Different types of disasters take different types of responses and need different sorts of preparedness.  Flood, explosion, disease, contamination.  For that reason, when the disaster response doesn’t work, the failure could be for all sorts of reasons.  Maybe you don’t have enough hardened facilities, or your grid is too centralized, or your supply chain was too fragile, or you were mentally unprepared, or bureaucrats, or looters, or communication.  Who knows?

But whatever the form the failure takes, it is always just one failure.

Imagine a disaster like the one in William Forschten’s One Day After.  A giant EMP pulse or a Carrington Event knocks out the electric grid and fries most unshielded electronic devices which includes vehicles.  Civilization stops.  So in the book 99% of everyone then proceeds to die.  OK.  Probably they would in life too.

But it wouldn’t have to be that way.

What if people were smart and bold and loving and cooperative enough?  What if they self-organized, didn’t give in to fear, and dared greatly?  Take some big city somewhere.  They would start distributing rationed foodstuffs and taking stock for supplies.  Enough water for drinking hauled in carts.  No carts?  They would convert vehicles.  They have all that labor.  They could move them rapidly using gangs of laborers and pulley and rope systems installed along the streets.  Maybe they start planting potatoes wherever they can.  The more ingenious are cobbling together machinery, resurrecting old steam plants, finding ways to make engines work once the electronics are fried.  Little bits and pieces of old knowledge would be found and put together here and there.  Old, good-enough ways of doing things.  Meanwhile the city fathers would be organizing contact with the rest of the state and nation and world.  Coordination would be happening.  They would be finding the food warehouses and the grain silos.  They would start sending out expeditions of people to rural places that could take them in, that had agriculture and would need lots of labor now that the mechanization was down.  Fertilizers necessary?  They would brute force the mines, seeing what lots of labor and innovation and boldness could do.  They would handcart it if necessary–using converted vehicles with modern axles, pneumatic tires, on quality roads, and various kinds of mechanical advantage.

People would die.  There would be disease.  The medically fragile would die.  Just like in the handcarts of yore, many of the old (or obese, for us) might perish along the way and be buried with prayer.  But we would make it.

The one failure in every disaster response is that we are not great-souled enough.

We are not men enough.