16 ms·

A World Without Power (2013)

220 points by acdanger 7y ago

Gravityloss 7y ago
Having solar panels, batteries, heat pumps and electric cars could make society quite a lot more resilient to these kind of things.
- i_am_proteus 7y ago
  Or if you're rural, an external combustion engine of some sort, so you can keep the lights on with firewood.
  - ccccppppp 7y ago
    You must mean steam engine.
    - gwbas1c 7y ago
      Sterling engine, peltier chip... You can find peltier chip phone chargers that work by being placed in or near a campfire.
  - jhoechtl 7y ago
    Extract gas out of firewood to fuel the combustion engine? Doable but nothing without consideravle knowledge and welding tools. Unless you are prepared. A nice stock of heating oil (doesn't contain degradeavle components as regular diesel now at least in Europe) will also get you through for some time.
  - oceanplexian 7y ago
    If you actually are rural, there are substantially better ways to do this. Most people who live in a rural area have 500+ gallon fuel tanks, either heating oil or propane. Even my mom has one and she's not a "prepper" or technically sophisticated or anything. With a properly set up standby generator (The diesel ones are super quiet) you could be rocking a month long power outage and not even know that the power was out.
- thisisbrians 7y ago
  That's an interesting thought. I wonder how many cars a charging station could handle in the event of a grid outage?
  - jhoechtl 7y ago
    Wise people would use the power stored within the cars batteries?
  - sudhirj 7y ago
    Think the OP meant in conjunction with each other, I.e going off grid. Solar panels on the roof, a full power wall and an electric car. That’s enough to keep you going as long as you can manage food and water.
- mikestew 7y ago
  %s/electric cars/personal electric vehicles/g. Cars are too inefficient. Right now our "power goes out for two weeks" contingency is the solar-paneled RV and a Honda generator. Neither the panels nor the generator can charge the car in a reasonable amount of time. The RV solar panels can charge the scooter (or electric bicycles) in the same amount of time as house AC (big inverter in the RV). It won't get you to the mountains to your remote cabin (that's what the RV is for <g>), but it's enough to get around town if need be, and can do so indefinitely. On a related note, as I've researched solar panels for the house, it came as a surprise to me that by default grid-tied solar won't keep the lights on when the power goes out (nothing to sync to). So if one goes that route, don't forget the batteries and inverter.
  - oceanplexian 7y ago
    The electric car is useful because in the event of a power outage, a decent one will have a 60KWH+ battery. Assuming it's even partially charged, that's enough energy to power personal electronics for weeks. You could probably even power a fridge, TV, and some basic household equipment for a week if you had a decent inverter. On the other note, if you get grid tied solar you can use them if the power is down, but you need to buy an SMA inverter with secure power supply. The inverter will give you an outlet that will work if the grid is down, even without a battery system.
    - mikestew 7y ago
      You're just doing a global search-and-replace and replacing with "big ass battery". :-) I take your point, but I was referring to transportation. As you point out, ride the scooter and use that big ass battery in the car for something else.
  - lutorm 7y ago
    by default grid-tied solar won't keep the lights on when the power goes out (nothing to sync to). Indeed, but some inverters have emergency outlets where they can supply power on a dedicated circuit as long as the panel output is enough. The amount of power is limited and it can't sustain any surges so it can't run e.g. motors, but having 1500W is tons better than having 0... I've verified that my big-ass UPS that I use for the computer can run the refrigerator and be charged from this outlet.
- gwbas1c 7y ago
  I just built a house with that. The one problem is that my heat pump uses so much electricity that it's impractical to put on the battery. The battery basically powers everything but HVAC and the level 2 charger.
  - Gravityloss 7y ago
    is it a ground or air heat pump?
    - gwbas1c 7y ago
      Air. Ground heat pumps are very uncommon; "heat pump" is assumed to be air based.
      - Gravityloss 7y ago
        Ground heat pumps are common here where there is large temperature variation. They are a more expensive investment but much more efficient.
dsfyu404ed 7y ago
Keep in mind that in 2003 China still hadn't figured out how to make small engines with good (enough for western consumers) quality control so everyone and their brother did not have a backup generator. These days things are very different. Many businesses (especially ones that depend on refrigeration) have backup generators now.
- dpcan 7y ago
  But most generators need fuel. It's only a temporary fix. It's funny how a generator creates peace of mind, and yet we don't consider the magnitude of the disaster for which they give us peace.
  - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
    The distributors have generators because they cannot afford to be down if the power is. They need power to run their systems. They might be running at reduced capacity but they will run. Many gas stations/convenience stores and other small consumer facing businesses have generators because generators have proliferated and they have a financial incentive to have one. Sure, not all of them have generators but not all of them need it. If your two preferred gas stations are down and the third one is crowded you'll make do fine. This is what's different from '03. Getting fuel in a blackout is a non-issue logistically. Paying for it is where the most problems will be because so many people don't carry cash anymore.
    - alecmg 7y ago
      On payment. Assuming cell network stays up, it is just another redundancy element, have a mobile network backup to landline network.
      - kzrdude 7y ago
        This story makes me think that I really should have more cash in reserve at home (typically I have nothing). And other "prepper" thoughts..
dpcan 7y ago
This was well written. Sounds like he had less than 24 hours without power but turned the story into a doomsday journal entry. His note about cell phone towers losing power was scary. Never really thought about that. I usually assume the phones will keep working as long as we can charge them, but I suppose the towers need some juice too. In our small city, one power line blew down last week and 1/4 of the city was without power for about 6 hours. I'm baffled at the lack of redundancy. I have more redundancy behind my customers' blogs about their dogs than it appears our city has for keeping electricity flowing to 10K people. Life without power will be hard to survive. And I fear my neighbors much more than my food spoiling.
- JaimeThompson 7y ago
  A redundant power grid would be very expensive to implement and maintain. In the vast majority of cases it is less expensive to simply deal with the few power failure events that the typical household gets in a year.
- toast0 7y ago
  I moved to an island outside Seattle in 2018, and went through a couple big outages so far; our cell towers start turning off in 3 to 5 hours. Of course, my dsl goes down instantly, so it's important to have offline things to do.
  - syntheticnature 7y ago
    I have a UPS for my router and modem; what I've learned is that while a UPS can last for hours powering those things, the upstream battery at the cable company only lasts an hour.
    - bryanlarsen 7y ago
      That's one advantage of DSL over cable: the telephone is considered critical infrastructure and does stay up much longer than an hour. I didn't realize that cable stayed up at all. That was one condition of switching to VoIP: my wife insisted that 911 from wired phones must continue to work through a power outage.
harel 7y ago
There was a TV series about a scenario where electricity simply stopped working: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_(TV_series)
- notduncansmith 7y ago
  The book series Dies The Fire also gives the topic an excellent treatment: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dies_the_Fire https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dies_the_Fire
- mxuribe 7y ago
  My partner and I loved watching this show!! (We saw it over one of the streaming service, not live tv.) Too bad they stopped at 2 seasons. But, thanks for sharing the wikipedia link, because now i see that there's a comic book series which wraps up the story. Cheers!
  - harel 7y ago
    I didn't pay attention myself, so thanks for mentioning about the comics - I didn't know.
jihadjihad 7y ago
Years back I was introduced to a terrific BBC show called Connections with James Burke (1978). The first episode, available on YouTube [0], is all about the world's reliance on power and that within a short period of time we'd be catapulted back to the plow. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XetplHcM7aQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XetplHcM7aQ
- Symmetry 7y ago
  There's a great book, The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch, talking about how to recover from an apocalypse where most people die. They recommend as a first step going out to the nearest golf course to grab the batteries in the golf carts because those are things you'll really need and won't be able to re-make for a while. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18114087-the-knowledge https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18114087-the-knowledge
  - mikestew 7y ago
