6 ms·

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

by 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.
    - syntheticnature 7y ago
      I live in a rural area that is getting creeping suburbia (hence the cable). The phone lines/DSL, sadly, are out about as often as the power, and slower to get fixed. Power at the CO doesn't matter if the line maintenance isn't up to snuff.
- bryanlarsen 7y ago
  "my dsl goes down instantly" Put your dsl modem & router on a UPS. Telephone lines have independent power and generally stay up during power outages.
  - toast0 7y ago
    Thank you, my dsl modem is on a UPS, I have a generator. The DSL line goes down instantly when the power goes out. I'm on centurylink's ADSL2 service.
    - bryanlarsen 7y ago
      My DSL survived a tornado. I'm on Ontario Bell (through teksavvy).
glenneroo 7y ago
> The outage lasted 2 days and a bit.
roywiggins 7y ago
> I fear my neighbors much more than my food spoiling Find better neighbors? Large parts of Puerto Rico lost power for weeks and it didn't descend into The Purge. It wasn't great, but people survived because of their neighbors, not in spite of them. > I'm baffled at the lack of redundancy. 10K is not a huge tax base, how much property tax are you willing to spend to increase uptime beyond 99.999%?
- ccccppppp 7y ago
  > Large parts of Puerto Rico lost power for weeks and it didn't descend into The Purge Not that many people affected, and there was massive help from the mainland. Now imagine NYC without power for weeks.
  - nostrademons 7y ago
    NYC was without power for 2 days in the Northeast Blackout of 2003 (the event the article was describing), and it generally brought people closer together. Folks went outside and chatted with their neighbors rather than hole up inside with nonexistent A/C to watch blank TV screens. A number of blocks organized impromptu barbecues to use up all the meat that was about to spoil, since grilling was the only cooking method available to many people. It's a crapshoot which way society goes when the infrastructure disintegrates, but Lord of the Flies is definitely not a given. Historically people seem just as likely to come together as beat each other apart.
    - ccccppppp 7y ago
      2 days and weeks are not in the same class. Just like not eating for one day (fasting) is not the same as not eating for weeks.
    - astura 7y ago
      Two days is not in the same league as several weeks. Plus New York City also had a blackout in 1977 that was very different. >Looting and vandalism were widespread, hitting 31 neighborhoods. Possibly the hardest hit were Crown Heights, where 75 stores on a five-block stretch were looted, and Bushwick, where arson was rampant with some 25 fires still burning the next morning. At one point, two blocks of Broadway, which separates Bushwick from Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, were on fire. Thirty-five blocks of Broadway were destroyed: 134 stores looted, 45 of them set ablaze. Thieves stole 50 new Pontiacs from a Bronx car dealership.[1] In Brooklyn, youths were seen backing up cars to targeted stores, tying ropes around the stores' grates, and using their cars to pull the grates away before looting the store.[1] While 550 police officers were injured in the mayhem, 4,500 looters were arrested.[1]... In all, 1,616 stores were damaged in looting and rioting. A total of 1,037 fires were responded to, including 14 multiple-alarm fires. In the largest mass arrest in city history, 3,776 people were arrested. Many had to be stuffed into overcrowded cells, precinct basements and other makeshift holding pens. A congressional study estimated that the cost of damages amounted to a little over $300 million (equivalent to $1.2 billion in 2017). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_blackout_of_1977 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_blackout_of_1977 Everyone on the radio in the 2003 blackout was going crazy predicting the mass looting that New York City was in for (based on the 1977 blackout).
