14 ms·
How long would society last during a total grid collapse?
- marstall 4y agoscary. presume FEMA would significantly mitigate things in a Texas-wide outage ... but something much wider ... yikes
- wmf 4y agoFEMA would take a week or longer to even wake up and they don't have the resources to help Texas. Source: Katrina.
- fallingknife 4y agoKatrina is a meaningless comparison because the city was underwater. Logistics runs on trucks. No roads, no trucks.
- gjsman-1000 4y agoThe US has 3 separate grids… which isn’t actually a lot. I don’t really trust FEMA if something took out, say, all 3 (Texas being one). If you can’t pay your FEMA workers while their families are panicking, you are toast. Total collapse follows quickly.
- fidesomnes 4y ago
- sieabahlpark 4y ago
- tevon 4y agoI'd be curious if it would be better to be in the city or the country. My hunch is that the city requires more "inputs" to stay survivable (fewer food/water stockpiles available), dependant on inputs. However cities would also be the focus for recovery efforts and disaster relief. On the flip side, the country has a greater store of natural resources per-capita (water, likely food, heat sources), however would be deprioritized for any kind of support.
- philwelch 4y agoIn the long run, country, because you have more room there to build your own off-grid infrastructure.
- bluGill 4y agoSpecialization means the country is lacking too. Farmers may have a garden but they count on regular trips to the grocery store. OTOH farms almost universally have fuel tanks and generators and so can get by without the grid for weeks.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- vasco 4y agoIn the country it's also easier to be raided by people who know or suspect you have food and water. One house with nothing around it for miles vs an apartment in a huge building, is basically hiding in a crowd.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- groffee 4y agoI think everyone should turn off their power for a couple of hours (when convenient) just to see if and how well they'd manage. Because it's so easy to become reliant on something without realizing that it could go. Powers gone off? Guess I'll put the kettle on and make some tea while I wait - no power. It's got a bit dark - put the light on. Listen to spotify? No songs downloaded and no data etc etc. And that's not even covering food preparation yet.
- School-Cotton 4y agoLuckily, if you have a gas stove, you can still heat up water for tea at least :)
- vasco 4y agoDepends if the gas is from a canister in your house or if you're relying on the gas grid which can also fail during a prolonged widespread power outage.
- modoc 4y agomost city natural gas systems are powered by gas powered generators spread around. Multi week outages due to ice storms in the north east have rarely (if ever) caused outages of the gas system.
- Teknoman117 4y agoSo long as you have some lighters, matches, or a mechanical sparker because the built-in ignitors won't work without power.
- selimthegrim 4y agoUsually battery operated on heaters at least
- foundajob 4y agoSpoiler alert: The chicken went bad.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mikewarot 4y agoI thought there were a few more days buffer at each point he discussed, but it's mostly in line with my expectations. We need to spend quite a bit more on redundancy than we have been doing.
- kccqzy 4y agoAnyone interested in this should check out the book, The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Civilization in the Aftermath of a Cataclysm by Lewis Dartnell.
- Animats 4y agoParts of Ukraine are there now.
- acidburnNSA 4y agoA lot of old Cold War preparatory war game scenarios start with EMPs blanketing the continental US. It only takes a few (like 1) nuclear weapon detonations in thin atmosphere (a few dozen km up) where the primary heat transfer mechanism is radiative (vs. convective, conductive) to cause enough EMP to take out pretty much the entire continental US grid. The military is fully hardened against EMP. Civilian infrastructure, not so much. "The EMP robustness of the civilian infrastructure of the United States can be summarized far less equivocally: it is entirely non-existent. Our civilian telephony, electricity, broadband communications and electronics plants are all naked to our nuclear-armed enemies. They were neither designed, nor engineered, nor constructed nor are they operated so as to survive nuclear explosion effects, even at very great distances – for the 'invisible hand' of the marketplace provides no incentives for EMP robustness, nor penalties for failing to so prepare. Large electric power and telephony systems are known to fail under the effects of solar storms, which impose far smaller electromagnetic stresses than are known to arise from high-altitude nuclear explosions of even modest scales. Consequently, even a modest, single-explosion EMP attack on the U.S. might well devastate us as a modern, post-industrial nation." https://spp.fas.org/starwars/congress/1999_h/99-10-07wood.htm https://spp.fas.org/starwars/congress/1999_h/99-10-07wood.ht...
