Start your own Internet Resiliency Club

> One of my nightmares is waking up one morning and discovering that the power is out, the internet is down, my cell phone doesn’t work

I dunno.... as I get older, this sounds more and more idyllic

I see the sarcasm but you're likely not simulating this hard enough. This is what happened in most of Spain and Portugal during the recent power outage and it wasn't pretty.

It also wasn't so incredibly nasty, though. There were disruptions and some arrests, but the large majority of people were in the streets socializing, dancing, doing impromptu things they wouldn't be doing on a work day.

That's because they kinda expected everything to be back to normal in a few hours. If there would be some more catastrophic distributed outage there would probably be less dancing.

But wait either it was "pretty" or it wasn't. We've gone from "it wasn't pretty" to "Ok, it was pretty, but only because they expected a resolution."

Pretty for young and unencumbered, less so for the COPD patient with an oxygen concentrator, or the parent of an infant running out of sterile bottles, etc.

To sterilize a bottle you simply need boiling water without a significant amount of toxic materials in it. To get boiling water you need water, a container for the water, a combustible fuel, an ignition source, and a means of transferring heat from the burning fuel to the water. Even if you don't have a metal pot you can do stuff like heating rocks and then stacking them on cool rocks inside a plastic, glass, ceramic, wood, etc container filled with water to get to a boil.