myself248 7y ago
> His note about cell phone towers losing power was scary. Never really thought about that. I was working for a cellular provider in Michigan when the northeast US lost power in August of 2003, and we got a taste of this. Most sites have a few hours of battery (maybe more than a few), but only some sites have generators. Fuel storage permits are a hassle, after all. Most cell companies have some trailer-mounted generators they can tow to a few sites that're out due to sporadic storm damage, but this isn't enough when the whole region goes out at once. After the '03 outage, I started seeing generators at a lot more sites! Then it just becomes a question of whether your fuel contractor can visit them all regularly enough to keep them topped up. A local tower tech will probably end up just riding along with the fuel tanker, to unlock each gate, etc.
- ocschwar 7y ago
  And keep the fuel from going bad.
bryanlarsen 7y ago
"And I fear my neighbors much more than my food spoiling." In my personal experience, catastrophes tend to bring out the best in people.
- neonIcon 7y ago
  In 'most' people. That's the issue
- ryanmarsh 7y ago
  Having lived through many hurricanes this is true. However, I can't recall a truly dire situation where everyone ran out of food and water and had no hope of being saved by the government. Don't underestimate the lengths an ordinary person would go to feed their starving child. At a certain point resources become so scarce it is truly a zero sum game.
mikestew 7y ago
I usually assume the phones will keep working as long as we can charge them, but I suppose the towers need some juice too. It was interesting to observe when the power went out in Redmond, WA for two weeks about ten years ago. Towers stayed online for a while, until some (I'm guessing) lost their batteries. Still had a little signal, though, because (again, guessing) some towers had generators. Then the diesel ran out (again, guessing), and we had no cell signal after a few days. That's why I keep the amateur radio skills practiced.
- jwr 7y ago
  I consider the communications infrastructure to be extremely fragile and prone to collapse. It already collapses under load easily, and while it can make through a short blackout, a solar storm/flare would take it out for a long time. Yes, amateur radio makes a lot of sense.
  - ecpottinger 7y ago
    Starlink could solve the loss of power problem, but a really big solar flare could take that out too.
- twothamendment 7y ago
  I would guess most of this crowd could pass the tech test without too much trouble. If anyone has ever wondered if they could, try https://hamstudy.org/tech2018 https://hamstudy.org/tech2018. No relation, just a happy user.
strken 7y ago
The town where my parents live had a three week (!) telecommunications outage after an exchange caught fire, including a couple of days where the banks didn't have connectivity and had to go back to ledgers and implement a withdrawal cap. Apparently the company running the backbone, Telstra, would usually bring in backup exchanges with a satellite connection on the back of a truck, but didn't have any available at the time.
papln 7y ago
Would you rather pay 2x your rate for electricity (~$1K/yr) for redundant power, or would you rather drive to the next town over (~$1K/5yrs) during an extended power outage?

