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When the Trucks Stop – A community mutual aid guide for fuel-constrained New Zealand – open for your input!
At the time of writing, New Zealand has roughly 20 to 27 days of physical onshore fuel stocks. We import 100% of our refined fuel. The Strait of Hormuz crisis has already triggered Force Majeure declarations from Gulf and Asian suppliers, and the late March escalation has destroyed refining infrastructure that will take years to rebuild, if it is rebuilt at all.
Government will do what government does: triage. Hospitals, police, essential freight corridors. That is appropriate. But it means communities are largely on their own for everything else – food distribution, transport, heating, health access, economic survival. Civil Defence is built for earthquakes and floods, not for a slow-onset nationwide supply chain collapse with no clear end date.
So we wrote a guide.
When the Trucks Stop: Mutual Aid Arrangements for a Fuel-Constrained New Zealand is a practical briefing covering ten areas where communities can organise now to meet basic needs if fuel imports fall to zero or near-zero for weeks or months. It covers food production and distribution, water, energy, transport, health, economic alternatives like timebanking and local currencies, communication, governance, and the specific needs of vulnerable populations.
Image Credit: The-Power-of-Mutual-Aid-Networks.jpg (700×394)
It is not theory. It draws on real precedents – Cuba’s Special Period, the Lyttelton TimeBank after the Christchurch earthquake, Puerto Rico’s community microgrids after Hurricane Maria, Ukraine’s rapid urban farming response. These are places where people faced severe fuel or supply disruption and found ways through it. Not comfortably. Not without suffering. But they made it work, and the common thread in every case was community-level organisation that was already in place, or was built fast, before the worst hit.
The document plans for the worst case whilst hoping for a better outcome. The arrangements it describes cost almost nothing to establish and strengthen communities regardless of whether severe disruption eventuates. If it does, they could prove decisive.
This is a living document and we want your input. The Google Doc version is open for comments. If you know of resources, models, organisations, or practical experience that should be included, please add a comment or get in touch. We will edit contributions into the guide as they come in. This is a community document for community use. It is published under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence – share it, adapt it, translate it, print it out and pin it to the noticeboard at your local dairy.
What you can do this week:
Read the guide
Share it with your community group, church, marae, sports club, school community, or neighbourhood
Call a meeting – even five people is enough
Contact a local farmer and ask if they’d supply your community directly in a crisis
Set up a communication channel – a group chat, a phone tree, a physical noticeboard
Comment on the doc with resources, corrections, or experience we should include
The time for preparation is before you need it. That time is now.