    Hammering the extremely malleable lead into thin plates and mixing with some sulfuric acid seems the most easily solved of my technological problems. Now, the author isn't wrong, grabbing golf cart batteries would be a hell of a lot easier, and would make for better batteries. But making the tools needed to fill those batteries seems to be a much taller order, IMO. Solar panels and generators are the things I "won't be able to re-make for a while".
    - maxerickson 7y ago
      There's alternators all over the place though. "Just" need to figure out how to get one turning.
      - davinic 7y ago
        In the same way that speakers are microphones, all motors are generators, albeit probably with very low efficiency.
buboard 7y ago
There is probably a moral to this story: We are too much dependent on centralized systems because of perceived efficiency, but how true is that anymore? How hard is it to be i.e. energetically autonomous though? In sunny places, a house could probably be affordably autonomous, however these solutions have not been explored at scale and are not cheap yet. (I already know it's possible to have food-autarky, a garden and a few chicken will do).
- ccccppppp 7y ago
  We can't support 7 billion people if each one of them has a house with garden and grows it's own food. That's what the middle ages were, look at the population then.
  - pharke 7y ago
    The truth is probably somewhere between the two of you. We shouldn't be entirely dependant on centralized systems, nor should we attempt to be 100% self-sufficient. I'm sure there's a best of both worlds approach.
syntaxing 7y ago
I really take for granted how great electricity is. I didn't have power for a week during the big Sandy storm and it's funny how I instinctly turn the lights on every time I go into a room. It's scary to think what it would be like if we didn't perpetually have electricity.
emperorcezar 7y ago
Years ago when I was growing up in the woods of West Virginia we had a particularly bad blizzard. During this time the power went out. We were use to this happening and most of the time it was for half a day or so. So we pulled out the kerosene heaters and the oil lamps for light. Bundled up and waiting. We ended up being snowed in without power for two weeks. My mom and dad would take turns bundling up and walking a mile or so every few days to get to the roads to get more fuel. One thing I remember clearly was cooking on out outside wood fire grill, which was essentially cinder blocks and a grate. No worry about running out of wood since there was always plenty around. I remember the whole ordeal pretty fondly. As a kid it was a good change of pace and like camping.
- kgwxd 7y ago
  What did you do for fun?
  - emperorcezar 7y ago
    I remember reading books a lot. I have two brothers, so playing with them and with toys. We also went out to play in the snow a lot.
- ericmcer 7y ago
  I did something similar as a kid, but not on accident. Parents would take us for 1-2 weeks to a cabin with kerosene lamps no electricity, no running water. It was usually ok, but there was one trip where it rained nonstop for the week. I cannot forget that boredom, you can only play cards and read for so long before you start to lose it. I suppose our pre-electricity ancestors had deeper social lives with the people around them, and a stronger connection with the outdoors, but for those who lived in climates that required frequent shelter holy cow they must have been bored out of their skulls.
  - jbob2000 7y ago
    What did you eat while stuck in the cabin? My arm chair theory is that pre-electricity societies didn’t have food as dense/rich as we have it today, so they didn’t have the energy to feel bored.
bryanrasmussen 7y ago
reminds me of the movie Into the Forest https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/into_the_forest https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/into_the_forest
thisisbrians 7y ago
@dang do you mind adding (2013) to the title?
hourislate 7y ago
This was part of the 2003 North East Blackout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003 >The blackout's primary cause was a software bug in the alarm system at the control room of FirstEnergy, an Akron, Ohio–based company, which rendered operators unaware of the need to redistribute load after overloaded transmission lines drooped into foliage. What should have been a manageable local blackout cascaded into collapse of the entire Northeast region.
- S_A_P 7y ago
  My boss claims he is responsible for this blackout due to an errant tibco message. I can never tell if he is kidding or not, but he has a lot of experience in the power industry so I have no reason to doubt this.
  - smush 7y ago
    If you dare reveal your HN activity and ask him to comment, I'd love to read his first-hand account.
    - S_A_P 7y ago
      I asked and either because of fear of prosecution or modesty or hyperbole he said its just a bar story...
- pp19dd 7y ago
  Bit of an oversimplification, but I think it was a human error assisted by bad design. An engineer set the "state estimator" to manual mode at 12:40 pm, then at 1:30 pm went to lunch forgetting to put it back on auto. Half an hour later, a grounded wire set off the first outage and due to the system reporting bad information, a cascade occurred. They had launched the new power model just a couple of months prior, but I don't think it was a software glitch. For a few more details, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12476001 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12476001 and for the full report (238-page PDF) see https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/oeprod/DocumentsandMedia/BlackoutFinal-Web.pdf https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/oeprod/DocumentsandM...
GnarfGnarf 7y ago
The problem facing service station operators is that they can't charge a premium for gas when the power fails, to offset the cost of installing generators. It's seen as "gouging". So there is no incentive to prepare. The meager profit margins on gas sales are not enough.
- bryanlarsen 7y ago
  The OP did a month's worth of business in 2 days, and the subsequent goodwill generated and publicity gave him a permanent business boost. His preparation was very well rewarded.
  - bobakanoosh 7y ago
    And how frequently do power outages of this length happen in a given city? Considering none of the other gas stations had infrastructure in place to handle this event, I would assume it's the first time in decades, or ever.
    - lifeformed 7y ago
      To be fair, being able to increase your prices would have those same downsides too. It sounds like this kind of emergency preparation would have to be publicly subsidized for it to be a common thing.
  - stickfigure 7y ago
    permanent business boost / well rewarded That was not claimed by the author. For better or worse, gasoline tends to be break-even for stations - from the operators I've talked to, maybe they make 5 to 10 cents per gallon. They make most of their profit from the shop. A month's worth of gasoline sales might not cover the upkeep and depreciation of the generator. I'm more curious to know if any other stations installed generators after this experience. I wouldn't be surprised if the answer was "no".
- PhasmaFelis 7y ago
  Gas sales are (almost) a loss leader to get people in the door to buy snacks, drinks, smokes, and lottery tickets. Mattheij's generator had enough juice to run the pumps, registers, and half the freezers. How does the cost of installing and provisioning a generator compare to the cost of a few days of zero sales?
EGreg 7y ago
Most people are too blase about having decentralized backup systems, in every area. We need decentralized power generation and storage (solar panel based, etc.) to survive a Carrington Event or an EMP. Or just a simple blackout. We need electric cars which represent choice rather than fossil-fuel lockin. But we also need mesh networks and software to run on them, to survive the Internet being cut off like in Kashmir or Hong Kong. We need decentralized town currencies and much more. Please watch this talk I gave a few years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzMm7-j7yIY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzMm7-j7yIY
- rtkwe 7y ago
  How will rooftop solar help with a massive solar storm or EMP. Most inverters actually cannot provide 50/60hz AC on their own and just sync to an external source. Even beyond that issue they'd all be fried anyways in the same even that killed the regular electrical grid.
  - EGreg 7y ago
    Solar storm only affects really long wires, not short circuits around the house and a battery. https://www.cnet.com/news/we-arent-ready-for-a-solar-storm-smackdown/ https://www.cnet.com/news/we-arent-ready-for-a-solar-storm-s...
VBprogrammer 7y ago
I guess this is a good a time as any to ping Jacques about getting the photos back on his windmill build page. Still one of my favourite build logs...
- jacquesm 7y ago
  On the todo list. When I shut down Camarades.com/WW.com I took the photo archive offline as well, but did not realize my blog pics where hotlinked from it. Now I need to go digging around on some ancient backup server.
protomyth 7y ago
One thing that I was very impressed with was how well the cellphone network dealt with the outage, for at least 24 hours all the base stations worked, after that point they slowly dropped out one by one as their batteries ran dry. As decedents of an industry that was paranoid enough to generate power for their own equipment, its nice to see some of the cell phone companies take power seriously. It would be nicer if they could last a bit longer.
- mrtksn 7y ago
  They do have emergency base stations mounted on vans with diesel generators, these can run indefinitely.
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    As long as they have diesel.
    - rtkwe 7y ago
