I spend a lot of time coming up with disaster scenarios. I’m not a terrorist, a sadist, an anarchist or any sort of –ist. I don’t hate LA and I don’t wish ill will on people I just have a morbid imagination with a decidedly socio-political bent and I am concerned about the amazingly fragile infrastructure of the city I inhabit.
Not that I'm the first. Plenty of people have thought long and hard about this.
I’ve had this talk with several of my friends and I think this is something worth talking about. After all, if I can think is, I’m sure a terrorist can as well.
Anyway, this is how I would hit LA’s weak points (for massive damage).
-It has not rained here in four months. This is a typical summer here. By the time September rolls around, our mountains, hills, canyons and arroyos are so dry I could go on a nearby trail and start a fire simple by staring really hard at an oak tree. Simply put, the chapparal is chapped and
ripe for anarchy.
The objective here is simple: Get things rolling. Send agents into the various canyon trails all over Los Angeles with lighters in hand and turn this place into an 80 square mile bonfire.
-Naturally, the best way to fight fire is with water. This is the next target. Remember, Southern California is as dry as a bar in Salt Lake City on a Sunday , so we get most of our water from Northern California. That water is brought in through massive pipelines that cover hundreds of unprotected miles.
The target is the Los Angeles Aqueduct. For all the locals, you know when you’re driving to Magic Mountain and you see that huge thing that looks like a waterslide on the side of the 5? That’s the one.
Blow it up. In several places, spanning all across California. This won’t devastate us, but it will be a heavy blow to our water supply and will take some time to fix. But this is only the beginning.
-Now that we’re on fire and running out of water, it’s time for the main phase of the plan. I don’t know feasible this is, as I’m sure it’s a prime target for any sort of terrorist attack in the Southwestern United States, but the next step is to take out the Hoover Dam. An absolutely huge resource of power
AND water for every major city in the area, if the Hoover Dam is ever destroyed we are in serious, serious trouble.
That thing goes and it’s possible that our power grid can’t take the loss and just completely fails.
No control of the fires. No water. No power.
No chance.
Again, I’m not sure how to go about taking out the Dam, but I’m sure terrorists have thought of it. I guess reanimating Megatron is always an option.
Now people are scared. And worried. When the sun goes down on a blacked out Los Angeles ringed in flames, all hell would break loose. If it doesn’t, releasing rabid dogs on the streets would help. Dumping truck loads of guns would, too. People that want to loot now have the opportunity. And the means. Remember the LA riots? Imagine if that happened again with all this other stuff going on.
You'll see, I'll show you, that when the chips are down, these uh... civilized people, they'll eat each other.
And that, my friends, is the scary truth. Los Angeles isn’t Gotham, and this isn’t a movie. In real life, both those ferries are sinking. I write all this not to scare you, but because it scares me. I've thought long and hard about leaving this city, mostly because it's just not feasible for this many people to live here.
If I’m not around here after this post, count this as confirmation that the footprints from Virginia that kept showing up on my site were probably from Langley.
Comments (12)
This post put me in such a good mood! Yay! I love living in Southern California!
i knew you were alive heith. you must now reign as the joker
yeah!!!!!
watching civilized people eat each other...
mhmm...sounds like a plan
morbid imagination can be so much fun. And it is so true, with all our depending on technology and supply, we are weak, not only in LA.
The footprints from Virginia? You too? And here I thought I had a stalker. Dang!
hm that's pretty good actually
The funny thing is that if all electricity, including back-ups, were eliminated it actually trap everyone inside the city for several days. In that time most people would be dead and the city would be destroyed. Including all that cool stuff people stole. The thieves would be dead and their shit would be destroyed. Take that, fuckers. I hate thieves.
LA resembles that picture of Sioux City I put up on my trip entry anyway ha!
Hey... Is that a footprint from the District of Columbia?!
taking out Hoover dam would definitely be chaotic
It would sure take a lot to take out something as massive as the Hoover Dam. If I recall correctly, it's several hundred feet thick. I doubt conventional explosives would have much effect. Heck, a nuclear bomb might not if detonated above the surface. Or maybe it would. Eh.
And I don't think the Hoover Dam supplies even 1% of the nation's electricity, but I'm not sure what kind of effect its failure would have on the power grid. If you managed to bomb it somehow, the water displaced would probably create some kind of tsunami, but it's out in the middle of nowhere. The Vajont Dam in Italy had its reservoir displaced by a massive landslide nearby, which didn't quite destroy the dam but nevertheless caused extensive damage and killed 2000 or so. In China, there was an incident that killed 10 times as many, but I forget the name. Anyhow.. I guess what I'm saying is that it would take a lot of power to take out the Hoover Dam, but I'm not sure what kind of damage it would do.
So yeah.. this comment is pointless, haha.
if you were at langley, they prolly have some super duper cool secretive thing that makes xanga footprints untrackable!
@Iassi - here's the thing. if la were ever "compromised", then the rest of the country would be in some serious, serious shit. with one of the largest ports in the country taken down, not to mention all the other countless industries that are headquartered here, our economy would simply implode.
@tjordanm - actually. another phase of the plan was to begin systematically taking out major freeway intersections. take out the roads. take out circulation. local roads couldn't handle all the people trying to get out of the city.
@yello_lego - it supplies enough power to power 3 million people. 15% of that power goes to la. i'm not quite sure how power grids work, but i think that would be a pretty massive jolt to the system. (i'm thinking something along the lines of that huge blackout that hit new york a few years ago. only much worse.) it would probably be next to impossible to blow this thing up, but we've made the mistake of assuming the impossible couldn't happen before.
@nanumus - i'm not a schemer. i just do things.