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I have just finished another SF book of the apocalypse genre. In this one almost the entire human race is wiped out by a bio-weapon plague in a few days, leaving the physical infrastructure intact, so the survivors have to worry about feral dogs and so on, but have the pick of buildings and supplies like food, cars, guns and so on.

A town like the one I live in, with 11,000 population and three supermarkets, probably has several days of food supplies for thousands of people. If I was the sole survivor, there could be years worth of tinned food left on the shelves. There would be cars all over the place, guns and ammo in farmers' houses and in the local army base, petrol and spare parts in local garages, and so on.

In such a scenario, how long would things like the power grid keep running by themselves? How long would it take for supplies and hardware to decay? For example, tinned food can last 100 years if stored correctly, so can ammunition.

Looking at hardware, a modern car will run down its battery in a few months because of the burglar alarm. The rest of the hardware will eventually decay. If you have a portable generator, you can recharge the batteries. How long before the tyres, fuel hoses and so on start to decay? What about spare parts stored in workshops and so on?

You be a long long while storing food stuff and gear. I think gas would last up to a year unless sealed in storage. I give the power grid 30 45 days. By then though you would have a reliable back up in play.

Tires can start to rot in a few years, and your brakes will happily start to seize up after a month.

I do remember reading, that the average house has a month's supply of food in it.

Despite being famous for 'lasting forever' twinkes only have a shelf life of two week to a month.

There is a huge environmental factor to how long things last. A hot, dry environment will be very different to a cold, wet one.

But certainly tinned food etc will stay "within the tin" for quite a large number of years before the tin becomes breached if it is kept dry. The food inside may vary depending on how it was processed however.

Power will continue to function from anywhere between 1 day to a few months, depending on what the local grid is powered by and the fuel reserves the power station has as well as a requirement for human intervention (ie if no input is received then the power station will shut down), as well as the power supply/demands from the rest of the network.

Cars in the open will probably work for maybe 2-5 years if you replace the battery and probably tyres? Cars in garages etc may work for longer with the same repairs. After that you will be looking at corroded pipes and electrical contacts, leaks, fuel contamination etc.

Much longer than 10-20 years and you may run into issues with building integrity as well.

Working on the basis that you are at most one of a small number of survivors, as if there is any more then there is a whole other set of issues, but also probably people with the skills to fix stuff.

Transport: The biggest issue with cars if fuel varnishing. After a few weeks petrol starts to go "off". You would not notice except in very highly tuned engines. I can tell old fuel on a motorbike but not in a car. After a few months it starts to go very off and you can tell in any engine and may cause damage. After a year it is next to useless. After a few years it will mean completely striping the fuel system, cleaning out the injectors, replace fuel lines etc as they will have a nice layer of solid gunk on them (hence the name "varnishing"). Diesel is a little better, but not massively. Your best bet would be to run an old diesel engine that will run on cooking oil. Tonnes of that around in safe containers. If you know what you are doing you could probably keep it running for 20-30 years before you run in to trouble getting rubber parts like bushes and hoses as they decay in warehouses. Same goes for generators. If you don't, then cars may become a problem after a few years as tires give up, things need fixing etc.

Power. Depends on the local power source. Nuclear, in theory has the ability to run the longest, as the fuel rods last for decades, but in practice safety systems will probably cause it to shut down in a few hours. Fossil fuels, for as long as there is fuel being fed in. It all depends on how full their stocks are and how automated they are, but I would guess a maximum of a week, and in the case of coal I would not want to be near the place when it ran out of fuel. Coal fired power stations do not take well to not being shut down properly (It takes about 48h to correctly shut them down/start them up). Solar and wind, probably years. At least until the infrastructure begins to decay, but until then you would get intermittent power. However all of this is dependent on the power networks, which, if they keep running, will probably start to shut down after a few weeks to months without repairs. Especially if there is bad weather.

