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A government declaring a curfew (for any reason) is a bad thing, IMO, but I may be projecting a bit - how are people from Chile responding? I’m sure they’re not
by MisterSandman 2y ago
A government declaring a curfew (for any reason) is a bad thing, IMO, but I may be projecting a bit - how are people from Chile responding? I’m sure they’re not happy about the outage, but does the curfew etc. seem reasonable to them?
- robertlagrant 2y agoI think this is the pertinent section? > Authorities also announced a curfew in effect from 10 p.m. Tuesday until 6 a.m. Wednesday. Personally I could understand that both policing and emergency response with no light at night might just become impossible. All the streetlights are presumably out, making walking difficult. If all of the traffic lights are also not working at night, it seems extremely dangerous. And any criminal would be camouflaged by all of the chaos. Much simpler to police the very act of being outside. I agree it's not ideal, but I wouldn't thin end of the wedge it.
- lazide 2y agoIf there is any legitimate reason for an emergency nighttime curfew and martial law, it’s likely this would be it, yes. Chile is also relatively lightly populated, with the vast majority of its population in Santiago - which is pretty dense. If anywhere in Chile is going to have a sudden crime spree if there was an opportunity, Santiago would be pretty much it.
- inferiorhuman 2y agoCounterpoint: huge swaths of the Bay Area went dark for a few days (9–11 October 2019) and we did not descend into martial law.
- onetokeoverthe 2y ago[flagged]
- dang 2y agoYou can't post slurs here. I've (re-) banned the account. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- xphilter 2y ago[flagged]
- onetokeoverthe 2y ago[flagged]
- newsclues 2y agoWhat is the difference in preparation thought? Does the Bay Area have generators, battery backup for critical emergency services like police and emergency medical care?
- bluGill 2y agoI don't have to live there to tell you they do. Generators are very common in the US, though they are generally placed in locations where they are easy to ignore. I expect every hospital has them, as will your water department, natural gas utility, cell phone towers (hit and miss, many don't have them, many do), any business with a data center on site (the generator might not cover the rest of the building, but the data center and HVAC will be on it). In many locations your utility will give a substantial discount to power if you have a backup generator and will allow your utility to switch you to running only on the generator when power demand is high. It that is the case nearly every business will have a generator - it is almost paid for off the discounts and so the ability to run normally when the power is out makes it worth it. In Mississippi I saw generators on 20 foot poles so they would keep operating even when a hurricane flooded the whole region (they probably went in after the hurricane where it would have been needed...). I wouldn't expect that in the Bay area, but it it shows what is considered normal in places that have earned a reputation as backward. I know Chile is not the richest country, but my impression is they are good enough that I'd expect generators in all the important places at least. Though still power off will turn the city dark overall.
- quickthrowman 2y agoYes, backup generators are required by the NEC for hospitals and certain other facilities (I’m at lunch and don’t have my copy of the NEC handy). Generators are extremely common at hospitals, emergency dispatch centers, cell phone towers, nursing homes, natural gas and water pump stations, police and fire stations, data centers, etc.
- lazide 2y agoRolling portions of the Bay Area (but by no means all, or even most) had well communicated power outages due to weather conditions during that time. Aka there was plenty of time for people to know what is going on, no one was really surprised, agencies had time to prepare and roll out contingencies, etc. In this case, no one seems to really know what caused it, let alone have had any warning. And Santiago is the national capital. For all they know, someone intentionally crashed the grid in order to take the country. What would you expect the US gov’t to do if Washington DC suddenly and unexpectedly completely lost power? I guarantee it would be pretty much the same thing.
- aschobel 2y agoIt really is remarkable how a little forewarning can help. Sure, there was no cell phone service along stretches of 280 but overall it was calm. Planned outage vs unplanned outage.
- inferiorhuman 2y agocontingencies Caltrans and PG&E had to be shamed into providing power for the Caldecott tunnel. The contingency was basically just shut everything down including tunnels and whatnot. PG&E didn't share their list of folks who required electricity for medical equipment with counties, didn't actually contact everyone effected, and didn't communicate specifically when the power was going to be on/off to most of them. PG&E (still) doesn't do "well communicated".
- jeffbee 2y agoThe 2019 outage affected a small fraction of people. It mostly hit rural areas and small towns or subdivisions in hills. It affected only a few hundred thousand accounts in a region of 8 million people.
