➡ In times of crisis, our society’s systems, like food distribution, medication supply, and law enforcement, can quickly break down. North America’s grain reserves are limited, and pharmacies only hold a week’s worth of medication. If transportation stops, food and goods can’t be delivered, and hospitals, already operating near capacity, will be overwhelmed. Therefore, it’s important to prepare for emergencies by stocking up on essential supplies.

When the emergency alert system blares out over the airwaves, it’s going to take minutes, not days, for everyday resources to disappear. Our entire society runs on the just-in-time delivery system. It’s efficient during peacetime, but fragile in times of chaos. Today I’m taking you location by location to show you how quickly everything will run out when the panic buying ensues. Let’s get to it! Think there’s enough gas to go around? Think again. There’s around two to three days worth of gas in these gas stations during normal times. There’s around one gas station for every 5,000 people in North America, and each one of those gas stations contains around 10,000 gallons of gasoline.

Now when you do the math, that means that there’s two gallons of gasoline for every person. These stations are going to run dry in a few hours. There’s around 150,000 gas stations like this across North America, and all of them rely on daily or weekly tanker deliveries. When tankers can’t resupply gas stations, it’s going to be utter pandemonium. The global supply chain depends on vehicles like this. Semi-trucks transport 70 to 80 percent of all freight. They also consume around 60 to 65 percent of diesel fuel. When that runs out, it’s game over.

Grocery stores like this one here are going to be the front line for panic buying. This is going to be Grand Central for chaos after it hits the fan, and most of these places in order to keep costs down rely on the fast in time delivery system. That means that they rely on daily shipments from their distributors in order to keep things well stocked. After an emergency alert, these store shelves will be cleared within three to five hours. Water, bread, canned goods, baby formula, and possibly even toilet paper are going to be the first things to go.

Most stores at best have two to three days worth of food on hand, and over 80 percent of North American cities rely on food that is trucked in. When the trucks stop rolling, that means no resupply, and that means that grocery stores like this are going to be a ticking time bomb. Towers like the one you see behind me here, whether they’re 4G or 5G, it doesn’t matter. They have a very limited surge capacity. You might think that there’s an unlimited amount of internet access out there, and that you can call your family and friends in the time of an emergency without a hitch.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Cell towers during the best of times can facilitate the communication of 500 to 1000 people. Well, what’s going to happen when a disaster strikes and everybody is going online to social media to try to figure out exactly what is going on, or everybody trying to contact their loved ones at the same time? These systems are easily going to be overwhelmed. What’s more is that these cell towers actually require power. Most of them will have a backup battery supply that will last about four to eight hours.

After that is depleted, there’s no more communications. In 2020, when lockdowns began, some regions reported internet slowdowns of up to 50 percent due to demand spikes. Internet service providers prioritize average daily usage, not crisis-level surges. And infrastructure like fiber hubs and data centers rely on constant power. Many only have 24 to 48 hours of backup power generation if you’re lucky. Rural areas are going to be even more vulnerable, with over 20 million Americans lacking access to high-speed internet. In a crisis, many will lose it completely. If cell towers go down and fiber optics are cut, there is no internet.

Even Starlink requires power, clear skies and hardware. If there’s no signal, there’s no communication, that means there’s no help. You’re going to be on your own. Most banks like the one behind me here keep very little cash on site. In fact, most ATMs in the time of an emergency are going to be cleaned out within a couple hours. Digital systems are likely to fail during cyber attacks or blackouts. If you don’t have at the grocery store, less than 10 percent of money in circulation is actually physical cash. The average branch like this one only carries $50,000 to $200,000 in cash at any given time.

If a bank is hit by a cyber attack, power outage or grid failure, you can’t even access what’s in your account. Three to six months into a Mad Max apocalypse, everybody’s going to be using silver and gold. But in the immediate aftermath of a crisis, cash is most certainly going to be king. Clean running water is something that everybody takes for granted. It feels like a given until it stops. Most cities require a constant supply of electricity in order to pressurize and purify water. Without power, pressure begins to drop within two to six hours, especially in high-rise buildings.

In some cities, water towers can buffer short-term outages, but will only provide gravity-fed pressure for limited zones. In North America, the average person uses around 80 to 100 gallons of water per day. This includes that used for drinking, cooking, bathing, cleaning, gardening, and of course, flushing toilets. No water means no drinking, no toilets, no firefighting, and no sanitation. And that’s going to make for a really crappy situation. In densely populated urban areas, everybody relies on electricity. From water pumps to credit card machines, all of it shuts down if there’s no electricity.

The problem is the North American power grid is aging and fragile. Transformers like the one you see behind me here are nearly 40 years old on average, and most of the components and manufacturing is done overseas in China. It’s not uncommon for the average household to endure one to two hours of a power outage once a year, maybe even several times a year depending on where you live. But we’re talking about a sustained power outage, and of course, power is the cornerstone of civilized society. All it takes is one ice storm, one cyber attack, or solar flare to completely shut the grid down indefinitely.

After the apocalypse, everybody’s going to want to get drunk to kill the pain, so they’re probably going to descend onto liquor stores. Now, while this is not an essential item, it might make for great barter, and yeah, who is not going to want to tie one on, especially if it’s the end of days? In North America, we are dependent on big box stores like this. There’s one Costco for every couple hundred thousand people. Now, when we came in here to film this video on a Monday morning, we could barely find a parking spot.

They say that during times of disaster, places like this are going to see volume increase by about eight times. Imagine the chaos and pandemonium when eight times the amount of traffic descends on a place like this. The problem with Costco and any grocery store is that there are no longer any warehouses in the back. They totally rely on the just-in-time delivery system. Firefighters and first responders are heroes, but they can’t defy logistics. Fire stations like this are going to be overwhelmed when disaster strikes. You’re going to have electrical fires. You’re going to have arson.

