Royal Army College

Lesson Overview

The last lesson made the home ready. This one is about using that readiness when the services modern life depends on actually fail. Power, water, heating, and communications run quietly under ordinary life, and an emergency usually announces itself as the loss of one or more. We take each in turn: what its loss means, what to do, and what dangers to avoid, with particular weight on the few that can kill.

This is a soldier's subject because resilience in the Principality is built in layers: the national and the household first, then the community, the local authority, the state, and the Royal Kaharagian Army last, in support of the civil authority. The Army is a small, lightly armed, humanitarian home-defence force. A member who can carry their own household calmly through a week without power has done the first and most useful thing in that structure, and has learned, on their own kitchen floor, the methods they will one day bring to a stricken neighbourhood.

By the end you will be able to manage a household through a power cut, a loss of water, a loss of heating, and a loss of communications; avoid the deadly dangers each can bring, above all carbon monoxide; and keep a household safe, warm, watered, fed, and clean through days without services.

Key Terms

Vital services: the supplied services ordinary life depends on, principally power, water, heating, and communications.
Carbon monoxide: the invisible, odourless, deadly gas produced by burning fuel; the single greatest avoidable killer in a power cut or heating loss.
Cascading failure: the way the loss of one service brings down others, as a power cut takes water, heating, refrigeration, and communications with it.
Water discipline: the deliberate, sparing use of a limited water supply, and the treatment of doubtful water before it is drunk.
Sanitation without flushing: the safe management of human waste when the toilet will not flush.
Triage of needs: the habit, when a service fails, of pausing to decide which problems are most pressing and dealing with them in order.
Food-safety danger line: the band of temperature, neither properly cold nor properly hot, in which the germs that spoil food multiply fastest.
One warm room: the principle, carried from the previous lesson, of warming and occupying a single room rather than failing to heat the whole home.

When the lights go: a power cut

Power matters most, because so much depends on it. In a modern home the water and sewerage may rely on it, the heating very often does, refrigeration certainly does, and the telephone, the internet, and the means of cooking may all fail with it. A power cut is rarely just darkness; it is a cascading failure, the quiet collapse of half the household's functions at once. So the first thing to do is not to rush but to triage: decide calmly which problems are most pressing, and deal with them in order of danger, not in the order they occur to you.

   WHEN THE POWER GOES, WHAT STOPS

   [ ELECTRICITY OUT ]
         |
   +-----+--------+-----------+-----------+-------------+
   |     |        |           |           |             |
 light  cooking  heating   refrigeration  charging   maybe also:
 (most  (electric (if pump   (fridge then  (phones,    - water (if pumped)
 homes)  hob,     or fan      freezer      torches,    - router, internet,
         oven,    driven)     warming)     power banks)  often the mast
         microwave)                                     - card and cash
                                                          machines in shops
         |
         v
   one cut becomes FIVE problems at once: deal with them
   in order of danger, not in the order they occur to you.

Take light first, because it makes everything else safer. Reach for the torches and head-torches kept ready, and avoid stumbling about. Work to the head-torch by preference: it leaves both hands free and points where you look. A torch stood on its end throws a soft glow round a room. Move slowly on stairs and in the kitchen, where most blackout injuries happen, and resist the candle as a first reflex, for reasons given below. A fall in an unlit house turns one emergency into two.

Take food safety next, and manage it by the clock. A fridge and freezer kept closed hold their cold for a useful while, so the cardinal rule is to open them as little as possible. Eat down the fridge first, because it warms soonest: through the early hours use the food already cooked, the things opened, and whatever has the shortest life, cold or barely heated. Then the freezer, which holds its cold far longer when left shut and packed, so a full freezer is safer than a half-empty one. Food still hard with ice crystals is sound; food thawed but still cold can usually be cooked and eaten promptly; food that has plainly warmed, softened, and sat for hours is thrown out. The hazard is the food-safety danger line, the lukewarm band in which the germs that cause illness breed fastest. The Field Health, Hygiene and Sanitation course teaches the same truth about food hygiene; under a power cut it is no different. When in doubt, throw it out: a wasted meal costs little, a household laid low by food poisoning mid-crisis costs a great deal.

