Source: Salt Lake Tribune. For Latter-day Saint families, preparing for emergencies is the norm

Preface.  Ted Koppel’s book “Lights Out” highlights the many risks to the grid from cyber and physical attacks, electromagnetic pulses from weapons or solar flares, large transformer failures, and simply falling apart because it is very old and is falling apart at a time when it needs to be expanded for electric cars and trucks, which would require 40% of all electricity produced today.

The LDS church Mormons are by far the most prepared for the grid going out for weeks or months, which Koppel explains would kill many Americans (according to the congressional testimony here, a year-long grid outage could kill 90% of us)

This post excerpts the parts about the Mormons, who are better prepared than preppers because they are a community, they are organized, many families have a year of food stocked up, the LDS church is one of the largest farm and ranch owners in the U.S., and their culture and belief system are wired towards survival after their difficult history of attacks from Christians wherever they moved.

This ultra patriarchial men-get-their-own-planet-and-many-wives sci-fi religion may not appeal to most people, but other aspects of helping one another, sharing, cooperation and more will be key to not only surviving the endless depression ahead, but to making it meaningful, rewarding, and in many ways better than the texting on phone social media isolation of today.

What Koppel misses though is that this is a permanent emergency, the grid can’t stay up without fossil fuels, especially natural gas to balance and provide peak power. But also coal to make steel and other metals, and above all oil, for mining trucks and supply chains. If oil peaked in 2018 then the end of the grid is in sight.  No matter how much freeze-dried food or MRE’s were stockpiled, that doesn’t get around the carrying capacity of the U.S. being around 100 million or less without fossil fuels.

The only real actions to take are limiting immigration to 100,000 a year or less, encouraging one child per woman (or less), organic agriculture, breeding horses and oxen.  That is politically impossible, nor would people give up their Star Trek hopes, and capitalism depends on endless growth, perhaps unable to cope with shrinkage, which is what is required above all – less consumption.

I have two other posts reviewing this book:

1. Book review of Lights Out. A Cyberattack. A Nation Unprepared. Surviving the Aftermath
2. What is the plan for an electric grid outage that lasts for months?

Related posts: Electromagnetic Pulse, Electric Grid, Energy Storage

Alice Friedemann  www.energyskeptic.com  Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”.  Women in ecology  Podcasts: WGBH, Financial Sense, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity,  Index of best energyskeptic posts

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Koppel T (2015) Lights Out: A Cyberattack, A Nation Unprepared, Surviving the Aftermath.  

What intrigued me about the Mormons was that their plan engages an entire community. The LDS church is not a casual operation. The office headquarters in Salt Lake City are linear and somewhat stark, like something out of an Ayn Rand novel. The interior space, where the offices of the church leadership are located, bears more than a passing similarity to the antechambers guarding the offices of the secretary of defense or the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon. Nor is that the only echo of military structure. The church is a highly disciplined, hierarchical organization. It is very tradition-bound; unlike the military, which has elevated at least some women into its highest ranks, those who govern the LDS church—the members of the First Presidency, the Quorum of the 12 Apostles, the Presidency of the 70, the First Quorum of the Seventy, the Second Quorum of the Seventy, the Presiding Bishopric, slightly more than a hundred in total—are all men.

When, during many of the religion’s early years, that hostility manifested itself in the form of physical violence against church members, preparing for disaster became an essential element of survival; this ultimately matured into a matter of doctrine itself. It may seem curious that in gathering information about the impact of a cyberattack on one of the United States’ electric power grids, I have spent the better part of a chapter sketching out the cross-country journey of the earliest Mormons. But it is a necessary prerequisite for understanding why the church is so focused on preparing for the unexpected.

What Brigham Young told his followers in Salt Lake City created a mindset that informs Mormon behavior to this day: “If you are without bread, how much wisdom can you boast, and of what real utility are your talents, if you cannot procure for yourselves and save against a day of scarcity those substances designed to sustain your natural lives?

Even the most elaborate framework requires a solid foundation. For the Mormons, this means starting with families, who are encouraged to prepare, over time, for unspecified emergencies. They are urged to gradually set aside enough food, water, clothing, and money to sustain themselves for three to twelve months.

“Have you ever paused to realize what would happen to your community or nation,” he asked in 1980, “if transportation were paralyzed or if we had a war or depression? How would you and your neighbors obtain food? How long would the corner grocery store—or supermarket—sustain the needs of the community?” He recommended storing at least a year’s worth of supplies.

However unfamiliar its governing structure may be to nonmembers, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a vast, efficiently run enterprise, claiming a worldwide membership of more than 15 million, of whom roughly six million are in the United States. Describing its intricate hierarchy is, in the context of this book, useful only in this sense: one would be hard pressed to find a large religious organization with more precise systems of communication and oversight.

