Understanding infrastructure can help you become more resilient when disaster strikes
When our power went out eleven days ago in the massive ice storm that smashed into Western Oregon, we thought our solar battery would keep our essential services working. Then our solar battery promptly failed and we had no water, sewer, heat, or refrigeration. Our infrastructure had failed in a deadly ice storm. And since the roads were impassible, we could not get these vital services elsewhere.
In the midst of all this, I began to think of the subsystems that support our Western way of life as a giant robot. A robot built on subsumption architecture. This kind of robot is built in hierarchical layers. Each layer processes sensory information and takes action in response. Higher layers can suppress the lower, simpler layers. In a sense, a robot built like this mirrors the processing of our bodies that are below conscious awareness. They just operate in the background as we go about our lives. In the case of our body, thought is a higher-level behavior emerging from our experience of ourselves in the world. A lower-level behavior might be walking - moving around our environment to get what we need. Once we learn to walk, we don’t think about walking, we think about where we’re going. Walking is an automatic process. Walking, in turn rests on blood circulation, heart action, and all the other bodily systems needed for creating energy to fuel muscles and eliminate wastes.
Most of these lower systems operate beneath our conscious awareness, until they don’t. If you’ve ever hurt your leg, or had a heart problem, all of a sudden the infrastructure of your bodily existence is revealed. Just like our daily lives, we worry about a work deadline, or our kid’s homework, or what to fix for dinner, until the power goes out. Now in addition to those concerns, we have to provide the basic services that were subsumed under the normal surface activities of our lives. Yes, this sudden change is overwhelming. We are now faced with completing a lot more tasks just to take care of daily needs. Our life is suddenly more complex because we have to tend to the lower level systems that make our existence possible.
In the case of the infrastructure on our homestead, the primary system–the power grid–failed, taking with it water production, sewage processing, and heat. Then our back up system failed. Fortunately for us, after a few days of heating large stones with a propane torch to bring inside and help stabilize the house temperature, and draining what water we could from our pressure tanks into storage jugs, a kind friend loaned us a generator. Then the problem became finding propane to run it, because the storm in Texas shut down a third of the nation’s supply of these fuels, and every one else was cold, too. It was systems all the way down.
We learned a lot from this stress-test of our infrastructure systems, and I wanted to share a few key take-aways for us.
First, identify your critical systems. This isn’t just for power and heat. This could be in your relationships, too. What relationships are critical for your well-being? In my case, I depend on my husband for many things, including handling the work necessary to run our small farmstead. And, of course, I depend on my relationship with my body. Am I tending to the critical systems I need to maintain health? Maintaining these critical systems will give me more resilience in the face of a failure in my life.
Second, identify the weak points in those systems and think through how to reinforce them. In the case of the ice storm, we discovered a fault in the software of our solar battery that caused the system to fail, and we eventually got it fixed. We also learned more about operating the system. As rural denizens who are last on the list for power grid repairs, we will also buy a generator and keep fuel on hand for the next big storm. Finding and reinforcing critical systems also apply to your child’s schooling, important work responsibilities, or your personal relationships. For instance, do you daily tend to the most important relationships in your life? A little kindness and understanding, a sign of affection or appreciation for your partner or child, can go a long way to buttressing that relationship for when times get tough. Because, they will, and weathering sudden change is part of life.
Meeting these changes with creativity (heating stones with the propane torch we had on hand), and preparation (buying a generator for next time) gives you the best chance for surviving the unexpected.