In cold weather, warmth becomes pressing, and the principles of the previous lesson and of the Cold-Weather Operations and Survival course apply at once: keep body warmth with layers and bedding, and heat and occupy a single room. Medication that needs refrigeration matters for some households; anyone who depends on such medicine should know in advance how long it keeps. The practical step is usually to move it to the coldest available place, an unheated room in winter or a cool box, note the time, and take medical advice rather than guess.

The deadly danger. In a long, cold power cut the temptation is to bring a source of heat or power indoors, and it is here that people die. A generator, a camp stove, a barbecue, a fuel-burning heater not vented for indoor use, any engine or any flame that consumes fuel, gives off carbon monoxide: a gas that cannot be seen or smelt, and kills quietly, often in sleep, because it dulls the mind before its victims understand they are in danger. It must never run inside a home, a closed room, a garage, or any enclosed space, however cold, however brief the intended use. A generator runs outdoors, well away from windows and doors, so its exhaust cannot drift back in. A barbecue stays outside and is never brought in even to cool. Only heating designed and properly vented for indoor use comes in at all.

   THE CARBON-MONOXIDE RULE  (no exceptions, ever)

   ANY device that burns fuel gives off carbon monoxide:
     a generator . a camp or gas stove . a barbecue or grill
     . a paraffin or gas heater not vented for indoor use
     . any petrol or diesel engine

   It is INVISIBLE and ODOURLESS. It gives NO warning.
   It kills quietly, often in sleep.

   ->  NEVER run any of them indoors, in a garage, in a tent,
       or in any enclosed or partly enclosed space.
   ->  A generator runs OUTSIDE, well clear of doors and windows.
   ->  Only appliances MADE and VENTED for indoor use come inside.

   However cold. However brief. There is no safe exception.

This is why the safe use of heat is reinforced in person. A working carbon-monoxide alarm with a sound battery is a cheap and valuable guard, precisely because it warns of the thing a person cannot. But it is a backstop, not a permission, and never makes it safe to run a forbidden device indoors. The rule comes first, the alarm second.

When the taps run dry: loss of water

Water may stop because the supply fails or because the power that drives it does, and its loss reaches into everything: drinking, cooking, washing, and the flushing of the toilet. The household's first defence is the water it stored in advance, used sparingly.

A simple order of priority keeps that water doing the most good. Drinking first; then water to prepare food and take essential medicines; then the little needed to keep hands clean around food and after dealing with waste; only then anything else. Washing the body can wait or be done with a damp cloth, dishes wiped rather than rinsed, the garden and the car forgotten for the duration. A household that planned for a week should still ration, because an emergency may outlast its expected span and resupply may take time. When the tap still runs but a warning has been given, the time to fill every clean container, the bath, and the kettles is now, before it stops.

When the stored water runs low and water of uncertain quality must be used, it has to be made safe, because doubtful water carries disease. The Field Health, Hygiene and Sanitation course sets out these methods in full; the same principles govern the kitchen as the field. Boiling is the surest where a safe means of heating exists: bring the water to a true rolling boil, hold it there briefly, then cool and keep it covered. Chemical disinfection with purification tablets or drops uses the correct dose for the quantity, never guessed, then the full waiting time before drinking, longer if the water is cold or cloudy. Filtration uses a purpose-made filter rated to remove disease organisms; a cloth or coarse filter only clears the mud. If the water is cloudy, settle or strain it clear first, but remember: clear water is not clean water, and water that merely looks clear is still treated before drinking. Boiling depends on a safe means of heating, so it carries every caution of the carbon-monoxide rule above. Follow official announcements, which will say whether tap water is safe or must be boiled and where drinking water is available; a boil-water notice means what it says, even for brushing teeth, until it is lifted. One warning the field course drives home: these methods make water safe from disease, not from poison, so water that smells of fuel or chemicals is set aside, not treated and drunk.

