The sirens wail as delegates bike away from failed negotiations about irrigation slowing a river that both communities depend on. The delegates, along with passers-through, shelter in the basement of a general store. How do the disparate people see the weather that forced them underground? Will the devastation of the storm tear the two communities further apart or will rebuilding their weather-beaten infrastructure give them a shared goal to work toward? Can the passers-through mediate between both communities?
Other aspects to explore are how storm alerts could be issued without a centralized meteorological organization or a federal/national government controlling the communications infrastructure. In the U.S., the federal government has an alerting system, which local governments can use.
Could mesh networks like Reticulum or Meshtastic, coupled with open source weather sensors help to provide some weather-reporting? Would local governments or scientific organisations need to take over tracking extreme weather if national organizations lacked the resources?
How would communities share meteorological data between themselves? Would information sharing possibly be too slow to be useful if large parts of the internet had been converted to meshnets to simplify infrastructure?
The general store could be “zero waste” (which would more accurately be called, “low waste”). One way to achieve this would be to have customers bring their own containers to fill up with grain, spices, and so on. This introduces a complication where cross-contamination of allergens is likely and the community may lack resources to create epinephrine auto-injectors to deal with allergic reactions.
The general store may also be a place to gather regional news, the way barber shops, hardware stores, pubs, and coffee shops are. The general manager may have seen the trouble with the water dispute coming because he or she heard people from both communities complaining about it for months. Could the manager have prevented the conflict when he or she spotted early warning signs?
