Speaker 1: By the time the heat waves subsided, at least a
Speaker 1: thousand people were dead. Those are the official numbers, at
Speaker 1: least the numbers no one trusts. The city government and
Speaker 1: the police denied breaking up homeless encampments during the disaster
Speaker 1: and only acknowledged a handful of outdoor exposure deaths. On Twitter,
Speaker 1: someone shares a video of what might be a mass grave.
Speaker 1: You're not sure if it's real, and you don't really
Speaker 1: have time to find out. After the grid overloads, it
Speaker 1: takes weeks for the power situation to normalize. Bottled water,
Speaker 1: abundant at the start of the disaster becomes scarce. In
Speaker 1: conversations with friends and snippets of time online, you learn
Speaker 1: that much of the Midwest has been subject to titanic
Speaker 1: mudslides and flooding. Hurricanes hit the Southeast, driving up demand
Speaker 1: for disaster supplies even further and putting more stress on
Speaker 1: interstate commerce. Work is basically impossible for days. You're not
Speaker 1: even really sure if your job is going to exist
Speaker 1: much longer anyway. Outside of a few high end shopping districts,
Speaker 1: life just hasn't gone back to normal for most people,
Speaker 1: so you've settled into a new normal using your car,
Speaker 1: and you're now copious free time to ferry supplies to
Speaker 1: and from a handful of collection points in new encampments.
Speaker 1: You felt bad for days after fleeing when the cops
Speaker 1: broke up the first camp. Aaron, your community organizer friend,
Speaker 1: told you not to worry about it. Not everyone's ready
Speaker 1: to go face to face with riot cops. Tom the
Speaker 1: former marine, said the same thing, but then offered to
Speaker 1: give you some self defense training if you wanted it.
Speaker 1: He and a couple of other combat vets had started
Speaker 1: organizing regular self defense sessions in one of the camps,
Speaker 1: based out of an old apartment complex abandoned when it's
Speaker 1: holding company went bankrupt. For a couple of weeks, you
Speaker 1: lose yourself in the work. Gradually you realize that the
Speaker 1: network of encampments you and your new friends have been
Speaker 1: working to support have become something more than just a
Speaker 1: stop gap. For one thing, The number of folks without
Speaker 1: housing just keeps on rising. All the added stress on
Speaker 1: the power of bread and the questionable ways some people
Speaker 1: dealt with it led to a spate of urban fires,
Speaker 1: which forced hundreds of people out of their homes. The
Speaker 1: local economy is in free fall too, you're not the
Speaker 1: only one whose work just disappeared. And while you've got
Speaker 1: enough saved for a little while, you're ever aware that
Speaker 1: you won't be able to pay rent forever. That possibility
Speaker 1: doesn't scare you as much as it did before. It
Speaker 1: helps that you're spending half your time in one camp
Speaker 1: or another. Anyway, you decide your best bet at any
Speaker 1: kind of comfort in the future is to make sure
Speaker 1: life in the camps is as comfortable for everyone as possible.
Speaker 1: To that end, you and Tom scrounge up a crew
Speaker 1: and spend days flitting in and out of abandoned buildings,
Speaker 1: scrounging solar panels, batteries, and wiring. None of you know
Speaker 1: much about how to use that ship, but a collective
Speaker 1: of electricians and engineers put together a list of the
Speaker 1: parts they needed and how to safely get them. By
Speaker 1: the time summer comes to an end, almost three thousand
Speaker 1: people are living in camps with regular power and cooling stations.
Speaker 1: Other collectives have spent the weeks building solar stills to
Speaker 1: filter waste water and deal with the drinking water shortage
Speaker 1: that's still endemic across the southern half of the country.
Speaker 1: Life is by almost any measure harder than it was
Speaker 1: a year ago. But the stories of wildfires in the
Speaker 1: Northwest and massive police crackdowns across the Great Lakes region
Speaker 1: make it clear that you're not struggling alone. You feel
Speaker 1: lucky that it's been weak since you've so much as
Speaker 1: seen a police patrol. There's been a lot more property
Speaker 1: crime in the parts of town where the economy is
Speaker 1: still functioning somewhat close to normal. You've heard shootout several nights,
Speaker 1: and you've grown increasingly glad to be off on the
Speaker 1: margins with a good community of people who take care
Speaker 1: of each other and don't have much worth stealing. And
Speaker 1: then in late September, things take a turn. Some right
Speaker 1: wing live streamer visited the largest of the three camps,
Speaker 1: now almost fifteen hundred strong. He stitched together in narrative
Speaker 1: blaming a series of downtown arson's and burglaries on organized
Speaker 1: Antifa extremists in their war camp. One of Tom's friends,
Speaker 1: who's been doing armed security at night, shows you a
Speaker 1: handful of posts from far right extremists threatening to raid
Speaker 1: the camp. You hear rumors the police might finally be
Speaker 1: planning a crack down. Two ever fired a gun tom asks.
Speaker 1: You shake your head no and he nods, well, that's
Speaker 1: probably about time you learn. I'm Robert Evans and this
Speaker 1: has been an excerpt from the continuation of my podcast
Speaker 1: It Could Happen Here, which is now a daily series.
Speaker 1: Listen to It Could Happen Here daily, starting on August
Speaker 1: on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
Speaker 1: you get your podcasts.