My area has several "independent" and "progressive" weekly "newspapers". I usually avoid them, except maybe to get a giggle out of the personals, but one of them had a pretty good article this week on bugging in, from a panademic perspective.

http://www.7dvt.com/2009pandemic-pantry

I liked how they implied that everyone who's been doing this is a paranoid nut, but their kinder, gentler, more enlightened readers should do it now to.

I sent a note to their editor that those of us who have been saying this for decades have also been composting and growing gardens with heirloom seeds and baking our own bread and looking at alternatives to oil for our power needs since before it was cool. "Welcome to the campfire, hippies- about time you got here."

Hippies. Hippies. Now that is a name I haven't heard in a long,long time.The equally disdainfull appelation of survivalists that devolved from knucklewalking gunshow heroes didn't all call up Lehman's Hardware for advice from Amish farmers on seed preservation when THE TURNER DIARIES didn't happen in concordance with Revelations. It, and lots of interesting skills were found again in the 70s 'Homesteading Movement' that gave us Rodale press, Mother Earth catalogs,so called primativism and a cornucopia of expandied interests and lifestyle experiments from those 'Hippies.'

I am always bemused when any worldview is actually embraced by the unwashed heathen and the cradle adherents whine about the converted sitting in 'their' pews.

In regard to "looking at alternatives to oil for our power needs", I think we found it in our part of the country, big time. Its called natural gas, where in the last 18 months they have found a possibly a 100 year (and counting) supply, and they seem to be finding more every day. Natural gas prices have plumited in the last 6 months - to only about 20% of what it was a year ago, before they cranked up the drilling. There's natural gas wells everywhere around here, and the natural gas is cheap and extraordinarily clean. Natural gas does not cause many of the environmental problems of solar and windpower. Everyone around here who's now running on natural gas tells me they are very pleased as well. About a year ago I installed a natural gas generator to run my central air system, and we're thinking of going off the grid completely, except when I change the oil in my generator's Ford engine. I swear by Ford engires for natural gas generators. If you don't have natural gas in your area, I recommend checking with a geologist in your area and have him or her check out the seismic data underneeath your area to see if you might also have a practically limitless supply, a whole lot cheeper kwh than they charge you in Vermot, and how. I'm also thinking of changing our family car over to run on natural gas, but that costs about $1,500 or so to do. The trick is that before you get a natural gas well drilled, insist that the driller allow you a tap and retain at the wellhead for free all the natural gas you use at your home for as long as your or your successors care to have it (and for your vehicles), before you allow them to drill.

Speaking of primativism, my wife and I still have a 1971 edition of the Last Whole Earth Catalog lying on our coffee table.

That is a great line.

LOL!

:-)

have any others on this board been able to get off the grid by using free natural gas? its much more dependable than power line electricity

I'm not sure where you're located, GradyT34. I assume your well is shallow and the gas is at a very low pressure, like coalbed methane. Nice.

But I'm surprised you're not running afoul of existing mineral rights.

In my part of the world, very few people own the mineral rights to the oil/gas/coal underneath their feet.