Each ward is expected to have its own emergency plan, designed to deal with the sorts of natural disasters peculiar to the region, and a local bishop’s placement within a military-style chain of command gives him and those in his care access to an incredible network of resources. In case the electricity is out and the normal phone system is no longer functional, satellite phones have been pre-positioned with stake presidents and a network of ham radio operators has been set up. If cars aren’t working or if gasoline is scarce, local bishops have plans to send messengers by bicycle or foot. A ward bishop knows who in his community is vulnerable and where he can find those with the particular skill sets to assist—those who can provide medical assistance, or help with rudimentary repairs. The bishop’s recognized authority within the ward enables him to organize the community at the local level.  We firmly believe that the individual members who have storage and food and preparation in their homes, led by local bishops and stake presidents, would immediately join together and figure out how they could best care for each other.

The finely calibrated, professional operation this national network represents can, and has on occasion, outstripped Washington’s own disaster response machine. In a 2007 article for Mother Jones, Stephanie Mencimer recounted the LDS church’s reaction to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. It was, she wrote, “a performance that put the federal government to shame.” The New Orleans branch of the LDS church had evacuated all but seven of its approximately 2,500 congregants before the storm even hit, largely because the church had created an automated telephone emergency warning system that alerted all its members, instructing them to get out of town and telling them where to go. “While FEMA was floundering,” Mencimer wrote, “the church dispatched ten trucks full of tents, sleeping bags, tarps to cover wrecked roofs, bottled water, and 5-gallon drums of gas from its warehouse to New Orleans and other hard-hit areas. The supplies were distributed in an orderly fashion to people who desperately needed them.

There is an entire branch of the church hierarchy dedicated to dealing with the administration of the church’s physical assets—its 148 temples and 19,000 buildings worldwide, as well as the torrent of resources it produces, sells, and distributes.

“There is scripture that we refer to in the church, that says that if you are prepared you shall not fear. This is at the center of our religion, this scripture, to be prepared. So a lot of what we are doing is teaching people, helping people get prepared in their families for anything that comes.

“Anything that comes” doesn’t have to be a disaster on the scale of Katrina, or indeed any kind of collective emergency. Where a family is no longer able to deal with its own setbacks, whether that be a lingering illness, a sudden death, or perhaps the loss of a job, it is still expected to turn to its ward bishop. It is through a bishop’s “recommend” that a ward member can be granted access to what is variously referred to as a “bishop’s storehouse” or “Lord’s storehouse.”

A recommend, which can be bestowed or withdrawn, is an incredibly powerful tool for influencing behavior. To a ward member experiencing hard times, the bishop’s storehouse can be an indispensable resource. “It’s like a grocery store,” Caussé explained, “but you don’t have to pay. You know, there is no cashier and you cannot pay at the end. You choose to come with your recommendation of the bishop and you will take whatever food you need for your family.” A recommend is not an open-ended license to load up a shopping cart, but it is a generous extension of charity for the time that the bishop determines it will take a family to become self-reliant again. Those availing themselves of the bishop’s storehouse are expected to volunteer their own time to work at the storehouse for a few hours each week. Several of my hosts stressed the high priority that the church places on volunteering, both as a means to strengthen the fabric of the community and as a way for those receiving help to restore their own self-esteem.

I saw this effort to treat everyone as useful and functional firsthand during my visit to a bishop’s storehouse. I was struck there by the presence of a young staffer who was clearly challenged. His name tag identified him as a church elder. He was, it was explained to me, incapable of fulfilling the duties of a missionary overseas, but with supervision he could assist with simple tasks at the storehouse to fulfill his obligation. It would be the first of several instances in which I witnessed a determination not to consider or treat any member of the community as anything other than productive.

The storehouse I visited is part of a sprawling network. Think of 111 mini-marts spread around the United States and Canada. Like any supermarket chain, the individual stores need to be replenished, for which there are four large central warehouses in the United States and one in Canada. Those warehouses, in turn, are resupplied from an enormous complex in Salt Lake City. Only a chain of stores on the scale of Costco or Walmart would need a facility of this size: building after building, 30-40 feet high, pallets stacked floor to ceiling with everything from food supplies to shelves of truck tires. Some buildings are air-conditioned, others refrigerated. There are giant generators ready to provide electricity in the event of a shutdown and underground tanks of diesel fuel with an estimated storage capacity of 250,000 gallons.  The diesel also fuels the trucks that service the church’s national distribution system. Those trucks, too, are owned and operated by the church—part of LDS’s proprietary trucking company, Deseret Transportation. A prospective trucker for Deseret Transportation must also be “currently temple worthy,” which is no simple task.

The Mormons require that each church member be interviewed by priesthood leaders at least once every two years. Each member is asked the same questions, dealing with, among other issues, chastity, tithing, church attendance, honesty, keeping the covenants, and sustaining the president of the church. If a member is found to be worthy to enter the temple, he is issued what is called a “temple recommend.” This is a card signed by his bishop, valid for two years and granting the holder admission to the temple.

Deseret Transportation has the best safety record of any trucking company in the country. I cannot vouch for that, but it makes sense. A Mormon truck driver who is temple worthy can reliably be assumed to be drug and alcohol free, and not even to rely on caffeine as a stimulant. Starkly put, the temple recommend ensures the church leadership a degree of top-to-bottom control over anyone who would consider him or herself a practicing Mormon.