      Diesel is pretty easy to get. Even in a power outage you can open the stations reservoirs and pump it out manually the main issue is getting the station to agree to it, makes sense for a single big customer but not to do it for everyone looking to gas up their car.
      - jacquesm 7y ago
        Only if the depots have gravity drops, if their pumps are electric and the reservoirs underground then you're not going to be able to pump it out to the surface. Fortunately most depots are aboveground and only need a tap to be opened to drop their fuel into a truck. A person looking up their car would not even be allowed on the grounds. Besides that the volume dispensed is way too high to deal with in a normal vehicle, you're looking at 1000's of liters / minute.
        rtkwe 7y ago
goda90 7y ago
This last winter on an incredibly cold night(<-10 F) we had a power outage in the middle of the night. I was up late and noticed it right away. After I reported it to the utility, I made sure the dog was on the bed with me, closed the bedroom doors, and hunkered down. I'm not sure what time it came on but when I woke up the thermostat was showing it had dropped more than 15 degrees F in the house. I should probably buy a generator.
- tonyedgecombe 7y ago
  Or just put a tent up in the living room.
  - projektfu 7y ago
    Or, perhaps, a down comforter or low temp sleeping bag if it might drop very low.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    Tents insulate poorly. A 1 litre Nalgene bottle, filled with boiling water, and slipped in a wool sock, on the other hand, will keep you warm. Two is generally overly toasty.
closeparen 7y ago
In a disaster, public transit is one of the first utilities to go. A fun exercise is “could I walk home from here?” If not, and you spend a lot of time there, you need to stage an emergency kit there at least as much as you need one at home. I wouldn’t count on BART service anytime soon after The Big One. (Not that I’d count on freeways either. A bike seems like your best bet). You find dependencies on electricity in surprising places. Good luck getting water out of an automatic faucet or push button water fountain. Good luck getting your car out of a stacker system - even if it’s already at ground level, those doors don’t have manual releases. Good luck getting through any badge reader doors in your office or apartment complex. (This may rule out the bike, even if you brought one).
- thatfrenchguy 7y ago
  > public transit is one of the first utilities to go This is mostly depending on how much backup the said agencies have. > I wouldn’t count on BART service anytime soon after The Big One And yet it's the only thing that survived the 1989 earthquake !
- SilasX 7y ago
  >Good luck getting water out of an automatic faucet or push button water fountain. Yikes! I hadn't realized that. I always praised plumbing as a good example of a well-designed, robust system that works even when the power is out, and how only the naive, self-styled 10xers would break that to be trendy ... and yet, they did it already. Hopefully the auto-flushing toilets don't have this problem?
  - sudhirj 7y ago
    They do, automatic = electric. If you're not applying force from your muscles to move something, that force is being applied by electricity.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - 7y ago
chiefalchemist 7y ago
Infrastructure is a concern. But to me the bigger concern is the food supply. It, like gasoline, runs lean; very just in time. Look at what the possibility of a snow storm does to the supermarket. Now imagine the effect on the public psyche when they're told "we'll have more food next week."
gao8a 7y ago
"The honda was a veritable bomb, it was filled with cannisters as many as they could cram in." Somehow that one sentence shivered me as I imagined a crowd of happy people surrounding a car with bottomed out suspension.
munificent 7y ago
> Infrastructure is invisible, as long as it works. And only when it fails do you realize just how much we are all dependent on it and how badly we are able to cope with such infrastructure being unavailable for any length of time. I grew up in hurricane country. We are born and mostly live our entire lives suspended in a giant web of infrastructure and support systems. When you're born into it, it's natural take it for granted and treat that as the baseline. But every now and then you have an experience that makes you realize just how far down below the ground really is, how far it is to fall, and how few cables need to fray before people start dropping. I'm not one of those doomsday preppers who seems to relish preparing for the zombie apocalypse. I think the much more rational approach is to strengthen the web itself so that we don't fall in the first place. But I'm definitely aware how quickly and how badly things can go. Hurricane Katrina is the canonical example. Over a thousand people died in the middle of a well-developed urban area, in the richest country on Earth, from a disaster that everyone knew was coming some day. The hurricane didn't kill those people. The city and state's complete failure to engineer robust infrastructure did. If that same hurricane had hit an equally populated city elsewhere, the outcome could have been entirely different.
- iambateman 7y ago
  Not a prepper either, but recently our water turned brown and I realized how water-dependent we are. Went out and bought two “life straws.” We have enough food to last a month without infrastructure just by virtue of large pantries, but when the water goes out, it’s gone. My wife laughed at me, but from my perspective, if infrastructure is down for more than a month, I’m probably toast anyway. ;)
  - komali2 7y ago
    Life straws suck to use as a primary means of getting water... The USGov has failed in the past at an individual response level, but they're really good at compiling resources to help you and your family be independent. In fact, in San Francisco, the Emergency Response mindset for The Big One has shifted (since loma prieta) from "the government will come help you when it happens" to "do everything you can to survive for weeks without government help, when it happens." So in your case, do more than buy life straws - store many gallons of water somewhere in your house. This can be done really easily and cheaply - save your used water bottles if need be, or just go buy a big giant plastic drum and drop some purifying tablets in it. Keep bleach and eyedroppers in your house for when that water runs out and you need to refill with questionable water. https://www.ready.gov/ https://www.ready.gov/ has shitloads of easily digestible resources to prepare.
kjar 7y ago
Check out ‘World Without Us’ by John Wiesman. A fascinating thought experiment wherein we all suddenly ‘beam up’ and Earth left to go on evolving.
jjav 7y ago
After hurricane Maria in September 2017 the entire island of Puerto Rico was without power. There was nowhere you could drive out of the blackout area since it was everywhere. A few luckier people got power back in one to two weeks, a small minority. My family in the greater metro area of San Juan got power back after two months. Friends in smaller cities only got power after three to five months. There are communities in the mountains which still don't have power today, almost two years later. If you haven't lived through anything like this, it is a useful mental exercise to think how you'd prepare for it.
- js2 7y ago
  I can't imagine. I lived through Hurricane Andrew. I think it was a few weeks before power was restored, but we found ourselves a generator within 48 hours. We used it to run our refrigerator at home in the evenings, and my dad's business (a 1-hour photo lab) during the day. It was august, so it must've been miserably hot, but I don't remember that much. What I do remember is how traffic functioned in Miami without traffic lights. There obviously weren't enough police to direct traffic at every intersection, so what happened was that a random driver who had a passenger would have the passenger jump out and direct traffic till his car got through and someone else volunteered to take over. This happened organically at many intersections, and it was really amazing to see.
- kzrdude 7y ago
  Do you know any write-ups of personal stories from this on the web? Something like the blog post in this hacker news post.
  - jjav 7y ago
    There is so much, but difficult to find any one link to summarize.. After a bit of searching found this page which is a similar blog-style page except has snippets from many different people. In Spanish. https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2018/09/209947/huracan-maria-aniversario-puerto-rico-experiencia-mujeres https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2018/09/209947/huracan-mari... For English language coverage, search for videos by David Begnaud of CBS News who was on site and provided excellent reporting.
ThomPete 7y ago
There is a moral to that story. Making sure we have enough energy for everything we want whether the source is coal, oil, nuclear or hydro because energy is the single biggest contributor to a better life, richer and safer life and the more access we have the better of we are.
smush 7y ago
I've done some research into the serval mesh project and Briar and similar; I do wish most cell phones had some mesh networking installed by default. Something to enable granny to send a text message to me via piggybacking off other people who happen to be near enough to have P2P communication. This would have to be a protocol designed for offline-tolerance I suppose, so something like auto-exchanging private keys while the network is good and/or in person if network is down for message security, then when in no signal mode, regularly transmit and receive small messages encrypted with the same key-pairs as the real ones, then if they can decrypt the short test message (short enough to be easy to try / won't eat too much battery life), establish a dedicated connection long enough to transmit full messages back and forth before disconnecting. IDK. Probably serval mesh, briar, gnutella or similar already have this figured out. I'd like it to be end-user easy for us to prep for that though so if we are in a venue like a theme park or stadium our phones can transparently be P2P over Blue-Fi-Drop