Food will never be an issue, as long as you are happy to live on tinned food. It will be even better if you can hunt.

Buildings will be an issue, but as long as you are in one place not moving around, and pick the right building (such as a stone cottage) then keeping it in a livable condition should not be a problem.

Canned food does have a shelf life, and its a lot less than you think.

If its hydrocarbon powered that power supply is not going to last long. Once the infrastructure goes down it will start to cascade (think Northeast blackouts). I am not familiar with the actual storage capacity on site for hydrocarbons at plants but I can't see it being great-more typically from pipelines. Those are going to go down pretty quickly without human oversight.

Thats why I have a good supply of rocks and pointy sticks. When the chips are down, go back to what you know.

Sounds cool! What book?

I second, what book?

"The hardest part of the Zombie apocalypse is pretending I'm not excited."

there was a old TV show, i belive called life after humans.

it documented life if humans just vanished, some things went fast, the stone presidents and hoover damn concrete are going to last a very long time.

Extinction Game by Gary Gibson. The plot is a lot more involved than I have indicated as I didn't want to give away any spoilers.

not quite what your after but might give you a solid idea.

though mainly US centreted, it documents how cities will fare etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_After_People

Sounds interesting. I wonder if it's available on Amazon Prime.

I imagine buildings would last 10 to 50 years depending on how well-found they are to start, and the weather. For example my own house is currently having all the windows rebuilt and painted, but the roof and some of the pointing will need attention in the next 10 years. Without that maintenance I would expect weather to start to damage the structure.

Building durability will depend greatly on your climate as well as the methods and materials of construction. The dryer, the better when it comes to building survival. There is a village somewhere in Scandinavia (I think) that is in such a cold, dry climate, that its buildings are probably going to last hundreds of years.

Regarding fuel - I think in the US, additives are added to reduce the volatility - those are what caused "varnishing" Elsewhere, you may have the opposite effect, in that the fuel will evaporate, either causing explosion hazards or escaping.

Power stations all need some incoming electricity to keep things like amenities, fuel pumps, heaters, etc, running; if the entire grid goes down you end up needing batteries to start up the diesel generators which are then used to get the main generating systems back online.

For structural decay, think of places like Pripyat (abandoned for 30 years), Hashima Island in Japan (40 years) , Detroit (some factories have been abandoned for up to 70 years) or this village in China. Monuments in Egypt, South America, Stonehenge, the Orkneys, etc have survived for thousands of years, but those are just big piles of stone.

Roman concrete buildings have lasted for a couple of millennia, but modern reinforced concrete will be lucky to last a century due to corrosion of the metal reinforcing rods. In general, modern buildings prioritise strength over longevity.

The things that will last the longest? Probably industrial pollution (along with things like evidence of nuclear fission, depleted coal and oil seams and odd deposits in ice cores) and the remnants of the space program; Neil Armstrong's footprints will last a few million years before eventually being eroded (although the US flag will long since have turned white - make of that what you will ), and the Voyager probes will be there until radiation and outgassing weakens the metal they're made of and they disintegrate. Unless some Klingons blow them up for fun, of course.

One thing Life After People ignores is the vast amount of decaying meat that an apocalypse will leave behind - that's going to make any sort of inhabited area fairly inhospitable after not too long.

 Frazzled wrote:
Canned food does have a shelf life, and its a lot less than you think.

Canned food lasts much longer than the shelf life. Shelf lives given is normally in the 2-5 year range. If properly canned and the can is not damaged it can still be edible 100years later. What they will do is slowly lose flavor and become bland mush.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Sounds interesting. I wonder if it's available on Amazon Prime.

I imagine buildings would last 10 to 50 years depending on how well-found they are to start, and the weather. For example my own house is currently having all the windows rebuilt and painted, but the roof and some of the pointing will need attention in the next 10 years. Without that maintenance I would expect weather to start to damage the structure.

