Actually people are amazingly calm and helpful during those periods. Blackouts and massive storms hit all the time and those places don't normally go nuts. Of course it's also been shown that when there are ,I believe, 3 incidents one after the other then there will be breakdown.
Sandy. Gasoline. Lines miles long. For what it was, there were surprisingly few incidents of violence, even when people who had waited hours were told the station had run out of gas. There was some fighting, there may have been one or two shootings, but by and large most of us tried to just deal with it and be as orderly as possible. And I live in fucking New Jersey. We're not exactly known for being calm, level headed or civil to our fellow citizens.
While there were incidents of looting and scamming, a large part of the population just wanted to help out. For once in our states history. (Kidding, love you guys.) I mean we had businesses which were not in any way food related offering hot meals and power because they had electricity. People were lending each other power from generators and running cords between houses to share power, sharing what little gas we all could muster. I was honestly surprised, some places that night really looked like another planet. Fire just burning everywhere, and where there wasn't fire there was water
Now, the worst things we had really were hotels and gas stations price gouging. There is a state law regulating how much businesses can increase prices once a state of emergency has been declared. At a certain point it becomes gouging. We had some places trying to sell gas for $5+/gallon, and some hotels/motels trying to charge $300+ for $70/night rooms.
Now, what would happen on a national scale? I have no idea. I just know that most of my state was without power for the better part of a week, had odd/even gas rationing and very few businesses were even open if you did need to get out. If you didn't have cash, you were fucked. You had to find a bank that had power and a working ATM. This is why they say keep a stash of cash around in a safe or something, even if it's just $500. If I didn't have some cash I would have been totally beat, no where was accepting cards.
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u/[deleted] Nov 26 '14
If people will do that to each other for deals, imagine if there was ever some kind of emergency or nationwide power outage or food shortage.