- inferiorhuman 2y agoYeah, no. Pretty much all of Sonoma and Marin lost power for days. Most of the rest of the cuts were in more rural areas but UC Berkeley and East San Jose got hit. The only county spared entirely was San Francisco. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-10/unprecedented-california-blackout-spreads-with-millions-in-dark https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-10/unprecede... PG&E has restored power to 228,000, or 31%, of customers in parts of the San Francisco Bay Area after high winds died down and inspections and repairs were complete, Vice President Sumeet Singh said during a press briefing. More than 100,000 had already regained service earlier Thursday. About 510,000 were still without power. Over eight hundred thousand is a bit more than a few hundred thousand.
- jeffbee 2y ago800,000 was the entire state. For example, they turned off the entire city of Red bluff. Red bluff is not in the Bay area. The number of customers that got turned off in the Bay area was much less than 5% of the population. I am sure you can see that that is very different from a nationwide blackout.
- robertlagrant 2y agoI wouldn't say that's any more right or wrong. Localities have to deal with things according to their context, which will have to account for lots of variables.
- infecto 2y agoCounterpoint: The Bay Area is not a dense metro area.
- jvanderbot 2y agoA curfew is not martial law. Regular daytime law abides in all cases, there's just a curfew.
- andreshb 2y agoThe Night of Terror during the 1977 blackout in NYC led to 1000 fires, 4000 arrests, and 550 injured police. The blackout in 2003 in NYC had no looting or violence. The blackout in Maracaibo Venezuela in 2019 had 350 stores looted and 550+ people arrested. The difference was the economic and social challenges in 1977 in NYC and 2019 in Venezuela. A recession and high unemployment.
- anjel 2y agoOr NYC 1977
- mrbungie 2y agoYep. The 2010 Chilean earthquake and tsunami[1] is an example of what can happen in this country during catastrophes: sacking and looting. Since then night curfews are a given during and after disasters. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Chile_earthquake https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Chile_earthquake
- nobodyandproud 2y agoThis is executive powers as it was intended, though, and not a power grab.
- newsclues 2y agoI think generally you must confirm that there was no power grab after the emergency has pasted. Otherwise you can grab power and refuse to relinquish it after a real emergency that justified the executive powers.
- aithrowawaycomm 2y agoThat is true but it seems like most authoritarians invent a vague emergency to justify grabbing specific powers (e.g. Trump declaring a "border emergency"), whereas a specific emergency for a specific event has a time limit. In particular: getting Trump to rescind his border "emergency" will be a long slow process of organizing and accumulating public pressure, whereas there will be an overwhelming amount of public pressure to end the curfew as soon as the power is restored.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- nkrisc 2y agoIf there were ever reason for a curfew, this seems to be a textbook example of when it is warranted.
- DanielVZ 2y agoThis is common standard procedure during region-wide emergencies. Everyone sees it as reasonable as far as I know due to crime being common during emergencies. We are at an all time high perception of crime. I myself have been victim of two car hijacks this year, and know plenty of victims in my already small social circle. If my only loss of freedom is going out during the night (you still can do it for short trips by filling a form), I think it’s worth it.
- sieabahlpark 2y ago[dead]
- dataviz1000 2y agoOn a scale from 0 to Augusto Pinochet bringing American "Freedom" to the people or his next door neighbor, Videla, throwing dissidents out of airplanes, the current government declaring a curfew during darkness is about a 0. Luckily, I flew out of Chile on Saturday. Although it felt like it was the safest place I have visited in South America so far the empty white powdered dime bags on the sidewalk, people telling me to be very careful walking alone at night, razor wire and electrified fences around properties was a reminder of how dangerous it is.
- eitally 2y agoI have a very close friend who's Chilean but grew up in Brasil after his family immigrated to escape Pinochet. Overall, Chile is exceptionally safe by South American standards, especially outside Santiago (which has all the perks and challenges of any large city).
- bigtimesink 2y agoHow's Paraguay? I'm told it's one of the safest places in South America outside France, and safer than Chile.
- AnimalMuppet 2y ago? All of South America is outside France. Did you mean to type something else?
- dragonwriter 2y agoGuyane (“French Guiana”) is “outside France” in the same way that Alaska is “outside the United States”. Most of France is in Europe, but most is different than all.
- chmod775 2y agoBy area, only about 80% of France is in Europe!
- 2y ago
- boomboomsubban 2y agoEven ignoring crime, a curfew probably helps the health care and firefighting sectors significantly. I can easily imagine my friend group using a blackout as an excuse for a drunken bonfire.
- bluGill 2y agoSo long as there is enough space to safely have a bonfire (no burning down the neighbor's house or starting a forest fire), and nobody gets so drunk they need medical care there is nothing wrong with a drunken bonfire. Or you can put away the alcohol and have a kid friendly bonfire - they are just as much fun. Of course many drunken bonfires end up needing health care and/or firefighting. However they need not. How do you fix your friends?