by dpcan 7y ago

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.
  - syntheticnature 7y ago
    I live in a rural area that is getting creeping suburbia (hence the cable). The phone lines/DSL, sadly, are out about as often as the power, and slower to get fixed. Power at the CO doesn't matter if the line maintenance isn't up to snuff.
bryanlarsen 7y ago
"my dsl goes down instantly" Put your dsl modem & router on a UPS. Telephone lines have independent power and generally stay up during power outages.
- toast0 7y ago
  Thank you, my dsl modem is on a UPS, I have a generator. The DSL line goes down instantly when the power goes out. I'm on centurylink's ADSL2 service.
  - bryanlarsen 7y ago
    My DSL survived a tornado. I'm on Ontario Bell (through teksavvy).

glenneroo 7y ago

> The outage lasted 2 days and a bit.

roywiggins 7y ago

> I fear my neighbors much more than my food spoiling Find better neighbors? Large parts of Puerto Rico lost power for weeks and it didn't descend into The Purge. It wasn't great, but people survived because of their neighbors, not in spite of them. > I'm baffled at the lack of redundancy. 10K is not a huge tax base, how much property tax are you willing to spend to increase uptime beyond 99.999%?

ccccppppp 7y ago
> Large parts of Puerto Rico lost power for weeks and it didn't descend into The Purge Not that many people affected, and there was massive help from the mainland. Now imagine NYC without power for weeks.
- nostrademons 7y ago
  NYC was without power for 2 days in the Northeast Blackout of 2003 (the event the article was describing), and it generally brought people closer together. Folks went outside and chatted with their neighbors rather than hole up inside with nonexistent A/C to watch blank TV screens. A number of blocks organized impromptu barbecues to use up all the meat that was about to spoil, since grilling was the only cooking method available to many people. It's a crapshoot which way society goes when the infrastructure disintegrates, but Lord of the Flies is definitely not a given. Historically people seem just as likely to come together as beat each other apart.
  - ccccppppp 7y ago
    2 days and weeks are not in the same class. Just like not eating for one day (fasting) is not the same as not eating for weeks.
  - astura 7y ago
    Two days is not in the same league as several weeks. Plus New York City also had a blackout in 1977 that was very different. >Looting and vandalism were widespread, hitting 31 neighborhoods. Possibly the hardest hit were Crown Heights, where 75 stores on a five-block stretch were looted, and Bushwick, where arson was rampant with some 25 fires still burning the next morning. At one point, two blocks of Broadway, which separates Bushwick from Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, were on fire. Thirty-five blocks of Broadway were destroyed: 134 stores looted, 45 of them set ablaze. Thieves stole 50 new Pontiacs from a Bronx car dealership.[1] In Brooklyn, youths were seen backing up cars to targeted stores, tying ropes around the stores' grates, and using their cars to pull the grates away before looting the store.[1] While 550 police officers were injured in the mayhem, 4,500 looters were arrested.[1]... In all, 1,616 stores were damaged in looting and rioting. A total of 1,037 fires were responded to, including 14 multiple-alarm fires. In the largest mass arrest in city history, 3,776 people were arrested. Many had to be stuffed into overcrowded cells, precinct basements and other makeshift holding pens. A congressional study estimated that the cost of damages amounted to a little over $300 million (equivalent to $1.2 billion in 2017). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_blackout_of_1977 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_blackout_of_1977 Everyone on the radio in the 2003 blackout was going crazy predicting the mass looting that New York City was in for (based on the 1977 blackout).

myself248 7y ago

> His note about cell phone towers losing power was scary. Never really thought about that. I was working for a cellular provider in Michigan when the northeast US lost power in August of 2003, and we got a taste of this. Most sites have a few hours of battery (maybe more than a few), but only some sites have generators. Fuel storage permits are a hassle, after all. Most cell companies have some trailer-mounted generators they can tow to a few sites that're out due to sporadic storm damage, but this isn't enough when the whole region goes out at once. After the '03 outage, I started seeing generators at a lot more sites! Then it just becomes a question of whether your fuel contractor can visit them all regularly enough to keep them topped up. A local tower tech will probably end up just riding along with the fuel tanker, to unlock each gate, etc.

ocschwar 7y ago
And keep the fuel from going bad.

bryanlarsen 7y ago

"And I fear my neighbors much more than my food spoiling." In my personal experience, catastrophes tend to bring out the best in people.

neonIcon 7y ago
In 'most' people. That's the issue
ryanmarsh 7y ago
Having lived through many hurricanes this is true. However, I can't recall a truly dire situation where everyone ran out of food and water and had no hope of being saved by the government. Don't underestimate the lengths an ordinary person would go to feed their starving child. At a certain point resources become so scarce it is truly a zero sum game.

mikestew 7y ago

I usually assume the phones will keep working as long as we can charge them, but I suppose the towers need some juice too. It was interesting to observe when the power went out in Redmond, WA for two weeks about ten years ago. Towers stayed online for a while, until some (I'm guessing) lost their batteries. Still had a little signal, though, because (again, guessing) some towers had generators. Then the diesel ran out (again, guessing), and we had no cell signal after a few days. That's why I keep the amateur radio skills practiced.

jwr 7y ago
I consider the communications infrastructure to be extremely fragile and prone to collapse. It already collapses under load easily, and while it can make through a short blackout, a solar storm/flare would take it out for a long time. Yes, amateur radio makes a lot of sense.
- ecpottinger 7y ago
  Starlink could solve the loss of power problem, but a really big solar flare could take that out too.
twothamendment 7y ago
I would guess most of this crowd could pass the tech test without too much trouble. If anyone has ever wondered if they could, try https://hamstudy.org/tech2018 https://hamstudy.org/tech2018. No relation, just a happy user.

strken 7y ago

The town where my parents live had a three week (!) telecommunications outage after an exchange caught fire, including a couple of days where the banks didn't have connectivity and had to go back to ledgers and implement a withdrawal cap. Apparently the company running the backbone, Telstra, would usually bring in backup exchanges with a satellite connection on the back of a truck, but didn't have any available at the time.

papln 7y ago

Would you rather pay 2x your rate for electricity (~$1K/yr) for redundant power, or would you rather drive to the next town over (~$1K/5yrs) during an extended power outage?