[HaplessOperator]

One imagines that that 15-25% of people left in most cities are going to die off pretty quickly once there stops being any water to drink and once nobody's delivering bottled stuff.

Take Seattle. The entire remaining populations of Seattle, Bellevue, Renton, and Kirkland would have to essentially converge around Lake Washington to have any hope of having water to drink. There's a reservoir farther out into King County towards Enumclaw, but - like Lake Washington - its viability wouldn't last long if there turned out to be 3/4 of the populations of the actual cities in the area running out and pissing and shitting and throwing garbage into it, and the people that actually need it to survive would probably quite literally start shooting people to death over it.

Hell, literally first thing I'd have done if I was up there and something like this kicked off was start blowing those bridges past Renton, Maple Valley, and Black Diamond to deliberately keep most of the populations you're talking about from getting out and to where we were. You'd only have to keep most of them out for a week or two until the mass die-offs began, and the vast majority of people in Seattle would do literally nothing to contribute to anyone's survival once the lights went out, and would - to most of the rural populations out there - represent nothing more than an encroachment and vast consumption of any resources they might already have.

You're talking about hundreds of thousands of people who have literally no life skills beyond a service economy and that don't even know you have to shit downriver. I had the misfortune of moving up there for about eight years from a lifetime in rural WV, and the prognosis of any given person in Seattle surviving past the lights going out and the pantry going empty... suffice to say I think your LLM is being incredibly generous.

Most of these larger cities have populations that have willingly and deliberately spent entire generations shaping themselves - mentally and physically - into people who are abjectly incapable of surviving the conditions we're talking about, and no amount of will can overcome a lack of training, preparedness, or knowledge.

There's a multitude of reasons that the Congressional commissions on EMP damage estimated a 90% die-off of the population in the first year, and that doesn't even count the first hard winter.