- jkepler 7y ago
  Have you heard about the GoTenna mesh project, https://gotennamesh.com/ https://gotennamesh.com/ ? I haven't got one yet, but it looks like the sort of thing you're describing (though its a device that works with existing smartphones, rather than being a protocol our phones could run. An advantage here is that with sufficient GoTenna mesh users in an area, one's anonymity could be increased, as typically (at least in the USA and most of western Europe) one can't buy SIM cards to access telephone networks without one's ID.
rbritton 7y ago
Having an RV set up for remote work where we can leave home for days, weeks, or months has actually prepared me for outages better than most. The entirety of the RV can run on propane and battery, and I have both solar and generators to recharge the battery bank. Depending on the season, the propane I have on hand can last from 14 days to upwards of months while the generator gas I have on hand can handle about a week of full-time running. Because of where I like to visit, I also carry two cellular hotspots and a satellite internet option and can typically get internet access where others can't. A few years back, prior to owning the RV, we had a windstorm come through about ten days before Thanksgiving. Power to most of the area was knocked out as the weaker trees fell and wiped out much of the powerline infrastructure (I recorded gusts around 75 mph before my weather station actually broke). As is normal that time of year, temperatures were in the 20ºF range, which meant finding alternate heating methods at the very least. We were very underprepared for it, losing much of the food in the fridge/freezer, and the house got very cold. All local generators and gas cans sold out very, very quickly, but I found one on Amazon that could be shipped to my door overnight for $50 extra. It arrived on the second day (of seven) of the outage, and I wired the furnace, fridge, and one multipurpose outlet into it. We struggled with just the one 5 gallon gas can, though, needing a daily trip to the gas station to refill. Had they not had power, it would've been worse. In the end, it was much like camping without adequate preparation. The first couple days were novel and amusing, but by the end, it was just a daily routine of ensuring we stayed warm enough and no damage was done (e.g., pipes freezing).
clomond 7y ago
Having lived and experienced the aforementioned blackout (> 55 million people, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003 ) It was a transformative experience to me and it felt everyone else who experienced it regarding the hidden importance of these infrastructure pieces. What I loved about this piece is it reads much like so many people's experiences of the incident. Even though it happened over 15 years ago, I and most others remember distinctly and with clarity the sequence of events that occurred on that day. Seems like most people's stories went somewhere along the lines of: - Interruption of an intended activity due to no electricity - Attempt at understanding scope, and an effort to substitute the interrupted activity (in my experience, we were entering a restaurant for food and was told "given we don't have power, we can't microwave most of our items - but the oil in our friers are still a bit hot though so you can have fries... We wanted to try elsewhere). - The realization that this was not a localized one block situation, but something larger and more serious. (We drove around and the traffic lights were out, put on the radio (most most stations were "silent"). The few that were didn't even know what was going on "it appears there is a blackout, getting reports from as far as <X>" with <X> being of an increasing scope as the hour went on. - Then an abandonment of the days plans for a trip "back to shelter/home" where one nestled and tried to wait it out until services were re-restored. The natural gas in our home didn't work either, so the only way we could heat food was on a fire. It's one thing to realize that all these these are connected, but its another to feel its connectedness through these services' absence.
- mikepurvis 7y ago
  I was in high school at the time (in Toronto), working at a technology camp for kids— the blackout hit late afternoon when our day was mostly wrapped up, so I took the bus home as usual. My experience into the evening was totally different from yours though. People in my parents' neighbourhood sat out on each other's front porches, barbecuing, eating ice cream before it all melted, hanging out. It was a pretty unique moment of community, almost like an impromptu street party that went on for blocks and blocks. It was kind of liberating, I think, in a reverse paradox of choice kind of way, to suddenly not be able to do a whole bunch of things, and to be forced to just kill time away from the TV (and probably outside, as the reality of not having A/C descended). Anyway, I don't think I'm unique in this recollection: https://www.google.com/search?q=2003+blackout+party https://www.google.com/search?q=2003+blackout+party
dang 7y ago
Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4995938 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4995938
smush 7y ago
I wish it wasn't so expensive to have a switch next to your circuit-breaker that was labelled 'electric lines/natural gas/water' and depending on which selection would cut-off the home electricity from the others and enable the electricity to come from, respectively, the central grid, a small natural-gas-fed generator (with auto-start battery?), a pico/micro hydro generator in the basement/crawlspace. Having the ability to convert your electricity bill to a more expensive water/natural gas bill and still have power during an outage would be quite nice.
- pinkythepig 7y ago
  The natural gas genny portion exists, the water one does not. The water one doesn't exist for two reasons: 1. There is only energy in the water system because your city has pumps/water towers to give it pressure. So in a disaster, you running your hydro setup is just placing more strain on the water infra who are likely running on generators. 2. Hydro plants need huge amounts of water to provide power. To even power a single outlet, you are talking in the range of tens of thousands of gallons of water per hour. Your water bill would quickly eclipse the cost of just buying a generator. --- Going back to natural gas, you are looking for an automatic transfer switch. When the power cuts, it disconnects you from the grid, turns on the generator automatically, and you then have power again. When the power is back, it switches you back to grid and turns generator off. Only downside is that there will be a several second power cut while generator turns on. You generally can only get this feature on midrange cost and up generators. For cost savings measures, you can also buy a manual transfer switch, with the obvious downside of you having to flip the switch and go start the genny.
- MrRadar 7y ago
  XKCD did a "What If" on hydro power from your municipal water[1]. tl;dr: "In either case, for a bathtub faucet, this works out to almost 200 watts, or $25 per month." (And that's in addition to all the other issues he pointed out.) [1] https://what-if.xkcd.com/91/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/91/
bungie4 7y ago
Nice to read an article from somebody local, or nearly so, to me. I remember the outage well, I worked at a major telecommunications company with reserve generators. I really didn't appreciate the depth of the issue until I drove home that night. People were telling other people, total strangers, that nukes were dropping all over the US. You can imagine the panic. Word eventually spread and the northern mindset of looking after your neighbours took hold, as mentioned in the artice. I went to use the BBQ to make some burgers. We ran out of propane naturally. My neighbour offered his BBQ which coincidentally, was out of propane. Then HIS neighbour offered his BBQ. He was out building a deck when the power went out. He fired up his generator and continued on. His skil-saw was the only sound to be heard. All the neighbours threw in food and drink and we got to know one another. I will admit to being a little said after the power was restored, because, except for a nod or a wave, we went back to the business of minding our own.
ctdonath 7y ago
Back when the "Y2K Bug" was emerging as a serious threat, I described to my ex-engineer father the looming issue in great detail. He listened carefully, then calmly replied "if that happens, I'll throw another log on the fire and go back to my book." Indeed, he was living preparedness: there was no "crazy prepper" stuff, just someone who had systematically thought through everything that could go wrong, and who had seamlessly integrated backup systems into his lifestyle. I aspire to do the same, making slow progress. Too few know how close to disaster their lifestyle is.
- ecpottinger 7y ago
  I had a cabin up northern ontario that you had to canoe and portage to get to, no power, no running water, outhouse. Invited friends up. What was interesting while some would come up, others claimed they could not live without a hot water bath, or electric lighting, and while my outhouse had seven (yes seven) coats of white paint and the hole was so deep I had problems getting out when I first dug it - the idea of not using a flush toilet was alien to them. Some people are not ready for how basic things can get without power.