Hygiene and sanitation matter more than they seem when water is short, because cleanliness keeps disease out of a household under strain. Hands can be kept clean with very little water, or with hand sanitiser and wet wipes from the kit. Fix the habit: clean the hands before handling any food and after any contact with waste, every time, because the unwashed hand carries disease from waste to mouth. The hardest problem is the toilet that will not flush. It can sometimes be flushed by pouring a bucket of saved or greywater briskly into the bowl, but when no water can be spared the waste is contained another way, by the method the Field Health course teaches: line the bowl, or a stout bucket kept for the purpose, with a strong plastic bag; after each use cover the waste with an absorbent material such as cat litter, sawdust, soil, or shredded paper; tie the bag off part full; and store the sealed bags in a lidded container well away from where the household lives, eats, and prepares food, until they can be disposed of properly. Keep the waste, the hands, and the food strictly apart, and the disease that travels from waste to mouth is stopped at its source.

When the heating fails: loss of heating

In a hard winter the loss of heating is among the most dangerous service failures. Most homes are heated by powered means an emergency may take away, and a home robbed of heat in deep cold becomes a threat to the very young, the elderly, and the unwell within hours. The Cold-Weather Operations and Survival course teaches warmth and the prevention of cold injury in full; the household principles follow from it.

The whole method rests on one idea: warm the person and one room, not the house. A household that tries to heat every room with what little it has will grow cold all over; one that gathers into a single small room will stay tolerable for days. Work it in three steps. First, keep the warmth the body itself makes, the cheapest heat there is: dress in several thin layers rather than one thick one, hat on because much heat is lost from the head, dry socks on the feet, and pile on all the bedding. Second, reduce heat loss from the chosen room: close its door, hang blankets over the windows after dark and across any draughty doorway, block the gap under the door with a rolled towel, and shut off the rooms that cannot be warmed. Third, share the warmth: bring the whole household, and any vulnerable neighbour, into that one room, because several bodies warm a small space as one body never can, and sleeping there together under shared bedding carries a household through the coldest nights. A hot drink and hot food warm a person from within, so a safe means of heating a drink is worth having, used with every heat-safety caution.

Watch the people as closely as the temperature. The signs of dangerous cold are shivering, then slowing and clumsiness, drowsiness, confusion, and a strange loss of the will to act. The very young and the very old slide into this soonest and most quietly, so keep a particular eye on them and do not wait for complaint. If the cold deepens enough to threaten the pipes, lag them and leave a tap dripping slowly, but the people always come first. And the carbon-monoxide rule governs any alternative heat absolutely: only a device designed and vented for indoor use may run inside; no fuel-burning stove, barbecue, generator, engine, or unvented heater, ever, however cold the night. A household that cannot keep itself safely warm should not endure the cold out of pride; the right course, set out below, is to seek warmth elsewhere.

An emergency can come in a heatwave as readily as a freeze, and the principle simply reverses. Where the danger is heat and the cooling has failed, keep cool and shaded: close the curtains and blinds on the sunny side through the day, open the house to cooler air at night, move into the coolest, most shaded room, and rest rather than exert in the worst of it. Drink water steadily, more than thirst suggests, because heat draws fluid from the body fast; dampen the skin to let evaporation cool you; and watch the same vulnerable members, who suffer the heat first and may not say so. The Field Health, Hygiene and Sanitation course covers heat illness in full. Warm and gather when it is cold, cool and shade when it is hot, and in both cases look first to those who feel the extreme soonest.

When the network goes quiet: loss of communications

The loss of communications is less immediately dangerous than the loss of heat or water, but it is disorienting, and a power cut often takes it down with everything else. The mobile network may fail, the internet and the router with it, and the contacts stored in a telephone become unreachable the moment its battery dies. Two simple provisions answer most of this.