- gjsman-1000 4y agoBut is the military hardened against deserters, starving soldiers, starving military families, and so forth caused by civilian infrastructure collapse? I doubt it. If you can’t feed or heat/cool people, alliances quickly change - especially if you have no way of tracking who becomes AWOL. As far as I know, military bases don’t have their own nuclear reactors or coal plants. EDIT: Apparently the DoD requires diesel backup with enough fuel to last… “one to two weeks.” Meh… if I’m an EMP-empowered nation who hates the US, the grid looks tempting… sure, they can counterattack, but if you make investigating difficult and spread enough pandemonium… all you need to do is keep the government haphazardly distracted and confused for two weeks and you win…
- theteapot 4y agoSoldiers and their families would likely be some of the last to starve. Hardened.
- johng 4y agoI am reminded of an excellent Twilight Zone episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPOoEQ2vx7w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPOoEQ2vx7w
- px43 4y agoThat episode is less about unreliable power grids, and more about how easy it is to tear apart society by turning neighbors against each other over relatively minor things. Something that we've seen on a whole new level since 2015.
- johng 4y agoMost definitely. Just reminded me of it is all... I feel like nearly every life lesson can be learned through various Twilight Zone episodes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGguhrEMR_U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGguhrEMR_U
- rgrieselhuber 4y agoThe thing about these discussions is that the situations they imagine are entirely avoidable, it would only take a complete revamping of our social isolation and dependence on monocultural agriculture / long distance food miles for starters.
- mikewarot 4y agoWe just need to look back and see how Ukraine handled it in a year or so for lessons learned.
- micro_cam 4y agoGrowing in the 80s up on the rural olympic peninsula the power routinely went off for a couple of weeks after windstorms. Even still it will be off for a few days every year. There are just a lot of power lines and a lot of trees and they have to check the whole system before it turns back on though they usually get it on for the schools and grocery stores pretty quick. Everyone has a wood or propane heat source. We kept a non cordless land line, it worked fine with out power and i guess the phone lines are lower on the poles and not high voltage so it isn't a big issue if one is on the ground. One year we had to cook a turkey on top of a wood stove.
- sologoub 4y agoThe article talks about phones correctly - at the backbone level it’s mostly VoIP now, which requires power. I bet some places have old mechanical switches that in theory can still be used, but those need some power as well. Landline is great for a localized loss where your central office still have enough power to run.
- doctorshady 4y agoCircuit switched landline service is still very much alive. It isn't and hasn't been electromechanical for a very long time, but it's non-packetized in a very large part of the US, provided you actually get a service that legally qualifies as a landline (voip is unregulated).
- cpsns 4y ago> Critical facilities like cellular base stations and data-centers often have an on-site backup generator. These generators have enough fuel to extend the resiliency beyond 24 to 48 hours. During the 2019 hurricane here in Nova Scotia people stole the fuel (and even a few generators somehow), so don’t even count on that. We had no internet, cellular, or landline service for days where I live as a result, much less power. The only reliable communication option in a true disaster is as it always has been, amateur radio.
- dbish 4y agoHeard the same thing happening during some long post-hurricane power outages in the USVI where my family lives. Generator stolen from the main cell tower for a chunk of the island, very selfish and expected now.
- acidburnNSA 4y agoJust gotta keep your ham radio go box in an EMP-hardened roll of tin foil and have a good crank generator, and you should be good to go. In a grid outage even tiny transmitter powers will be able to get out. It's most power efficient to use CW (morse code) unless you plant to have a computer up and running to run the even fancier digital modes.