220 points by acdanger 7y ago

Having solar panels, batteries, heat pumps and electric cars could make society quite a lot more resilient to these kind of things.

i_am_proteus 7y ago
Or if you're rural, an external combustion engine of some sort, so you can keep the lights on with firewood.
- ccccppppp 7y ago
  You must mean steam engine.
  - gwbas1c 7y ago
    Sterling engine, peltier chip... You can find peltier chip phone chargers that work by being placed in or near a campfire.
- jhoechtl 7y ago
  Extract gas out of firewood to fuel the combustion engine? Doable but nothing without consideravle knowledge and welding tools. Unless you are prepared. A nice stock of heating oil (doesn't contain degradeavle components as regular diesel now at least in Europe) will also get you through for some time.
- oceanplexian 7y ago
  If you actually are rural, there are substantially better ways to do this. Most people who live in a rural area have 500+ gallon fuel tanks, either heating oil or propane. Even my mom has one and she's not a "prepper" or technically sophisticated or anything. With a properly set up standby generator (The diesel ones are super quiet) you could be rocking a month long power outage and not even know that the power was out.
thisisbrians 7y ago
That's an interesting thought. I wonder how many cars a charging station could handle in the event of a grid outage?
- jhoechtl 7y ago
  Wise people would use the power stored within the cars batteries?
- sudhirj 7y ago
  Think the OP meant in conjunction with each other, I.e going off grid. Solar panels on the roof, a full power wall and an electric car. That’s enough to keep you going as long as you can manage food and water.
mikestew 7y ago
%s/electric cars/personal electric vehicles/g. Cars are too inefficient. Right now our "power goes out for two weeks" contingency is the solar-paneled RV and a Honda generator. Neither the panels nor the generator can charge the car in a reasonable amount of time. The RV solar panels can charge the scooter (or electric bicycles) in the same amount of time as house AC (big inverter in the RV). It won't get you to the mountains to your remote cabin (that's what the RV is for <g>), but it's enough to get around town if need be, and can do so indefinitely. On a related note, as I've researched solar panels for the house, it came as a surprise to me that by default grid-tied solar won't keep the lights on when the power goes out (nothing to sync to). So if one goes that route, don't forget the batteries and inverter.
- oceanplexian 7y ago
  The electric car is useful because in the event of a power outage, a decent one will have a 60KWH+ battery. Assuming it's even partially charged, that's enough energy to power personal electronics for weeks. You could probably even power a fridge, TV, and some basic household equipment for a week if you had a decent inverter. On the other note, if you get grid tied solar you can use them if the power is down, but you need to buy an SMA inverter with secure power supply. The inverter will give you an outlet that will work if the grid is down, even without a battery system.
  - mikestew 7y ago
    You're just doing a global search-and-replace and replacing with "big ass battery". :-) I take your point, but I was referring to transportation. As you point out, ride the scooter and use that big ass battery in the car for something else.
- lutorm 7y ago
  by default grid-tied solar won't keep the lights on when the power goes out (nothing to sync to). Indeed, but some inverters have emergency outlets where they can supply power on a dedicated circuit as long as the panel output is enough. The amount of power is limited and it can't sustain any surges so it can't run e.g. motors, but having 1500W is tons better than having 0... I've verified that my big-ass UPS that I use for the computer can run the refrigerator and be charged from this outlet.
gwbas1c 7y ago
I just built a house with that. The one problem is that my heat pump uses so much electricity that it's impractical to put on the battery. The battery basically powers everything but HVAC and the level 2 charger.
- Gravityloss 7y ago
  is it a ground or air heat pump?
  - gwbas1c 7y ago
    Air. Ground heat pumps are very uncommon; "heat pump" is assumed to be air based.
    - Gravityloss 7y ago
      Ground heat pumps are common here where there is large temperature variation. They are a more expensive investment but much more efficient.

dsfyu404ed 7y ago

Keep in mind that in 2003 China still hadn't figured out how to make small engines with good (enough for western consumers) quality control so everyone and their brother did not have a backup generator. These days things are very different. Many businesses (especially ones that depend on refrigeration) have backup generators now.

dpcan 7y ago
But most generators need fuel. It's only a temporary fix. It's funny how a generator creates peace of mind, and yet we don't consider the magnitude of the disaster for which they give us peace.
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  The distributors have generators because they cannot afford to be down if the power is. They need power to run their systems. They might be running at reduced capacity but they will run. Many gas stations/convenience stores and other small consumer facing businesses have generators because generators have proliferated and they have a financial incentive to have one. Sure, not all of them have generators but not all of them need it. If your two preferred gas stations are down and the third one is crowded you'll make do fine. This is what's different from '03. Getting fuel in a blackout is a non-issue logistically. Paying for it is where the most problems will be because so many people don't carry cash anymore.
  - alecmg 7y ago
    On payment. Assuming cell network stays up, it is just another redundancy element, have a mobile network backup to landline network.
    - kzrdude 7y ago
      This story makes me think that I really should have more cash in reserve at home (typically I have nothing). And other "prepper" thoughts..

dpcan 7y ago

This was well written. Sounds like he had less than 24 hours without power but turned the story into a doomsday journal entry. His note about cell phone towers losing power was scary. Never really thought about that. I usually assume the phones will keep working as long as we can charge them, but I suppose the towers need some juice too. In our small city, one power line blew down last week and 1/4 of the city was without power for about 6 hours. I'm baffled at the lack of redundancy. I have more redundancy behind my customers' blogs about their dogs than it appears our city has for keeping electricity flowing to 10K people. Life without power will be hard to survive. And I fear my neighbors much more than my food spoiling.

JaimeThompson 7y ago
A redundant power grid would be very expensive to implement and maintain. In the vast majority of cases it is less expensive to simply deal with the few power failure events that the typical household gets in a year.
toast0 7y ago
I moved to an island outside Seattle in 2018, and went through a couple big outages so far; our cell towers start turning off in 3 to 5 hours. Of course, my dsl goes down instantly, so it's important to have offline things to do.
- syntheticnature 7y ago
  I have a UPS for my router and modem; what I've learned is that while a UPS can last for hours powering those things, the upstream battery at the cable company only lasts an hour.
  - bryanlarsen 7y ago
    That's one advantage of DSL over cable: the telephone is considered critical infrastructure and does stay up much longer than an hour. I didn't realize that cable stayed up at all. That was one condition of switching to VoIP: my wife insisted that 911 from wired phones must continue to work through a power outage.

harel 7y ago

There was a TV series about a scenario where electricity simply stopped working: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_(TV_series)

notduncansmith 7y ago
The book series Dies The Fire also gives the topic an excellent treatment: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dies_the_Fire https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dies_the_Fire
mxuribe 7y ago
My partner and I loved watching this show!! (We saw it over one of the streaming service, not live tv.) Too bad they stopped at 2 seasons. But, thanks for sharing the wikipedia link, because now i see that there's a comic book series which wraps up the story. Cheers!
- harel 7y ago
  I didn't pay attention myself, so thanks for mentioning about the comics - I didn't know.

jihadjihad 7y ago

Years back I was introduced to a terrific BBC show called Connections with James Burke (1978). The first episode, available on YouTube [0], is all about the world's reliance on power and that within a short period of time we'd be catapulted back to the plow. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XetplHcM7aQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XetplHcM7aQ

