I was born in the mid-1970s. I do remember the gasoline shortage of 1979 vaguely. I remember asking my mom if the water could run out. My dad purchased a bicycle and started riding it to work everyday. He rode a bike to work and back from 1980-1983 (until we moved too far away). My mom rode a bicycle to the grocery store and around town.

Whether people realize it or not, our lifestyle revolves around fuel. One type of fuel is electricity. In my house that is the stove, the refrigerator, the freezer and the furnace. I would say that it is pretty important. A small amount of electricity can be stored in batteries and another small portion of electricity can be made with a generator but that doesn’t run without fuel.

We have all seen the Walking Dead where gasoline all runs out and the entire planet switches to ethanol. It’s a fun fantasy for sure but not really realistic on a large scale. Some preparedness minded people have made a huge investment in solar but this also assumes the outage is not caused by something like an Electro Magnetic Pulse. This is essentially a high level nuclear detonation that fries anything electrical. If you think that it is not possible, think about military escalation with Russia and a Chinese balloon that flew undiscovered along with who knows how many others.

I really don’t think that it is possible or practical to prepare for catastrophic events. What is smart is to deal with the typical, short term problems we see in everyday life. An ice storm knocks out power for a week or the government shuts down society for a month. You can’t leave or you don’t want to leave how is this going to work?

Can you actually stay home for two weeks? I know that examining what happened during the pandemic we didn’t. Sure, we had lots of food and we were fairly well prepared for survival. On the same hand, none of us knew what was going to happen so we went out in search of more while we could.

I remember standing in an hours long line at Costco on one of the first Saturdays of the lockdown. We waited for an hour and eventually decided that it wasn’t worth it. We ended up going to a scratch and ding kind of place called Wheeler Dealer because there were no lines. We got everything we wanted at scratch and dent kind of prices without the wait. It was mostly snacks and comfort foods, not something we stock a lot of. The truth is, we didn’t need to go out. It was a shortage fear that triggered us to react.

Leaving woulda/coulda/shoulda of that era behind, fuel is not much different the food. We may need to leave to get it, the prices are generally going up, it has a shelf-life, we can never have a lifetime supply at any one time and we use it daily. I am going to take the next couple of Thursdays talking about fuel storage, redundancy and alternative solutions.

End Your Programming Routine: This was going to be a single post but I couldn’t get my head around exactly what I wanted to say. There was too much and the topic was too broad and I wandered too much. I think I changed the title ten times before I settled on this one. Fuel is always something on my pantry list. It’s not sexy or fun but boy are you glad you have it when you need it.