This is one guess for three years after lights out.
SampleMan, it's much worse than you could imagine.
We will not have a week of normality before the Gibsmedats come boiling out of the urban kraals.
We will not have three days of Walmart "just-in-time" inventory to feed the hordes and keep them sated.
We will have only HOURS. History teaches us this:
1965 - Los Angeles - the arrest of a young black man in Watts incites a crowd, which spawns a riot, within one hour of the arrest;
1968 - across America - the death of Martin Luther King touches off rioting in several cities within hours of the media broadcast;
1977 - New York - the grid goes offline at 9:30PM, the looting starts around 11PM;
1992 - Miami - Hurricane Andrew's winds haven't even died down before the malls are ransacked;
1992 - Los Angeles - the verdict is announced for the Rodney King Trial, and almost immediately, the city burns;
2005 - New Orleans - the looting started even before the storm made landfall;
2011 - London - a protest over a slain gangbanger turns violent and within four hours, Greater London descends into mayhem;
2012 - Long Island, NY - in the wake of Frankenstorm, enterprising looters dressed as powerline repairmen sneak past the martial law cordon and pillage, with 24 hours of the storm;
2013 - Oakland, CA - less than fifty minutes after the verdict in the Zimmerman Trial is announced, mass demonstrations "spontaneously" erupt, but in Oakland, fires and unrest break out...
Hours, people - not days, hours.
This is one guess for three years after lights out.
And still nothing that indicates the urbans will leave the cities and flow across the land.
Those people are terrified of rural America. Here there be dragons.
Those are all cultural riots, a bad enough issue, but they aren’t hunger driven excursions.
1. They’ll rape and pillage their own neighborhoods simply because there’s no power.
2. If the power isn’t restored, they will face a hunger dilema that they will seek to solve by whatever means they think will work.
Without police, many neighborhoods will just start shooting, some won’t. Those that don’t, won’t survive.