Symmetry 7y ago
There's a great book, The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch, talking about how to recover from an apocalypse where most people die. They recommend as a first step going out to the nearest golf course to grab the batteries in the golf carts because those are things you'll really need and won't be able to re-make for a while. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18114087-the-knowledge https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18114087-the-knowledge
- mikestew 7y ago
  Hammering the extremely malleable lead into thin plates and mixing with some sulfuric acid seems the most easily solved of my technological problems. Now, the author isn't wrong, grabbing golf cart batteries would be a hell of a lot easier, and would make for better batteries. But making the tools needed to fill those batteries seems to be a much taller order, IMO. Solar panels and generators are the things I "won't be able to re-make for a while".
  - maxerickson 7y ago
    There's alternators all over the place though. "Just" need to figure out how to get one turning.
    - davinic 7y ago
      In the same way that speakers are microphones, all motors are generators, albeit probably with very low efficiency.

buboard 7y ago

There is probably a moral to this story: We are too much dependent on centralized systems because of perceived efficiency, but how true is that anymore? How hard is it to be i.e. energetically autonomous though? In sunny places, a house could probably be affordably autonomous, however these solutions have not been explored at scale and are not cheap yet. (I already know it's possible to have food-autarky, a garden and a few chicken will do).

ccccppppp 7y ago
We can't support 7 billion people if each one of them has a house with garden and grows it's own food. That's what the middle ages were, look at the population then.
- pharke 7y ago
  The truth is probably somewhere between the two of you. We shouldn't be entirely dependant on centralized systems, nor should we attempt to be 100% self-sufficient. I'm sure there's a best of both worlds approach.

syntaxing 7y ago

I really take for granted how great electricity is. I didn't have power for a week during the big Sandy storm and it's funny how I instinctly turn the lights on every time I go into a room. It's scary to think what it would be like if we didn't perpetually have electricity.

emperorcezar 7y ago

Years ago when I was growing up in the woods of West Virginia we had a particularly bad blizzard. During this time the power went out. We were use to this happening and most of the time it was for half a day or so. So we pulled out the kerosene heaters and the oil lamps for light. Bundled up and waiting. We ended up being snowed in without power for two weeks. My mom and dad would take turns bundling up and walking a mile or so every few days to get to the roads to get more fuel. One thing I remember clearly was cooking on out outside wood fire grill, which was essentially cinder blocks and a grate. No worry about running out of wood since there was always plenty around. I remember the whole ordeal pretty fondly. As a kid it was a good change of pace and like camping.

kgwxd 7y ago
What did you do for fun?
- emperorcezar 7y ago
  I remember reading books a lot. I have two brothers, so playing with them and with toys. We also went out to play in the snow a lot.
ericmcer 7y ago
I did something similar as a kid, but not on accident. Parents would take us for 1-2 weeks to a cabin with kerosene lamps no electricity, no running water. It was usually ok, but there was one trip where it rained nonstop for the week. I cannot forget that boredom, you can only play cards and read for so long before you start to lose it. I suppose our pre-electricity ancestors had deeper social lives with the people around them, and a stronger connection with the outdoors, but for those who lived in climates that required frequent shelter holy cow they must have been bored out of their skulls.
- jbob2000 7y ago
  What did you eat while stuck in the cabin? My arm chair theory is that pre-electricity societies didn’t have food as dense/rich as we have it today, so they didn’t have the energy to feel bored.

bryanrasmussen 7y ago

reminds me of the movie Into the Forest https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/into_the_forest https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/into_the_forest

thisisbrians 7y ago

@dang do you mind adding (2013) to the title?

hourislate 7y ago

This was part of the 2003 North East Blackout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003 >The blackout's primary cause was a software bug in the alarm system at the control room of FirstEnergy, an Akron, Ohio–based company, which rendered operators unaware of the need to redistribute load after overloaded transmission lines drooped into foliage. What should have been a manageable local blackout cascaded into collapse of the entire Northeast region.

S_A_P 7y ago
My boss claims he is responsible for this blackout due to an errant tibco message. I can never tell if he is kidding or not, but he has a lot of experience in the power industry so I have no reason to doubt this.
- smush 7y ago
  If you dare reveal your HN activity and ask him to comment, I'd love to read his first-hand account.
  - S_A_P 7y ago
    I asked and either because of fear of prosecution or modesty or hyperbole he said its just a bar story...
pp19dd 7y ago
Bit of an oversimplification, but I think it was a human error assisted by bad design. An engineer set the "state estimator" to manual mode at 12:40 pm, then at 1:30 pm went to lunch forgetting to put it back on auto. Half an hour later, a grounded wire set off the first outage and due to the system reporting bad information, a cascade occurred. They had launched the new power model just a couple of months prior, but I don't think it was a software glitch. For a few more details, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12476001 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12476001 and for the full report (238-page PDF) see https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/oeprod/DocumentsandMedia/BlackoutFinal-Web.pdf https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/oeprod/DocumentsandM...

GnarfGnarf 7y ago

The problem facing service station operators is that they can't charge a premium for gas when the power fails, to offset the cost of installing generators. It's seen as "gouging". So there is no incentive to prepare. The meager profit margins on gas sales are not enough.

bryanlarsen 7y ago
The OP did a month's worth of business in 2 days, and the subsequent goodwill generated and publicity gave him a permanent business boost. His preparation was very well rewarded.
- bobakanoosh 7y ago
  And how frequently do power outages of this length happen in a given city? Considering none of the other gas stations had infrastructure in place to handle this event, I would assume it's the first time in decades, or ever.
  - lifeformed 7y ago
    To be fair, being able to increase your prices would have those same downsides too. It sounds like this kind of emergency preparation would have to be publicly subsidized for it to be a common thing.
- stickfigure 7y ago
  permanent business boost / well rewarded That was not claimed by the author. For better or worse, gasoline tends to be break-even for stations - from the operators I've talked to, maybe they make 5 to 10 cents per gallon. They make most of their profit from the shop. A month's worth of gasoline sales might not cover the upkeep and depreciation of the generator. I'm more curious to know if any other stations installed generators after this experience. I wouldn't be surprised if the answer was "no".
PhasmaFelis 7y ago
Gas sales are (almost) a loss leader to get people in the door to buy snacks, drinks, smokes, and lottery tickets. Mattheij's generator had enough juice to run the pumps, registers, and half the freezers. How does the cost of installing and provisioning a generator compare to the cost of a few days of zero sales?

EGreg 7y ago

Most people are too blase about having decentralized backup systems, in every area. We need decentralized power generation and storage (solar panel based, etc.) to survive a Carrington Event or an EMP. Or just a simple blackout. We need electric cars which represent choice rather than fossil-fuel lockin. But we also need mesh networks and software to run on them, to survive the Internet being cut off like in Kashmir or Hong Kong. We need decentralized town currencies and much more. Please watch this talk I gave a few years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzMm7-j7yIY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzMm7-j7yIY

rtkwe 7y ago
How will rooftop solar help with a massive solar storm or EMP. Most inverters actually cannot provide 50/60hz AC on their own and just sync to an external source. Even beyond that issue they'd all be fried anyways in the same even that killed the regular electrical grid.
- EGreg 7y ago
  Solar storm only affects really long wires, not short circuits around the house and a battery. https://www.cnet.com/news/we-arent-ready-for-a-solar-storm-smackdown/ https://www.cnet.com/news/we-arent-ready-for-a-solar-storm-s...