The first is the battery or wind-up radio in the emergency kit. When power, internet, and television are all down, official broadcast information still reaches a radio that needs no mains, and listening to it is the single most useful thing a household can do to stay informed and resist the rumour that fills an information vacuum. A car radio serves the same purpose, listened to with the car outside and never with the engine running in a closed garage. Know in advance which station carries official emergency information, listen at intervals rather than leaving it running and draining the batteries, and keep spare batteries with the radio.

The second is the household message plan made in the previous lesson: the key numbers written on paper and kept in the kit, an agreed meeting point known to everyone, and the understanding that messages may have to wait. When the network is overwhelmed, a short text will often get through where a voice call will not, because it needs far less of the strained network and keeps retrying until it lands. So text rather than call, and keep it brief. Use mobile telephones and their batteries sparingly while the network holds, screen dimmed and the charged power bank in reserve, both to keep them alive and to leave the network free for those who need it most. Name someone outside the affected area, perhaps a relative in another district, whom scattered members can each try to reach, so that one distant point gathers everyone's news. Do not depend on the mobile network: the moment it is most wanted is the moment it is most likely to be down. Recognising trustworthy information and resisting rumour is the subject of Lesson 05; here it is enough to know where the household turns when the screens go dark.

The calm management of days without services

A real emergency rarely takes only one service, and the deeper skill of this lesson is managing a household through days when several are gone at once: dark, cold, short of water, out of touch. That skill is less about any single technique than about a steady manner. Triage needs as each failure strikes. Use stores, water, food, batteries with deliberate economy, because an emergency may outlast its expected span. Keep a routine, so a household knocked out of its ordinary shape still eats, sleeps warm, keeps clean, and looks after its vulnerable members in some order rather than in confusion. And watch over one another, the very young, the elderly, the unwell, whose distress in cold and dark can deepen quietly, and over neighbours in the same plight.

Routine and morale are easy to dismiss and hard to do without. A household that keeps regular mealtimes, a set hour to settle the children, a daily check of stores and people, and some small ordinary pleasure, a hot drink or a game by torchlight, comes through a hard week far better than one that lets the days run together. Children take their fear or their calm directly from the adults around them, so a steady manner, a simple honest word about what is happening, and a job to do are worth more to a frightened child than any reassurance; the next lesson treats this at length. The aim is the quiet order that keeps a household functioning, because a household that keeps its shape keeps its judgement.

Coping well also means knowing when not to endure. There is no virtue in remaining cold, unsafe, or unable to cope out of stubbornness. If staying at home becomes genuinely unsafe, if the cold cannot be managed, if a vulnerable member is at real risk, go to where there is warmth and help: a neighbour or relative better placed, or whatever warm centre or assistance the local authority provides, exactly as the shared layers of resilience are meant to work. Deciding between staying put and going elsewhere, and doing each safely, is the subject of Lesson 06; the principle here is that recognising the limit of what a household can safely manage is good judgement, not failure.

Above all, the manner is calm. A household led steadily by someone who has decided what matters most and is dealing with it in order comes through far better than one swept along by alarm, and the calm of one prepared person steadies everyone around them. That steadiness, held until the lights come back and the taps run, is the same the Army is asked to bring to the wider crisis under the Aid to the Civil Power course: the methodical presence that turns a frightening situation into a managed one. The member who has learned it at home will carry it into the street.