We have what's called prescriptive minerals - civil code, mineral code (much superior to common law, such as in Vermont) - keeps things simple - surface owners own their own natural gas around here (rule of capture, subject to corrletive rights and compulsary and volentary unitizaion), and if they are reserved by a former owner, they prescribe to the surface owner in 10 years of non-use. The drilling of a well or production from a well interrupts the running of 10 year prescription - generally. The gas is deep, mostly dry and high pressure (high pressure good). The agreement most folks around here worked out in the last couple years is that, in addition to royalty, to take, not in kind, but for free anywhere along the gathering system, but its more stable if it runs through the tailgate of the gathering facility first, after its gone through the low pressure and high pressure separator system and a dehydration and other units. Early clauses - where I got the idea for this area --- have been around in leases in Penn. since 1875? and around here since Spindletop - 1901 - and those were frequently for casinghead low pressure gas to run a stove. The hard scratch landowners are amazingly adept (sheeee - around here in regard to energy — it’s the french influence I suppose). When you get up in NY and other places in the NE and in CA, the tree-hugging one-eyed liberal commie pinko landowners (who are in great need buzz cuts) don't seem to have a clue as to what all this is about, and buy in to the smart liberal growth stuff (i.e. expsnsive no growth stuff) - go figure. I required the operator in the lease to engineer and set up and maintain (and remove if and when I should desire) a pressure regulator system of valves and backups and a stink pot (I just make sure they keep the stink pot full) -- and the operator also placed a high pressure governor, and then a regulator and then a second emergency shut off valve, but that's the operators' problem - always insist. They got Fluor engineers to engineer it for me. I even made the operator name me, my heirs and assigns AMIMA, as an additional insureds on the operators $25,000,000 liability and insurance policy covering the wellhead, gathering facility and my valve site and name the gathering facility after my wife (which was the hardest thing to get them to do). I also managed to get them agree to maintain a $10,000,000 seepage policy and a $25,000,o000 blowout policy (which they already had). My main tap is good one (taps good) so had them place me 3 - one near my water well and they placed on a line to by barn and one for my daughter’s family, if she ever decides to mover here. for as long as the gathering system is operative, even after my particular lease terminates. This field could last a couple lifetimes or so - or a lot less as it appears the whole country is falling being taken apart from top down as I’m writing this - maybe nothing will matter much in the next year or two anyway. But back to each well, they could last 25 years and then as marginal wells for 20 more depending on the price, but the decline curve analysis is positive indeed (positive is good). In any case they have to keep my lines presurized until the sun sets. There's room in the formation for about 8 more infield, alternate and a few substitute wells per now existing compulsory acre-feet unit. It's shapping up that their drilling will be staggered. As to natural gas, all this is possible because of the orders of magnitude leaps in seismic technology 3-D, 4-D and around here, the wonderful radial shoots, in the last few years --- and having the scientists in place to interpret the data. Now got to leave office to run back to my 72 home.

The article is sort of scattershot and unfocused, and the people they interviewed didn't seem to have thought about bugging in: "''There’s no reason why there wouldn’t be [utilities],' Bosma speculates." - and Bosma is Public Information Officer for Vermont's Emergency Management office. Shudder. The reporter couldn't reach anybody at a local food store authorized to comment on plans for pandemics, but a customer service rep was willing to gossip. The reporter interviewed a naturopathic doctor: "I use food as medicine."

Part of the lack of solid information is the nature of alternative weeklies (the search tags the paper assigned to the article are "food, health, quirky, religion"), part is lack of knowledge on the part of the reporter, and part is the reporter's failure to work with his interviewees to get some solid information. I don't think the reporter took it seriously, and that seems to be reflected in the responses.

Bugging in is taken seriously in the San Francisco Bay Area - we have refineries that occasionally spew acids and poisons in the air when things go wrong, and people are told to "shelter in place," and we all expect to be stranded after the big earthquake.

The Vermont "Stock Up and Stay Home" planner at
http://healthvermont.gov/panflu/documents/TTL-StockUpPlanner.pdf
(downloads a .pdf file) suggests for a family of four for two weeks that we start with 5 lbs of white flour, 5 lbs of wheat flour, 5 lbs of white rice, 4.4 lbs (?) of corn flour, 5 lbs of corn meal, and 5 lbs of pasta. What th' heck are they thinking of cooking? The entire list is over a page long and includes canned meat and fish, soy sauce, tabasco, dried beans, nuts and seeds, and other stuff. But I'd love to see whoever made that list live off it for two weeks after having the supplies sit in the attic or basement for a year.

It's good to suggest planning on bugging in, but I'm sorry it wasn't taken more seriously by the reporter. C'est la vie.

Vermonters clearly plan to do some baking. 4.4 pounds of corn meal would be 2 kilograms therof-and the assortment would provide maybe 20 batches of cornbread, which is my idea of a great survival food. The whole wheat would lose nutrients in the attic,but the rest of the stuff would be fine, I suspect. Beans, flour, and sugar were staples in the old forest service chuckboxes.