VBprogrammer 7y ago

I guess this is a good a time as any to ping Jacques about getting the photos back on his windmill build page. Still one of my favourite build logs...

jacquesm 7y ago
On the todo list. When I shut down Camarades.com/WW.com I took the photo archive offline as well, but did not realize my blog pics where hotlinked from it. Now I need to go digging around on some ancient backup server.

protomyth 7y ago

One thing that I was very impressed with was how well the cellphone network dealt with the outage, for at least 24 hours all the base stations worked, after that point they slowly dropped out one by one as their batteries ran dry. As decedents of an industry that was paranoid enough to generate power for their own equipment, its nice to see some of the cell phone companies take power seriously. It would be nicer if they could last a bit longer.

mrtksn 7y ago
They do have emergency base stations mounted on vans with diesel generators, these can run indefinitely.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  As long as they have diesel.
  - rtkwe 7y ago
    Diesel is pretty easy to get. Even in a power outage you can open the stations reservoirs and pump it out manually the main issue is getting the station to agree to it, makes sense for a single big customer but not to do it for everyone looking to gas up their car.
    - jacquesm 7y ago
      Only if the depots have gravity drops, if their pumps are electric and the reservoirs underground then you're not going to be able to pump it out to the surface. Fortunately most depots are aboveground and only need a tap to be opened to drop their fuel into a truck. A person looking up their car would not even be allowed on the grounds. Besides that the volume dispensed is way too high to deal with in a normal vehicle, you're looking at 1000's of liters / minute.
      - rtkwe 7y ago

goda90 7y ago

This last winter on an incredibly cold night(<-10 F) we had a power outage in the middle of the night. I was up late and noticed it right away. After I reported it to the utility, I made sure the dog was on the bed with me, closed the bedroom doors, and hunkered down. I'm not sure what time it came on but when I woke up the thermostat was showing it had dropped more than 15 degrees F in the house. I should probably buy a generator.

tonyedgecombe 7y ago
Or just put a tent up in the living room.
- projektfu 7y ago
  Or, perhaps, a down comforter or low temp sleeping bag if it might drop very low.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Tents insulate poorly. A 1 litre Nalgene bottle, filled with boiling water, and slipped in a wool sock, on the other hand, will keep you warm. Two is generally overly toasty.

closeparen 7y ago

In a disaster, public transit is one of the first utilities to go. A fun exercise is “could I walk home from here?” If not, and you spend a lot of time there, you need to stage an emergency kit there at least as much as you need one at home. I wouldn’t count on BART service anytime soon after The Big One. (Not that I’d count on freeways either. A bike seems like your best bet). You find dependencies on electricity in surprising places. Good luck getting water out of an automatic faucet or push button water fountain. Good luck getting your car out of a stacker system - even if it’s already at ground level, those doors don’t have manual releases. Good luck getting through any badge reader doors in your office or apartment complex. (This may rule out the bike, even if you brought one).

thatfrenchguy 7y ago
> public transit is one of the first utilities to go This is mostly depending on how much backup the said agencies have. > I wouldn’t count on BART service anytime soon after The Big One And yet it's the only thing that survived the 1989 earthquake !
SilasX 7y ago
>Good luck getting water out of an automatic faucet or push button water fountain. Yikes! I hadn't realized that. I always praised plumbing as a good example of a well-designed, robust system that works even when the power is out, and how only the naive, self-styled 10xers would break that to be trendy ... and yet, they did it already. Hopefully the auto-flushing toilets don't have this problem?
- sudhirj 7y ago
  They do, automatic = electric. If you're not applying force from your muscles to move something, that force is being applied by electricity.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
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chiefalchemist 7y ago

Infrastructure is a concern. But to me the bigger concern is the food supply. It, like gasoline, runs lean; very just in time. Look at what the possibility of a snow storm does to the supermarket. Now imagine the effect on the public psyche when they're told "we'll have more food next week."

gao8a 7y ago

"The honda was a veritable bomb, it was filled with cannisters as many as they could cram in." Somehow that one sentence shivered me as I imagined a crowd of happy people surrounding a car with bottomed out suspension.

munificent 7y ago

> Infrastructure is invisible, as long as it works. And only when it fails do you realize just how much we are all dependent on it and how badly we are able to cope with such infrastructure being unavailable for any length of time. I grew up in hurricane country. We are born and mostly live our entire lives suspended in a giant web of infrastructure and support systems. When you're born into it, it's natural take it for granted and treat that as the baseline. But every now and then you have an experience that makes you realize just how far down below the ground really is, how far it is to fall, and how few cables need to fray before people start dropping. I'm not one of those doomsday preppers who seems to relish preparing for the zombie apocalypse. I think the much more rational approach is to strengthen the web itself so that we don't fall in the first place. But I'm definitely aware how quickly and how badly things can go. Hurricane Katrina is the canonical example. Over a thousand people died in the middle of a well-developed urban area, in the richest country on Earth, from a disaster that everyone knew was coming some day. The hurricane didn't kill those people. The city and state's complete failure to engineer robust infrastructure did. If that same hurricane had hit an equally populated city elsewhere, the outcome could have been entirely different.

iambateman 7y ago
Not a prepper either, but recently our water turned brown and I realized how water-dependent we are. Went out and bought two “life straws.” We have enough food to last a month without infrastructure just by virtue of large pantries, but when the water goes out, it’s gone. My wife laughed at me, but from my perspective, if infrastructure is down for more than a month, I’m probably toast anyway. ;)
- komali2 7y ago
  Life straws suck to use as a primary means of getting water... The USGov has failed in the past at an individual response level, but they're really good at compiling resources to help you and your family be independent. In fact, in San Francisco, the Emergency Response mindset for The Big One has shifted (since loma prieta) from "the government will come help you when it happens" to "do everything you can to survive for weeks without government help, when it happens." So in your case, do more than buy life straws - store many gallons of water somewhere in your house. This can be done really easily and cheaply - save your used water bottles if need be, or just go buy a big giant plastic drum and drop some purifying tablets in it. Keep bleach and eyedroppers in your house for when that water runs out and you need to refill with questionable water. https://www.ready.gov/ https://www.ready.gov/ has shitloads of easily digestible resources to prepare.

kjar 7y ago

Check out ‘World Without Us’ by John Wiesman. A fascinating thought experiment wherein we all suddenly ‘beam up’ and Earth left to go on evolving.

jjav 7y ago

After hurricane Maria in September 2017 the entire island of Puerto Rico was without power. There was nowhere you could drive out of the blackout area since it was everywhere. A few luckier people got power back in one to two weeks, a small minority. My family in the greater metro area of San Juan got power back after two months. Friends in smaller cities only got power after three to five months. There are communities in the mountains which still don't have power today, almost two years later. If you haven't lived through anything like this, it is a useful mental exercise to think how you'd prepare for it.

js2 7y ago
I can't imagine. I lived through Hurricane Andrew. I think it was a few weeks before power was restored, but we found ourselves a generator within 48 hours. We used it to run our refrigerator at home in the evenings, and my dad's business (a 1-hour photo lab) during the day. It was august, so it must've been miserably hot, but I don't remember that much. What I do remember is how traffic functioned in Miami without traffic lights. There obviously weren't enough police to direct traffic at every intersection, so what happened was that a random driver who had a passenger would have the passenger jump out and direct traffic till his car got through and someone else volunteered to take over. This happened organically at many intersections, and it was really amazing to see.
kzrdude 7y ago
Do you know any write-ups of personal stories from this on the web? Something like the blog post in this hacker news post.
- jjav 7y ago
  There is so much, but difficult to find any one link to summarize.. After a bit of searching found this page which is a similar blog-style page except has snippets from many different people. In Spanish. https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2018/09/209947/huracan-maria-aniversario-puerto-rico-experiencia-mujeres https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2018/09/209947/huracan-mari... For English language coverage, search for videos by David Begnaud of CBS News who was on site and provided excellent reporting.