- cpsns 4y agoDoing CW QRP at 1 watt in the right conditions will cover a huge distance, especially if the power has gone out. It really doesn’t take much when you get down to the absolute minimum viable setup.
- daveevad 4y agoIndeed but at the same time, weapons and ammunition begin to look far more valuable than communication. I'm trying to reason through how valuable information would be in a grid-down scenario. Presumably, all the major roads would have check-points operated by the prevailing authority and would confiscate any valuable goods one learned about over the air. It seems to me that having access to defensible food and shelter is vastly more important over the first period of time until things have stabilized at a new local maximum.
- whois 4y agoThis guy has an amazing YouTube channel and just released a really cool book. I'm doing a book club going through it right now and it's really cool!
- quacked 4y agoThis is one of those situations where there are no backups, and no one has any plans to make any backups. A power outage disaster-hardened country has a populace that's deeply knowledgeable about self-governance, organized combat, agriculture, medicine, sanitation, power generation, engineering, textiles, supply logistics, and construction. If the citizens of a western country like the US somehow earned the free time and energy to start regularly studying and executing these skills for themselves and their neighbors, it would be disastrous for the profit margins of most industries. People would necessarily have to spend fewer hours in the workforce (@David Graeber, "Bullshit Jobs") completing nothing worthwhile and more time running a nation-state without money changing hands at every transaction of labor. I have given up any hope of "power-outage" hardening at a large scale and have resolved to stash my own house with supplies, although I'd be quite vulnerable to raids in the long term.
- gjsman-1000 4y agoMy family jokes that, while everyone stocks up on “survival” products… cigarettes and alcohol will probably be in high demand. Got video games, maybe some solar power (just enough for a TV and a Switch)? Parents will want those to keep the kids sane. Got Blu-rays, DVDs? When people can’t stream, you might get some good resources for them. Got a PC with some offline CAD software? Makes planning making things out of wood easier. And so forth.
- quacked 4y agoThat's a smart idea. Cigarettes, condoms, porn, gum, the sorts of things you bribe third-world soldiers with (often people with experience living without power for a long time.) Edit: I saw you added CAD software; I actually think that people would go back to just drawing things on paper before they'd go to "solar rig to PC with CAD software on it". Civilization did run just fine without computers up until they crashed the scene, and most of the really memorable buildings were designed on paper.
- gjsman-1000 4y agoYeah… I don’t know how many CAD users there would be in the apocalypse. I’m just listing some everyday things we already have that are pseudo-prepper to do… ;) EDIT: I just realized, how many people will have blank paper in the apocalypse? How many people print anymore? Man this rabbit hole never ends… For heavens sake though, digital media is so anti-resilient that it’s just crazy…
- TheAceOfHearts 4y agoIn Puerto Rico a few months back we lost power and water due to the hurricane. Living without power and water, even for a few days starts to have a severe psychological impact. You don't realize how much of a luxury and a blessing it is to have clean running water until it's no longer available. You can't flush the toilet, freshen up, shower, wash your dishes, or wash your clothes. If you don't have a backup power generator, all the food in your fridge starts rotting in a few days. There are so many luxuries which we take for granted up until they're taken away from us. Nature is cruel and harsh.
- Victerius 4y agoI regard attacks on critical civilian infrastructure as strategically indistinguishable from nuclear attacks, and deserving of a similar response. Edit: Why is this being downvoted. I'm right. One will kill 100k people instantly. The other will send them back to the Middle Ages. The former group might actually be the luckier one.
- dylan604 4y agoWhat are you going to do, nuke the hurricanes?
- Victerius 4y agoIn a war, I mean.
- dylan604 4y agoThen why would you reply to someone talking about devastation as the result of a natural disaster?
- armchairhacker 4y agoIf you explode a nuclear bomb in the eye of a hurricane does it make the hurricane stop?