- CJefferson 2y agoAll bonfires have risks, so banning them during a complete blackout really doesn’t seem unreasonable. If you do have an accident, don’t expect an ambulance to come.
- bluGill 2y agoWhy wouldn't an ambulance come? My experience (this is US) is I expect the local emergency phone numbers to work and the ambulance to come. A bonfire is what I want people doing. they have fun and with some care is safe enough. They can enjoy the power outage instead of complain about how awful life is.
- sieabahlpark 2y ago[dead]
- toast0 2y agoMy local experience with blackouts is cell towers become unusable after 4-6 hours; if the outage started in the middle of the night, sometimes things work a little longer, until everyone wakes up. Emergency calls have priority and can attach to any network, so maybe they would work, but not if all the cell towers are totally offline. Certainly some towers may have onsite generators with fuel set to automatically run, but not the ones around me, and I've had two multiday outages this winter. Landlines should work, but I don't know if Chile has many of them. I know they're rare here in Washington State. Wired internet is a maybe, depending on provider choices.
- ericjmorey 2y agoThe bad thing is the sudden change in a resource that the people are dependent on. There's absolutely nothing bad about imposing a curfew during this emergency.
- marcinzm 2y ago> A government declaring a curfew (for any reason) is a bad thing, IMO, As I see it, in a well running society there is enough trust to give everyone flexibility in the short term. If everyone assumes worst intentions and outcomes then your society is effectively no longer functioning. At which point a curfew is the least of your worries.
- mrbungie 2y agoChilean here. The curfew was very reasonable due to the scale of the outage initially affecting the ~99.0% of homes, and its the purpose was just to reduce circulation due to restricted policing capacity and the inherent danger of big cities such as Santiago being completely out of energy and artificial light at night. Plus, both natural persons and enterprises could ask for curfew passes via a website (Comisaria Virtual) created during the COVID-era for doing police paperwork online. Military/police staff were especially understanding and people who didn't have a pass when checked were allowed to get one on-site using their smartphones. It was as soft as a curfew can get. I didn't see any important backlash on social networks if that says anything to you.
- ipython 2y agoHow did the smartphone based pass system work if - as tfa states - telecommunication infrastructure was also non functional?
- mrbungie 2y agoMost telco and central gov. tech infra was actually working, unstable, but working during the first hours of the outage. I know some friends eventually lost connectivity in remote parts of the country though (for 2-3 hours at most). For the average chilean: As long as you had 4G-5G equipment with working batteries, you had internet and access to essential gov services.
- fwn 2y ago> A government declaring a curfew (for any reason) is a bad thing[...] does the curfew etc. seem reasonable to [Chileans]? This comment doesn't seem to have gone down well with the community, but I wonder why. "Emergency" alone does not justify curfews. Curfews are only justified if they are reasonably expected to actually affect the thing that is driving the emergency. This may well be the case with a disease, but here the emergency is simply that the infrastructure needs to be restored. My parents have a place in the German countryside and they are practically self-sufficient in terms of energy. I would definitely want to take the opportunity to visit them, catch up with them, use the time in a socially productive way, etc. I have done countless treks, even for weeks at a time, without having to depend on continuous electricity. Why should there be a curfew just because there is no electricity on the grid? Imagine doing rolling curfews in countries like South-Africa synced with rolling blackouts - just because some vague and hand-wavy "oh so dangerous". Sounds surreal.
- rafram 2y ago> Why should there be a curfew just because there is no electricity on the grid? Because that genuinely is dangerous? Do you deny that people are more likely to commit crimes of opportunity when the lights are off, security cameras are offline, and communication systems are down?
- fwn 2y ago> Because that genuinely is dangerous? Do you deny that people are more likely to commit crimes of opportunity when the lights are off, security cameras are offline, and communication systems are down? A rise in the likelihood of crime is a gradual, probabilistic matter, whereas a curfew is an absolute, binary restriction on freedoms. (Although in this particular case, fortunately, it seems to be quite lax.) If power outages were a sufficient justification for curfews, we would need clear, documented evidence of the crime increase, measured against other contributing factors, and balanced with the fundamental rights being restricted. In Germany, for example, crime (and hospitalization) spikes on New Year's Eve—yet no one seriously argues for a curfew every December 31st. The mere presence of an increased risk does not automatically override the need for a proportional response. Otherwise, any statistical uptick in crime could be used as a pretext to suspend civil liberties without proper consideration of competing rights and interests. None of this is new knowledge.
- volkl48 2y agoCurfews are commonly imposed during/immediately after major disasters in any significantly populated area, pretty much anywhere I have ever heard of in the world. It's certainly the case in both the US + Europe in my experience.
- OfficeChad 2y ago[dead]