Deseret trucks transport product not only to all bishop’s storehouses but also to more than one hundred church-run home storage centers, where church members and outsiders alike can buy prepackaged nonperishable goods. The trucks are available, the drivers are reliable, and there is a vast emergency reservoir of fuel. Even this extensive infrastructure, however, merely hints at the scope of the enormous, self-sustaining food chain that supplies the Latter-day Saints.

The welfare program has 52 farms, ranches, and orchards; 12 canneries and processing plants which carry enormous amounts of food to the church’s emergency preparedness network and sales beyond.

It’s difficult to quantify how much food they give away through the bishop’s storehouses, but Johnson estimated that it works out to about $145 million worth annually. Approximately 60% is sold on the open market. In the event of a massive crisis, though, everything could be consolidated to provide resources for the church members.

The church is independent of any outside supplier. What it donates, what it sells, and what it puts into storage all come from within a single ecosystem. There were enormous silos outside the facility where we met. The harvest had just ended, so the silos were filled with about 24 million pounds of wheat.

The lactating cows are milked three times a day, for a total of about 84 pounds of milk per cow per day. The 5,000 cows on this facility produce 420,000 pounds of milk a day. That’s about 50,000 gallons of milk per day. It all goes into the production of fluid milk, cream, ice cream, sour cream, butter, and cheese. Cows usually “leave this operation” after they’ve had three to five calves and are six or seven years old, at which point they become a part of the meat-generating part of the food chain. The torrent of dairy and beef products flows into the same production stream that carries millions of pounds of wheat, miles of pasta, tons of fruit from the orchards, and thousands of gallons of honey from the apiaries.

Many of the church’s companies and operations carry the name Deseret. It’s a term used in the Book of Mormon, meaning “honeybee,” and it has symbolic resonance within the church. Honeybees, too, work and live within a self-sufficient, collaborative, and highly productive community.

In the event of a national catastrophe, if an electric grid went down, every bishop’s storehouse—not to mention their supply chain—would seem an inevitable target for looters. It’s an uncomfortable topic, painful to contemplate; but with their history of having been driven from pillar to post and their disciplined culture of preparing for the worst, it is hard to believe that church leaders in Salt Lake City haven’t considered the issue.

“What if,” I asked Stevenson, “the church institution, in terms of its warehouses, becomes a target?

The issue of guns and self-defense is a minefield for any religious organization. It is particularly so for the LDS church, within which there is a historical sensitivity to the subject of armed violence. During the years of their trek across the country, Mormons were both victims and perpetrators, albeit more often the former than the latter.

The open acknowledgment of plural marriages among Mormons led to such tensions with other settlers in the Utah territory that in 1857 President James Buchanan sent the army to maintain order. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has had a difficult enough time being accepted into the mainstream of American life without reviving volatile images of a highly organized, self-sufficient, and heavily armed entity. It is totally understandable that the church leadership won’t even discuss the option of defending its resources with an armed force.

It requires an almost deliberate act of obliviousness on the part of church leaders, for whom the gathering and listing of every potential resource is an essential ingredient of disaster preparation, to avoid any discussion of guns and self-defense. This is an organization that, in almost every other respect, stresses its self-sufficiency, its independence, its reluctance to depend on government assistance. The issue of self-defense, though, is toxic.

Blaine Maxfield is the church’s chief information officer. After giving me an exhaustive rundown of the church’s emergency communications planning (which runs the gamut from Internet and social media and texting to those carefully distributed satellite phones and ham radios), Maxfield reaffirmed that no contingency exists for the church’s own defense. “None of our plans contemplate, from our perspective, us defending ourselves. We’re relying on all government agencies, really, to help protect our members of the church.” Maxfield defended this position wholeheartedly, adding, “We’re suggesting that each individual member, they rely on their relationship with their Father in Heaven and know exactly what best to do. And I know that might sound trite to you, but it isn’t. From our perspective, we believe that they’ll know exactly what to do to help with their families. Henry Kissinger liked to call it “constructive ambiguity.

Church leaders have repeatedly and emphatically refused to spell out any defensive measures or preparations—yet neither have they issued any prohibitions against them. But if it wanted to rule out the use of guns for any purpose other than hunting, it would do so.

The LDS church has established a model that makes good common sense, one that serves to support families in times of illness or unemployment, natural disaster, or international crisis. It is designed to cushion families during hard times over an extended period. Certainly most families cannot afford to immediately lay in a six-month supply of food and water. Too many families lack the resources to meet even their daily needs. But if those who can afford it take on the responsibility of longer-term survival, supplies available to emergency management agencies can be reserved for the very neediest.

What will, for most people, be the most difficult to replicate in the Mormon experience, however, is the intricately organized community, existing on both the local and national levels. There are well over 2,000 Community Emergency Response Teams (CERTs) throughout the country. They are affiliated with FEMA and provide a useful structure for implementing disaster relief, but they don’t have much of a presence in America’s cities.