No Food, No Fuel, No Phones: Only One Step From System Collapse
BY Herschel Smith
News and perspectives from Australia.
The fires cut road access, which meant towns ran out of fuel and fell low on food. Power to towns was cut and mobile phone services stopped working. So too did the ATMs and EFTPOS services the economy needs to keep running.
[ … ]
These shortages are no surprise. In Australia, as in most developed countries, food and fuel distribution systems run on a “just in time” model. This approach, originally developed by Japanese car manufacturer Toyota, involves organising supply networks so materials are ordered and received when they are needed.
Such systems remove the need to store excess goods in warehouses, and are undoubtedly efficient. But they are also extremely fragile because there is no redundancy in the system—no Plan B.
We import 90% of our oil—a figure expected to rise to 100% by 2030. Much of that fuel passes through the Straits of Hormuz and then through the Indonesian archipelago. We have few alternative routes.
Nor do we maintain sufficient back-up reserves of fuel. Australia is the only International Energy Agency (IEA) member that does not meet the obligation to keep 90 days of fuel supplies in reserve.
As East Gippsland and Mallacoota have shown, many other connected systems, such as food distribution networks, are critically dependent on this fragile fuel supply.
A systems engineering approach; redundancy; interconnectedness; single- and common-failure modes; Management Oversight and Risk Tree analysis. These are all tools one could use to design and plan for societal failures. Even an electrical engineering concept like “sneak circuits” or “relay races” would also be useful.
When is the last time you just sat and thought about your own vulnerabilities and dependencies on the society designed by your betters and rulers? And did anything about it?