If it’s a nuclear conflagration, fire is likely going to be out of control when the grid goes down. What’s more is 65% of firefighters are volunteers. If the grid fails, hydrants lose pressure or stop working altogether. No water equals no firefighting, and no backup means no containment. After it hits the fan, ammunition is going to disappear faster than anything. Case in point, Bass Pro and Cabela’s, during the COVID lockdown of 2020, sold out of entire calibers in only 24 hours. Ammo sales tripled overnight, and shelves were empty for months. The problem is most stores don’t really hold large stockpiles, and supply chain disruptions in lead, brass, and powder can have ripple effects that last for years.

Most of these components are imported from Europe or Asia. What’s more is that Russia was a major exporter of steel case ammo until the 2021 US import ban. This removed hundreds of millions of rounds annually from the market. If you wait till the shooting starts, you probably waited too long. After the breakdown of rule of law, crime is going to be rampant. And for that, you’re going to need police. Unfortunately, there’s not going to be enough police to go around. The ones that don’t go AWOL to protect their own families aren’t going to be sufficient to quell the growing surge of criminality after a grid-down predicament.

In North America, there’s only 2.4 police officers for every 1,000 people. Only a fraction of those are on duty at any given time. In large-scale disasters, the focus is going to shift on infrastructural protection. So in a city of 1 million people, you’re talking about 2,400 police officers, and only 480 may be working at any given moment. During major disasters, call volumes can spike nearly 600% or more, completely overwhelming dispatch centers. After Hurricane Harvey, over 75,000 calls came within the first 48 hours. Even when times are good, average 911 response times in North America are 10 to 15 minutes.

But during chaos, it can stretch for hours, possibly even never. Policing is reactive, and just-in-time staffing means that they can’t scale fast. In times of panic and pandemonium, law and order is going to evaporate quickly. That is why it is going to be your responsibility to protect yourself when it all goes down. Grain feeds everything, and our strategic reserves are on a razor-thin margin. Typically, in North America, we have around three months of strategic reserves of grain. You can’t say the same about China, where it’s actually around two years. Terminals like the one you see behind me are made to bring in product and ship it out immediately.

If milling, rail, and trucks stop, grain is going to sit completely useless. Here in North America, we don’t have grain reserves, we only have food in motion. Among the worst places to be in the zombie apocalypse has to be a pharmacy. These places only have five to seven days worth of medication in the best of times. Insulin, antibiotics, and psychiatric medication are going to vanish fast. 80% of all of the active ingredients in U.S. medications are manufactured abroad, primarily in China and India. Many people, if they can’t get their medications, they are going to survive.

And this is why you need to stock up beforehand. People think that the military are going to save them and that they’re going to enforce the rule of law. Let’s break that myth. Canada has around 100,000 troops if you include the reserves. And in the United States, the National Guard takes 48 to 72 hours in order to mobilize. They’re going to be primarily tasked with defending critical infrastructure, not bringing you groceries or rescuing you from rooftops. Now, this is where your food really comes from. These distribution centers are the central hubs that feed all the grocery stores within your region.

Most grocery chains get daily shipments from places like this. Warehouses like this one typically only hold one to two days of outbound goods. If trucking stops due to fuel shortages, cyber attacks, or road blockages, everything downstream stops too. Most food distribution hubs like this one serve hundreds of stores and cover multi-provincial and state regions. If this goes down, your grocery store is going dark and nobody is going to see it coming. There’s approximately 2 million people incarcerated in facilities like this in North America. They are all reliant on the same just-in-time delivery systems as the rest of society.

During Hurricane Katrina, staff abandon jails. And if food, water, and power fails, you will have a crisis inside the crisis. Jails often rely on external food contracts with no internal storage for food. This means that a lot of these inmates could potentially be released into the community. If and when the jail cell doors fly open and all of these criminals are released because they have no means of taking care of them, you can expect that crime in your region is going to skyrocket. As everyone discovered during the pandemic, hospitals and emergency rooms like this one aren’t built for a surge.

They’re built purely for efficiency. Most operate similarly using just-in-time logistics in order to cut costs. But what about in a disaster scenario? In North America, hospitals average 1.4 beds for every 1,000 people. They can expand that about 20-30% in an emergency situation. Many emergency rooms already run at 85-90% capacity on any given day. Only 4% of North American hospitals are considered fully equipped to handle prolonged mass casualty events. And most hospitals only store 3-5 days worth of medical supplies. So when disaster strikes, hospitals like these are going to be overwhelmed within hours. They were never designed for everybody to get sick all at once.

What about traffic? When everybody’s trying to leave at once, nobody’s getting very far. Most cities will be in gridlock at only 10-15% of traffic volume at any given time. That is going to grow six-fold during an evacuation situation. Evacuation surges can see 5-10 times as much traffic as during normal times. Gas shortages, accidents, emergency vehicles, and maybe even electromagnetic pulse could possibly stall roads for hours or even days. What’s worse is that most cities only have 2-3 major routes out, making bottlenecks pretty much inevitable. The just-in-time delivery system relies on roads, and roads rely on order.

Without either of those, we’re pretty much stuck. Most cargo still moves by rail. Railways like this move around 8 billion tons of cargo every single year, accounting for 25-30% of all freight that is moved. This is going to be even more important in places like Canada, where the geography necessitates utilizing rail to move large amounts of cargo from one part of the country to the other. These trains are also dependent on the same lifeblood of the supply chain as semis and cargo ships, and that is diesel. Without diesel, the trains don’t move and the cargo isn’t getting to where it needs to go.

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