- nelox 4y agoFor the hundreds of millions of people who have never had access to electricity, their survival without it is a moot point. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/world/world-without-power/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/world/world-without-...
- pc86 4y agoWith the exception perhaps of North Korea, every single one of these countries has a climate that you can mostly survive in outside, or with minimal protection. The comparison seems meaningless.
- epistasis 4y agoI'm surprised that this article doesn't even mention the ongoing, continual attacks on the civilian Ukrainian electrical grid, in a concerted effort to take it out with thousands of cruise missiles and loitering drones. Perhaps not all countries will be as determined as the Ukrainians are in their constant repairs, but even with half of their generation capability destroyed, and so many substations targeted, the effects are much like rolling blackouts. My son has Ukrainian language lessons with teachers both in Donetsk and Kyiv several times a week, and only a single lesson has been missed despite the constant destruction that is ongoing. I'm astounded both by the resilience of the grid and the resilience of Ukrainians. I hope that if such a situation ever happens to the US, we will prove to be as resourceful. This piece also completely ignores the ongoing changes to our grid as it is being revolutionized by distributed energy resources and storage. Soon, islanding of homes, and the spread of more micro grids, means that a lot of the older reasoning in this article won't make much sense. Already, many critical infrastructure from hospitals to data centers plan for independence during outages. This will become increasingly common as the more electric vehicles allow for vehicle to home usage, as well as charging directly from home solar. This is what wealthy people do today, and costs are falling to make this accessible to all. There's even a chance that islanding might be cheaper than the alternatives for a significant chunk of homes in the future. Already the grid costs us more than electricity generation, something like $0.08/kWh of the average electricity price of $0.13/kWh in the US. As generation from renewables gets cheaper, and storage gets cheaper, and the grid remains stubbornly expensive, more and more people will be looking to abandon it for energy independence on their own, or in smaller micro grids.
- radu_floricica 4y agoAll good points. A small note: there's yet a many orders of magnitude difference between the whole power consumption, or even only residential power consumption, and the storage available in distributed sources. Even projecting ahead a few years and counting what's likely to be built. I'd guess between 3 and 5 zeroes, in most densely populated cities. If anything, I think the bulk of the flexibility will come from the addition of new greener power sources, plus NOT shutting down the old ones but keeping them either at a minimum or suspended. The eco legislation in Europe in the past years is the perfect example of how not to do things. They kept going with more stringent regulation after covid, lockdowns and massive financial aids, when the likelihood of an economic crisis was high. In my country (Romania) in a moment of revolutionary enthusiasm, the local law passed to fulfill the wider european legislation had specific phrasing to permanently close existing power plants, with no option to ever reopen them. Talk about misreading the flow. And now we're a net importer of power, even as we're one of the most power-rich countries around.
- henearkr 4y agoA distributed grid, including many renewables spread on the whole country territory (or even in many homes), and with a redundant topology (that would tolerate many many wire cuts), would really help, in particular in conditions such as during a war.
- jmugan 4y agoIf you find this interesting check out Aurora by David Koepp. Fun read about if the power went out for an extended time due to a solar storm.
- 6Az4Mj4D 4y agoPeople in India villages can survive till they die :)
- Kamq 4y agoEveryone can survive till they die.
- JoshGlazebrook 4y agoAfter the Texas winter fiasco, we had solar panels + backup battery (40kWh worth) + backup whole home generator installed. Thankfully enphase allows you to go fully off grid so if the grid is down, you can still use your panels & backup battery compared to the Tesla system which does not allow that. The batteries can output up to 15kWh at once so it pretty much is "whole home" backup even if its just the batteries as long as you don't turn everything on at once. Can't imagine an EMP, but i'm as prepared as I can be at least for Texas.
- kart23 4y agohow much did the entire thing cost? just curious
- GaryNumanVevo 4y agoI can't really fathom living in a country where this is necessary. Is all of America's power grid this unreliable to where you'd need 40kWh of batteries just for one house? We have geothermal + solar, but this seems overkill.
