How a Former CIA Officer Would Survive 18 Months Without Power

Day forty of a blackout. A neighbor who has never once knocked on your door is on your step, friendly, asking how you're holding up, and his eyes keep going past your shoulder into the hallway. He isn't asking about you. He's counting. An 18-month national blackout is a warning scenario that serious people have raised, not a forecast. But after 31 years of watching what people do once they're sure nobody is coming to help, I can tell you that in a long outage the shortage that hurts people most is rarely food. It's people: who notices you, who comes to your door, who you trust and what you say. I walk you through it phase by phase: the first 72 hours, the first month, months two and three when a street starts sizing itself up, and the long stretch after. In each phase: what changes in people, what I would do as an older man living alone, and the one mistake people living on their own tend to make. And everything here works the same way in a two-week ice storm. Tell me in the comments: the first name of the one person on your street who would notice if your curtains stayed shut for two days. Everything here is public, legal, and about protecting yourself and your home. #poweroutage #gridDown #blackout #seniorsafety #livealone #emergencyprep #homesecurity #situationalawareness