In Practice: Three Days in the Dark

A hard winter storm brings down the power across a district, and a member's household is without electricity for three days in deep cold. There is no panic. The member reaches first for the head-torch and torches kept ready, so everyone can move safely. The fridge and freezer are kept shut from the start, the fridge eaten down first while its food is still good, the freezer left sealed; nothing that has plainly warmed is risked. As the cold bites they fall back on the Cold-Weather course: warm layers, hats, all the bedding; one room closed off with blankets over the window and a towel against the door; the whole household, with the elderly neighbour from two doors along, gathered there to share warmth and sleep together. The neighbour's refrigerated medicine is moved to an unheated room, the time noted, advice taken. When someone suggests bringing the camp stove indoors, the member refuses flatly and explains why: it would fill the room with a gas they could neither see nor smell. It stays outside, as does the barbecue, and the car is never run in the garage. Water is used sparingly in strict order, drinking and food and clean hands before anything else; hands are cleaned before each meal and after dealing with waste; the toilet that will not flush is managed with a lined bucket, the waste covered with litter, tied off, sealed, and kept well away from where they eat. The wind-up radio, tuned to the official station and checked each hour, gives the news that steadies everyone and word that a warm centre has opened. The key numbers are on a card in the kit, and a short text to a relative in another district carries everyone's news, the mobiles saved for those who need the network more. For three cold days the household keeps a quiet routine, checks its stores and its people morning and evening, and watches over its youngest and oldest. On the third evening the lights come back. Nothing heroic was done; the household came through because it was ready and led calmly.

Check Your Understanding

Why is the loss of power described as a cascading failure, and what does it mean to triage needs when the power goes? Set out, in order, the most pressing problems in a power cut, explain how you would eat down a fridge and then a freezer safely, and say what the food-safety danger line is.
State the carbon-monoxide rule in full, and explain why it admits no exceptions and why it is the deadliest danger in a power cut or heating loss. Name some of the devices it forbids indoors, and say where a generator may run and why.
Describe how a household manages a loss of water, including sparing use in order of priority, the three ways of treating doubtful water and why clear water is not clean water, hygiene with very little water, and sanitation when the toilet will not flush. Why does cleanliness matter so much when a household is under strain?

Reflection (write a short paragraph): This lesson argues that coping without services is less about technique than about a calm, methodical manner, and that knowing when to seek help elsewhere is good judgement, not failure. Imagine your own household through three cold days without power and water. Which needs would be most pressing, and in what order would you deal with them? How would you keep the household's routine and morale through the dark days, and where might your stores or your plan fall short? At what point would you decide that staying at home was no longer safe and that the household should go to warmth and help elsewhere?

Summary

Modern life depends on a few supplied services; an emergency usually shows itself first as the loss of one or more. A power cut in particular cascades, taking light, cooking, heating, refrigeration, charging, and often water, internet, and payment systems, so one cut becomes several problems to handle in order of danger.
In a power cut, pause and triage: light to move safely; food kept cold by keeping the fridge and freezer shut and eaten down fridge-first by the clock; warmth by the one-warm-room principle; and care for refrigerated medication. The overriding danger is carbon monoxide: never run a generator, stove, barbecue, engine, or unvented heater indoors or in any enclosed space, however cold; a generator runs outside, clear of doors and windows; there is no exception.
When water is lost, use stored water sparingly and in order (drinking, food and medicine, clean hands, then the rest); treat doubtful water by boiling, tablets, or a proper filter, remembering that clear water is not clean water; keep clean with very little water or sanitiser; and manage waste hygienically by lining, covering, sealing, and storing it away from living and food areas. These water and sanitation methods are taught in full by the Field Health, Hygiene and Sanitation course.
When heating fails in cold weather, warm the person and one room rather than the house, with layers, hats, and bedding; reduce heat loss; gather the household to share warmth; watch the very young and old for the quiet signs of dangerous cold; protect pipes if the cold deepens, but the people come first; and observe the carbon-monoxide rule for any alternative heat. In a heatwave the principle reverses, to keeping cool, shaded, and well watered. These are reinforced by the Cold-Weather Operations and Survival course.
When communications fail, rely on a battery or wind-up radio tuned to the official station and on a paper household message plan, texting rather than calling and naming an out-of-area contact; do not depend on the mobile network. Recognising trustworthy information is the subject of Lesson 05; deciding when to go to warmth and help elsewhere is the subject of Lesson 06. The steady, prepared manner is itself the heart of coping, and the same the Army brings to the wider crisis under the Aid to the Civil Power course.

Coping Without Services