Left on its own buildings will start to deteriorate very fast without heating, ventilation, clearing gutters etc. With basic maintenance (painting and repairing windows, fixing roof leaks) and being lived in they should go on for hundreds of years. Without the skills to do this work well repairs may not look very nice, but it will work. At least with old houses. Rubble fill stone, with wood windows and thatch or stone tile roof is much easier to look after than brick cavity walls, double glazing and clay tile or flat roof.

 AndrewGPaul wrote:
Regarding fuel - I think in the US, additives are added to reduce the volatility - those are what caused "varnishing" Elsewhere, you may have the opposite effect, in that the fuel will evaporate, either causing explosion hazards or escaping.

Varnishing happens the world over. Where it is in a sealed container the fuel forms long chain polymers. The ethanol added to fuel in some places makes it worse, but it still happens without it.

The food system is what would collapse first, almost immediately, because modern food transportation systems don't do long term storage. Most food is consumed, or discarded, within a few weeks of it being harvested. And as was mentioned supermarkets only have a couple days worth of food on the shelves. Just look at what happens when there are Hurricane or flood warnings and people rush to stock up on food, the stores get emptied instantly.

So you'd run out of food almost immediately, leading to mass starvation. Unless whatever the apocalypse was happened to kill the vast majority of people relatively instantly. If it happened over any period of time the population would likely eat through all food reserves before it was over. In the case of a disease, you'd likely see urban centers get hit the hardest while more rural areas escape relatively untouched. This would leave most food production intact, along with many of its workers. But you'd lose all your logistics and transportation. Survivors in the cities would be forced to leave and go look for food in rural areas.

As for the power grid, I think Coal plants would shut down quickly with nobody to keep it fueled. Nuclear plants would keep chugging away till something broke, which could be a while.

But I think a bigger issue for power isn't the generation side, but rather the power lines. With nobody around to maintain them they're gonna break quickly. If a single tree falling over can black out an entire region right now what if there is nobody to fix that fallen power line? You may still have a functioning nuclear plant, but your power lines are going to fall down in the next year or so just from natural weather related problems.

Then maybe the nuclear plant runs out of water because nobody is there to ensure its intake system is working, and you end with a meltdown like Chernobyl or it just turns off.

Nuclear plants would shut down within a couple of days, actually. They have safety systems installed that require human interaction regularly. If they don't get those systems managed, the system will shut itself down for safety.

Go to the library and delve into the art of skinning and gutting your kills

 Jihadin wrote:
Go to the library and delve into the art of skinning and gutting your kills

Won’t the librarians object? Or do you just skin and gut them first?

IIRC there would be no more corn as it has no real way to reproduce without humans.

Only the corn that is grown on an industrial scale. There are still people who use corn that doesn't have a kill gene in it. Plus there is the seed vault in Greenland(IIRC)

 Nevelon wrote:

 Jihadin wrote:
Go to the library and delve into the art of skinning and gutting your kills

Won’t the librarians object? Or do you just skin and gut them first?

Well if food becomes real scarce and your desperate....and you draw the short straw....

 Grey Templar wrote:
Only the corn that is grown on an industrial scale. There are still people who use corn that doesn't have a kill gene in it. Plus there is the seed vault in Greenland(IIRC)

I dunno about you but I'm not hiking and then swimming that far just to enjoy some corn

 KingCracker wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
Only the corn that is grown on an industrial scale. There are still people who use corn that doesn't have a kill gene in it. Plus there is the seed vault in Greenland(IIRC)

I dunno about you but I'm not hiking and then swimming that far just to enjoy some corn

Plenty of corn south of the border. And tequila!

 Kilkrazy wrote:
I have just finished another SF book of the apocalypse genre. In this one almost the entire human race is wiped out by a bio-weapon plague in a few days, leaving the physical infrastructure intact, so the survivors have to worry about feral dogs and so on, but have the pick of buildings and supplies like food, cars, guns and so on.

