What San Francisco (and everywhere else) REALLY would have looked like

What follows is my speculation about what the world of ESTWE would really look like. According to the film, the population was decimated by the plague over a people of 1-2 years.

The Vermin and “The Stench Smelled Round the World:” Billions of rotting corpses would create a reek that would be carried by wind all around the world. Any survivors in the habitable parts of the world would most likely smell it. It would last for weeks or months. It would also attract a planetful of ants, flies, bugs, worms, mice, rats, vultures and other “pests.” Cities, towns and villages would be overrun with them. The wilderness would immediately start to reclaim the cities, as untended gardens, lawns, parks and other vegetation encroached on artificial structures. This would only provide more places for small animals to live and hide. They would get into houses, factories, warehouses, supermarkets, and everywhere else, and consume anything they could get into. Most survivors would not be able to stay on in the cities. Many who fled into the countryside would die of exposure, starvation, thirst, disease, accidents, or violent death at the hands of other people or by predatory animals.

The Conflagration: Rapid depopulation would be a messy, chaotic business. You’d be hard put to find anyone civic-minded enough to try to maintain the city infrastructure or keep things orderly by running around shutting down generators or turning off lights and spigots and gas lines. An inevitable phenomenon of an untended modern city would be fires. Sooner or later, fires would break out. Even small ones would spread widely because there would be no one to put them out. Fires that burned out by themselves would be followed by more fires. Within the first couple of years, all or most of the world’s cities, towns and villages would burn. Modern cities (which is most cities of any size now) are full of billions and trillions of tons of toxic materials or materials that would become toxic if burned. Burning wood, rubber, fuel, paint, metal, glass, plastics, pesticides, insecticides, petroleum products, sulfur, industrial chemicals, cleaning products, concrete, asphalt, and the rest of the endless array of modern substances would create vast toxic clouds that would be carried around the world by the prevailing winds. They would cause global cooling and would bring on the Pollution Storms, as toxins rained out of the sky onto city and countryside, poisoning the air, soil and water, acidifying the oceans, lakes and rivers, killing birds and fish, possibly even causing a minor mass extinction, certainly killing off much of the world’s agricultural production that was still in the ground and making what survived unsafe to eat. Livestock, domesticated animals and wild animals would die in huge numbers, leaving the land open to hardy survivors, e.g., cockroaches. One hopes that the world’s nuclear power plants are well-designed enough that they would not be a major threat. I’m guessing that the major risk with nuclear reactors would be not meltdowns but fires again. Burning uranium, plutonium, americium, and other radioactive materials would release radioactive dust into the atmosphere that would become part of the Pollution Storms. Whole ecosystems would be damaged or destroyed, making life for any human survivors that much more difficult. In the cities and towns, any ordinary houses left unburned would be threatened by plant overgrowth and termites. A filmmaker who videotaped a place like San Francisco 12 years after a global plague would be picking his way through a burned-out, uninhabitable corpse of a city. Most humans would be reduced to an extremely precarious hunter-gatherer existence except in those rare places that were spared some of the global damage. Any spontaneous natural recovery would be hardly begun by 12 years after the plague. It would probably take more like fifty years before there was any cause for optimism among any survivors about the natural world around them. All of the old scourges of humankind would have arisen again: They would live at the mercy of the weather and be constantly fearful of famine, hunger, disease, violent death, natural predators, and exposure to the elements.