a local issue. The cavalry will not be coming.

In fact, in August of 2012 a bi-partisan group of lawmakers advocated that communities establish a civil defense program in case of such a grid-down scenario, but Congress failed to act.

Even well prepared individuals and families, known as preppers, can't be truly safe alone. The bottom line: Your family's survival depends on how well prepared your local government is. And right now your local government is completely unprepared. Local emergency managers depend on their ability to call for outside resources in a major emergency. The problem is that in a national-scale catastrophe, there will be no outside resources available.

Until now, there was no plan