A town like the one I live in, with 11,000 population and three supermarkets, probably has several days of food supplies for thousands of people. If I was the sole survivor, there could be years worth of tinned food left on the shelves. There would be cars all over the place, guns and ammo in farmers' houses and in the local army base, petrol and spare parts in local garages, and so on.

In such a scenario, how long would things like the power grid keep running by themselves? How long would it take for supplies and hardware to decay? For example, tinned food can last 100 years if stored correctly, so can ammunition.

Looking at hardware, a modern car will run down its battery in a few months because of the burglar alarm. The rest of the hardware will eventually decay. If you have a portable generator, you can recharge the batteries. How long before the tyres, fuel hoses and so on start to decay? What about spare parts stored in workshops and so on?

Power would be gone within weeks at best, most likely days or hours as power plants either run out of fuel or critical operations were no longer being performed and transmission hardware damaged/runs-down. Canned food obviously could last decades in many cases, shelf items a few weeks to a couple of years.

The functionality of cars would be dubious, if there was any sort of EMP, then anything built within the last couple of decades will likely no longer function, while batteries on older vehicles will fail from non-use/recharging within a few months, alarm or no the batteries just naturally lose their charge. Roads would be dicey, as cars just stopping where they were would create significant barriers to travel in many places. Gasoline also starts to become non-functional as a fuel after 60-90 days, almost certainly not longer than 6 months. Basically, unless you had access to some sort of fuel to power generators and batteries, cars and electronic devices are nonfunctional after a few months in the overwhelmingly vast majority of cases.

Guns & ammo can last nearly forever if properly stored.

TL;DR after a couple of years, basically only purely mechanical devices would still be operable, and canned/grown/caught food pretty much your only options. In scenarios where the overwhelmingly vast majority of the population is killed and there isn't the manpower or retained knowledge to cover everything, life would get very simple.

Environment plays a huge role, too. I live in a wetland region, where abandoned buildings don't last long. They're unlivable within a fairly short amount of time, as mold and water damage creeps in pretty quick.

I imagine ocean side communities would see a similar level of short-livedness. The ocean is just one of the most corrosive environments on Earth.

 Steve steveson wrote:
Canned food lasts much longer than the shelf life. Shelf lives given is normally in the 2-5 year range. If properly canned and the can is not damaged it can still be edible 100years later. What they will do is slowly lose flavor and become bland mush.

Yeah, a lot of canned product only has a use by date printed on it because certain retailers insist on it. Old-fashioned metal cans will last an awful long time so long as they're not damaged.

Although cans with ring-pulls are apparently not quite as long-lived, as the seal on the ring pull creates a weak point.

The elephant in the room will be unsupervised nuclear reactors. They are a hazard far in excess of that caused by any nuclear bomb, except a bomb landing on another nuclear reactor.

The reactor doesn't need to even cook off to be horribly lethal, it just needs to break down and be exposed.

 Orlanth wrote:
The elephant in the room will be unsupervised nuclear reactors. They are a hazard far in excess of that caused by any nuclear bomb, except a bomb landing on another nuclear reactor.

The reactor doesn't need to even cook off to be horribly lethal, it just needs to break down and be exposed.

Kinda thought there were safeguards for just such eventualities.

 Jimsolo wrote:

 Orlanth wrote:
The elephant in the room will be unsupervised nuclear reactors. They are a hazard far in excess of that caused by any nuclear bomb, except a bomb landing on another nuclear reactor.

The reactor doesn't need to even cook off to be horribly lethal, it just needs to break down and be exposed.

Kinda thought there were safeguards for just such eventualities.

I think he is talking about general break down of the whole building and shielding. though i figure most shielding might last quite a long time.

Though if we are assuming sudden case of zombie or grey goo like the pop bomb thread earlier. then i figure the worst will be the oil tankers and ships out at sea that eventually drift into things in bad ways.