The First 72 Hours: A Grid Attack

This is episode one of the Prepper HQ segment on 2A Patriot Ranch. It runs long on purpose, because the scenario deserves more than a listicle: a deliberate, coordinated attack on grid infrastructure, and what the first seventy-two hours actually look like from inside an ordinary house.

What the episode covers

The structure follows the clock, because that is how the problem actually arrives. Nothing about hour sixty is obvious at hour two.

• How the grid actually breaks. Why a deliberate attack looks different from a storm outage, and why the repair timeline is the number that matters.
• Hour zero to six. The window where everyone still assumes it is temporary, and the small decisions that pay for themselves later.
• Hour six to twenty-four. Stores, fuel, cash, and the point at which the normal supply chain stops being an option.
• Day two. Water pressure, sanitation, food that needed refrigeration, and the first genuinely hard tradeoffs.
• Security. Straight to camera, no cutaways. The generator as a beacon, and what a prepared household owes its neighbors versus itself.
• Day three and the decision. Stay or go, which is the hardest call in the entire scenario and rarely gets treated seriously.
• Hour seventy-three. Why the end of the first seventy-two hours is not the end of the event.

Run your own numbers first

The episode uses a household as an example. Yours is different, and the point of this site is that you should not be planning off somebody else's example. The Preparedness Plan Builder computes your actual water, calorie, power, medical, and communications requirements from your household size, climate, home type, and how long you want to be covered. It takes about two minutes, it shows the rule behind every number, and it stores nothing.

The gear the scenario leans on

Grid-down is a power and water problem before it is anything else. These are the items the episode keeps returning to.

Related reading

• Why two weeks is the real baseline, since a grid attack is the exact scenario the 72-hour kit was never built for.
• 10 things every prepper forgets, most of which show up in hour thirty of this scenario.
• Mutual assistance without the baggage, which is the other half of the security segment.