ThomPete 7y ago

There is a moral to that story. Making sure we have enough energy for everything we want whether the source is coal, oil, nuclear or hydro because energy is the single biggest contributor to a better life, richer and safer life and the more access we have the better of we are.

smush 7y ago

I've done some research into the serval mesh project and Briar and similar; I do wish most cell phones had some mesh networking installed by default. Something to enable granny to send a text message to me via piggybacking off other people who happen to be near enough to have P2P communication. This would have to be a protocol designed for offline-tolerance I suppose, so something like auto-exchanging private keys while the network is good and/or in person if network is down for message security, then when in no signal mode, regularly transmit and receive small messages encrypted with the same key-pairs as the real ones, then if they can decrypt the short test message (short enough to be easy to try / won't eat too much battery life), establish a dedicated connection long enough to transmit full messages back and forth before disconnecting. IDK. Probably serval mesh, briar, gnutella or similar already have this figured out. I'd like it to be end-user easy for us to prep for that though so if we are in a venue like a theme park or stadium our phones can transparently be P2P over Blue-Fi-Drop

jkepler 7y ago
Have you heard about the GoTenna mesh project, https://gotennamesh.com/ https://gotennamesh.com/ ? I haven't got one yet, but it looks like the sort of thing you're describing (though its a device that works with existing smartphones, rather than being a protocol our phones could run. An advantage here is that with sufficient GoTenna mesh users in an area, one's anonymity could be increased, as typically (at least in the USA and most of western Europe) one can't buy SIM cards to access telephone networks without one's ID.

rbritton 7y ago

Having an RV set up for remote work where we can leave home for days, weeks, or months has actually prepared me for outages better than most. The entirety of the RV can run on propane and battery, and I have both solar and generators to recharge the battery bank. Depending on the season, the propane I have on hand can last from 14 days to upwards of months while the generator gas I have on hand can handle about a week of full-time running. Because of where I like to visit, I also carry two cellular hotspots and a satellite internet option and can typically get internet access where others can't. A few years back, prior to owning the RV, we had a windstorm come through about ten days before Thanksgiving. Power to most of the area was knocked out as the weaker trees fell and wiped out much of the powerline infrastructure (I recorded gusts around 75 mph before my weather station actually broke). As is normal that time of year, temperatures were in the 20ºF range, which meant finding alternate heating methods at the very least. We were very underprepared for it, losing much of the food in the fridge/freezer, and the house got very cold. All local generators and gas cans sold out very, very quickly, but I found one on Amazon that could be shipped to my door overnight for $50 extra. It arrived on the second day (of seven) of the outage, and I wired the furnace, fridge, and one multipurpose outlet into it. We struggled with just the one 5 gallon gas can, though, needing a daily trip to the gas station to refill. Had they not had power, it would've been worse. In the end, it was much like camping without adequate preparation. The first couple days were novel and amusing, but by the end, it was just a daily routine of ensuring we stayed warm enough and no damage was done (e.g., pipes freezing).

clomond 7y ago

Having lived and experienced the aforementioned blackout (> 55 million people, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003 ) It was a transformative experience to me and it felt everyone else who experienced it regarding the hidden importance of these infrastructure pieces. What I loved about this piece is it reads much like so many people's experiences of the incident. Even though it happened over 15 years ago, I and most others remember distinctly and with clarity the sequence of events that occurred on that day. Seems like most people's stories went somewhere along the lines of: - Interruption of an intended activity due to no electricity - Attempt at understanding scope, and an effort to substitute the interrupted activity (in my experience, we were entering a restaurant for food and was told "given we don't have power, we can't microwave most of our items - but the oil in our friers are still a bit hot though so you can have fries... We wanted to try elsewhere). - The realization that this was not a localized one block situation, but something larger and more serious. (We drove around and the traffic lights were out, put on the radio (most most stations were "silent"). The few that were didn't even know what was going on "it appears there is a blackout, getting reports from as far as <X>" with <X> being of an increasing scope as the hour went on. - Then an abandonment of the days plans for a trip "back to shelter/home" where one nestled and tried to wait it out until services were re-restored. The natural gas in our home didn't work either, so the only way we could heat food was on a fire. It's one thing to realize that all these these are connected, but its another to feel its connectedness through these services' absence.

mikepurvis 7y ago
I was in high school at the time (in Toronto), working at a technology camp for kids— the blackout hit late afternoon when our day was mostly wrapped up, so I took the bus home as usual. My experience into the evening was totally different from yours though. People in my parents' neighbourhood sat out on each other's front porches, barbecuing, eating ice cream before it all melted, hanging out. It was a pretty unique moment of community, almost like an impromptu street party that went on for blocks and blocks. It was kind of liberating, I think, in a reverse paradox of choice kind of way, to suddenly not be able to do a whole bunch of things, and to be forced to just kill time away from the TV (and probably outside, as the reality of not having A/C descended). Anyway, I don't think I'm unique in this recollection: https://www.google.com/search?q=2003+blackout+party https://www.google.com/search?q=2003+blackout+party

dang 7y ago

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4995938 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4995938

smush 7y ago

I wish it wasn't so expensive to have a switch next to your circuit-breaker that was labelled 'electric lines/natural gas/water' and depending on which selection would cut-off the home electricity from the others and enable the electricity to come from, respectively, the central grid, a small natural-gas-fed generator (with auto-start battery?), a pico/micro hydro generator in the basement/crawlspace. Having the ability to convert your electricity bill to a more expensive water/natural gas bill and still have power during an outage would be quite nice.

pinkythepig 7y ago
The natural gas genny portion exists, the water one does not. The water one doesn't exist for two reasons: 1. There is only energy in the water system because your city has pumps/water towers to give it pressure. So in a disaster, you running your hydro setup is just placing more strain on the water infra who are likely running on generators. 2. Hydro plants need huge amounts of water to provide power. To even power a single outlet, you are talking in the range of tens of thousands of gallons of water per hour. Your water bill would quickly eclipse the cost of just buying a generator. --- Going back to natural gas, you are looking for an automatic transfer switch. When the power cuts, it disconnects you from the grid, turns on the generator automatically, and you then have power again. When the power is back, it switches you back to grid and turns generator off. Only downside is that there will be a several second power cut while generator turns on. You generally can only get this feature on midrange cost and up generators. For cost savings measures, you can also buy a manual transfer switch, with the obvious downside of you having to flip the switch and go start the genny.
MrRadar 7y ago
XKCD did a "What If" on hydro power from your municipal water[1]. tl;dr: "In either case, for a bathtub faucet, this works out to almost 200 watts, or $25 per month." (And that's in addition to all the other issues he pointed out.) [1] https://what-if.xkcd.com/91/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/91/

bungie4 7y ago

Nice to read an article from somebody local, or nearly so, to me. I remember the outage well, I worked at a major telecommunications company with reserve generators. I really didn't appreciate the depth of the issue until I drove home that night. People were telling other people, total strangers, that nukes were dropping all over the US. You can imagine the panic. Word eventually spread and the northern mindset of looking after your neighbours took hold, as mentioned in the artice. I went to use the BBQ to make some burgers. We ran out of propane naturally. My neighbour offered his BBQ which coincidentally, was out of propane. Then HIS neighbour offered his BBQ. He was out building a deck when the power went out. He fired up his generator and continued on. His skil-saw was the only sound to be heard. All the neighbours threw in food and drink and we got to know one another. I will admit to being a little said after the power was restored, because, except for a nod or a wave, we went back to the business of minding our own.

ctdonath 7y ago

Back when the "Y2K Bug" was emerging as a serious threat, I described to my ex-engineer father the looming issue in great detail. He listened carefully, then calmly replied "if that happens, I'll throw another log on the fire and go back to my book." Indeed, he was living preparedness: there was no "crazy prepper" stuff, just someone who had systematically thought through everything that could go wrong, and who had seamlessly integrated backup systems into his lifestyle. I aspire to do the same, making slow progress. Too few know how close to disaster their lifestyle is.

ecpottinger 7y ago
I had a cabin up northern ontario that you had to canoe and portage to get to, no power, no running water, outhouse. Invited friends up. What was interesting while some would come up, others claimed they could not live without a hot water bath, or electric lighting, and while my outhouse had seven (yes seven) coats of white paint and the hole was so deep I had problems getting out when I first dug it - the idea of not using a flush toilet was alien to them. Some people are not ready for how basic things can get without power.