- ltbarcly3 4y agoGiven that society has been around for about 200k years and power grids have been around for about 100 years, I think there would be a bit of disruption but it will be temporary and then things will adapt. People will sell conversion kits to change refrigerators over to using big blocks of ice, steam ships will harvest ice from icebergs. I doubt horses will come back though, presumably even without a grid factories will operate with local generators or solar/wind power farms, and trains don't need the power grid to deliver goods.
- eek2121 4y agoLonger than the far-too-many sci-books out there predict. I have lived in areas in the US that went without power for a week or longer...and without the ability to make power for at least that long (New Jersey, Hurricane Sandy as one example) Society is more tolerant than most people think, and the grid is gradually becoming less of an issue thanks to alternative energy means like solar. While many will suffer/not be happy if the lights went dark due to a grid collapse, I suspect we would survive.
- pc86 4y agoI think this is different though. If you had a working car, you drive a few hours at most and it's life as usual. In my mind "total grid collapse" in this instance means that in New Jersey you know there's no escaping it - it's exactly the same in DC and Atlanta and LA and Chicago and everywhere in between. While I agree the impact may be overblown in popular culture - or at least the speed of it - psychologically the weight of knowing the entire country is facing the same thing would be a lot worse than a week without power because of a hurricane.
- piyushpr134 4y agoComing from India and as someone who has lived, growing up (in the 90s), without power for hours and days...trust me you are going to be deeply inconvenienced but not going to die. We had hand fans (hot climate) and fire in large bowl shaped vessels (when cold). Nights without power are spent sleeping on terrace. We had oil lamps for light in the evening. Most night activity would siege by 8pm max to wake up early at 4am ish. For water we have wells and ponds. Flushing...well what's that! Indian toilets were made to not need lot of water flushing or people simply used nature toilet! No fridge (fresh food ftw), no vacuum (brooms and mop only), no elevators, no mixer grinder! But we lived. People adapt Society would collapse and go back in time...however people are more resilient.
- karmelapple 4y agoIf it’s winter in the USA, houses could be wrecked since it could be well below freezing and the pipes could burst. Dangerously cold freezing temps also introduce a real risk of life and limb. Fires can be made, but if there’s a blizzard happening, keeping a flame going might be very difficult.
- wrycoder 4y agoIf it looks like your pipes are going to freeze, you bite the bullet and simply drain them, using the provided fittings and valves. And, you add some antifreeze to your toilet, after you flush it to empty the tank.
- woodruffw 4y agoThis works if you live in a house, but lots of people live in apartment buildings where they don't have access to the necessary valves. The building's superintendent could theoretically do it, but it's a huge task for a large building.
- chinathrow 4y ago> The building's superintendent could theoretically do it, but it's a huge task for a large building. A huge task but a way bigger expense when pipes burst in any size of building.
- e40 4y agoI think the examples here (India, Puerto Rico, Ukraine) are pretty different than the US. People in those cultures are used to much more hardship than people in the US. In my community, there are lots of hills and water is pumped uphill by pumps powered by electricity. If the power grid failed for an extended period of time, I'm pretty sure it would be total chaos. Long lines to get water just to drink. Ferried by car, but when the gas runs out, that walk up the hills would be a killer. Once water is an issue, I think social niceties would be out the window.
- socialismisok 4y agoIndefinitely. Unless you have a very narrow definition of society. People forget that things like industrialization and capitalism are very recent inventions, and throughout our species history we've had many many different ways of organizing ourselves. Heck, the society of the 1970s is pretty radically different than today. But I'm surprised to see fertilizer production not listed. Ammonia fertilizer is whole integer percent of electricity usage, and it's what enabled us to add 7 billion additional people on the planet. Without ammonia fertilizer, there will be mass starvation on a scale we've never seen.
