Quote:
Originally Posted by unkated
Correct if I'm wrong, but don't the strikes listed also remove the main train access lines into San Francisco? Meaning that aid cannot move by rail? (Nor can people leave, though I understand that commuter rails run south out of the city.
Does anyone know how much of the city's food supply comes in by rail?
Personally, I suspect that by 2001, the regional population may be more like 1.5 million, with more people having moved away to places with better food supply.
Uncle Ted
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There's a rail yard in Richmond adjacent to the refinery. Needless to say, the yard and adjacent rail will be impassable.
I constantly play with the figures for the SF Bay population. I don't think 1.5 million is entirely unreasonable. I believe the surviving government will make an all-out effort to get people out of the cities and into the Central Valley and the Delta where labor will be needed for agriculture. This will be a messy process. Even messier will be the initial outbreak of cholera once the Bay becomes a cesspool because the POTW (publicly owned treatment works) around the Bay stop working. The level of success achieved by efforts to manage people's handling of their wastes will be a major determinant in how many survive to see 1999. When I'm feeling pessimistic, I feel that the ignorance and carelessness of the survivors will lead to massive epidemics. On the other hand, cholera is its own reward. It will kill the people who bring it on themselves. Survivors who organize and get themselves squared away will be much less vulnerable. In this light, the people who survive to see 1999 definitely will self-select by means other than violence.
Howling Wilderness mentions bubonic plague in San Francisco. I wonder about the likelihood of this, but I'm willing to go along with it. Black plague does exist in the American West. Once it becomes pneumonic plague, the rate of spread will explode. This, too, will kill the undesirables at preferential rates because better organized and more lawful clusters of survivors will have better access to the surviving health care (which will find itself drafted by whatever government can get its hands on them).
[By "undesirables" I mean gangs, brigands, marauders, etc. Warlords are vastly preferable to these types because warlords will take measures to protect the lives of their labor.]