Maybe you've all heard the following ditty:

For want a nail a horse was lost, for want of a horse, a rider was lost, for want of a rider a battle was lost, for want of a battle a war was lost, for want of a war a kingdom was lost (or something like that).

My point is that given the little time spent on serious remediation, even the best laid plans by our big service providers like water/hydro/telco etc can go seriously awry for simple mistakes or oversights: Ooops, we've run out of batteries. Our back-up communications is now toast, and as a result we can't coordinate the power grid and oops, the power just went down, oh oh there's goes a nuclear reactor, ohmygod, so much for our food supply....

Got batteries?

-- samIam (dr@seu.ss), November 26, 1999

Answers

310 AA, 175 D, 100 9 volt, etc.... ALL are high-end Duracell, not a china-knockoff in the bunch.

I dont even believe we will lose power and I have a crate of batteries just in case.

-- hamster (hamster@mycage.com), November 26, 1999.

sam:

I think the point of that ditty is that few Big Problems have sole sources. Big Problems tend to require a combination of sources, in sequence, to snowball enough to become big. Which is why such problems are pretty unusual.

Too many here, however, have concluded that the loss of *any* nail will *inevitably* lead directly to the loss of *every* kingdom. This despite the observation that we lose whole bins of nails daily under ordinary circumstances, yet kingdoms tend to be pretty durable.

On TV, Sgt. Friday gets his man every eposide. In real life, a good police department has a crime "clearance rate" (explained crimes) of under 10% -- and tend to cheat a bit to get that high. Most of the links in the "chain of circumstances" scenarious dreamed up here are weaker than wet noodles.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), November 26, 1999.

Found 2 UPS's at Office Depot for $19.22 each. Both my desktops may now be shut down properly at 12:01pm pst if anything happens...Have notebook with a couple of batteries if whatever happens takes too long to fix. Genny in the background for fridge and a light and a small TV if the "3 day ride" gets prolonged...oh yea, batteries in freezer too.

But I keep asking myself "Why do we even have to do all of this?"

-- Uncle Bob (UNCLB0B@Tminus35&counting.down), November 26, 1999.

To some extent, Flint [the salmon expert] is correct. The loss of a single nail will not be able to be extrapolated into the loss of a kingdom. Of course, unless, all of those nails are interconnected. As Flint has said, we will need to wait and see...

Best wishes,,,,

-- Z1X4Y7 (Z1X4Y7@aol.com), November 26, 1999.