- alkonaut 4y agoThe useful definition of society is “society” here is “society as we know it”. So, how long until there is widespread civil unrest and loss of life. I’d say about a week, maybe less, depending on the location and scope of the outage. Clean water will quickly be a problem.
- socialismisok 4y agoPeople should be keeping a week off water handy if they live somewhere this is possible. It's not hard to, it's relatively inexpensive, and it's pretty much fire and forget. If you live in somewhere threatened by climate or earthquakes or volcanos, store some food, water, and basic medical supplies!
- franciscop 4y agoIn Japan there are 4 major natural disasters that occur on a semi-regular basis (earthquakes + tsunamis, typhoons + floods) so the society is fairly prepared for prolonged blackouts, even if there hasn't really been a major blackout for a while since the gvmt has also been preparing for those heavily. People would have at least a stock of water bottles, and I've heard as a recommendation if a typhoon is coming to fill your bath as well to use as gray water (flushing, washing yourself). I believe that's also why most families also have a small gas stove (with gas canisters), the common usage is usually to have a small party dinner with the stove for cooking in the dinner table, but it's also very useful in case of blackouts and you can probably survive eating cooked rice+whatever you find for few weeks if needed. I don't know if people store other foods (cans, etc) for emergencies, I should probably inform myself a bit better. While Japan hasn't been close at all of a major blackout disaster like this for a long time (AFAIK), I cannot imagine how quickly e.g. Tokyo could get into chaos if there's a major prolonged food, electricity or water disruption.
- aequitas 4y agoThis resonates very much with the Connections[0] series by James Burke. It's an old series, but well worth the watch. Back then it already discussed what would happen if the grid would collapse, and how everything is interconnected. Now with the internet it has gotten even worse. I think the questions asked back then in the series are still very relevant and maybe even more so nowadays. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcOb3Dilzjc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcOb3Dilzjc
- bamboozled 4y agoProbably getting less and less likely everyday thanks to renewables and batteries.
- checkyoursudo 4y agoYeah, but when will my grid collapse?
- nonrandomstring 4y agoA big factor in social resilience is cash, because the inability to conduct commerce quickly leads to civil unrest. People will tolerate no entertainment, heating, or light for weeks or months. The danger is not with electricity itself so much as the tech that depends on it, because when there's food in the shops, and fuel in the tanks, but no way to buy it, force is quick to follow. Physical cash acts as a buffer that can keep the world moving even in primitive conditions. That's why I think the idea of a "cashless society" is one of the stupidest ideas I have heard in my life so far.
- Markoff 4y agoI don't think cash would hold much value, there would be insane inflation due to hardly any value of cash and extreme demand after limited resources, cash introduction would be fine after maybe a year when people would get used to live without grid, but in first weeks/months it would lose all the value.
- nonrandomstring 4y agoHave we got any historical data or decent models? I guess the problem with this is there's no precedent to formulate a null hypothesis against. If inflation was a factor it would affect digital systems linked to the same currency equally. Cash would still win out on availability. My feeling is that, in the absence of digital systems, physical cash would in fact gain value as a tangible asset intermediate to barter of portable wealth. Remember the main purpose of cash in my scenario is a flywheel to buffer the economy until things come back online, not as a permanent post-disaster substitute. The main thing is to stop needing the army to guard food trucks or shoot looters. That's what we're undervaluing about cash and what I think the bankers, in their zealous bid for more control, are completely missing as a political dimension about how real people and real societies work.
- YeBanKo 4y ago> Have we got any historical data or decent models? Yes, Ukraine is the recent example. Cash still worked in occupied territories, that were cut off from communications. It is the only way to conduct transactions, even with inflated costs.
- NoZZz 4y agoIndefinitely, hybrid solar baby...
- egorfine 4y agoHere in Ukraine we are learning to live with a dysfunctional grid. But another thing we learned is how resilient is the grid and how quickly it can be brought back up with heroic efforts and prompt equipment supply. So I guess the world is not going to collapse in the dark.