When the electricity goes out, even for a few hours, people get stupid really quick. Most ppl won't even read this and they should!
People become dumb ZOMBIES during a blackout. Do yourself a favor and read this post.. It will only take a few minutes.
The TV, movies, and media sells a zombie apocalypse as a bunch of dead people walking the streets as cannibals trying to feed on alive humans.
I witnessed a zombie apocalypse, and that is when normal human beings lose logic, common sense, and their self-preservation and survival instincts kick in at the expense of you, me, and everyone else.
I was on a trip visiting with some friends when a major transmission line that linked FIVE (5) cities went out. It darkened these 5 neighboring cities for only 4 hours. The stupidity began about 30 minutes into the blackout.
When the electricity dies, even during the daytime, it stops entire cities. Worse than that, it stops people from thinking sensibly. This is a real problem that needs to be recognized and steps taken to fix it.
Will it be fixed? NO !! So get ready for what to expect the next time a major blackout hits your city.
Most people take electricity for granted. No one worries about it. If the power goes out, as long as you have a flashlight with some batteries, a candle, and a good book to read, you're okay, right?
WRONG.
If you are stuck in traffic, you'll quickly realize how people change their driving habits when there are no traffic lights. Every intersection becomes a 4-way stop intersection. The problem is that these types of 4-way stops only work in low volume residential streets.
You can't take 8 lanes of traffic, 2 in each direction (North,South,East+West), with 8 cars, doing a 4-way stop for more than a few minutes before traffic jams begin. Every single time a person takes 3 extra seconds at the intersection to decide whether or not to proceed. This small hesitation by each driver adds 3 extra seconds to the line of cars behind them.
3 seconds with 15 cars in line, is 45 extra seconds for the 15th car.
Now 45 seconds doesn't sound like a long time, does it?
Try this experiment. Drive somewhere in the middle of a busy road, stop in the middle of the road, and put your flashers on for 45 full seconds. How much chaos can begin to erupt in 45 seconds? In traffic, 45 seconds is a very, very, long time.
So in a matter of an hour, you have gridlock. Everywhere. Ambulances can't get through. Fire trucks can't get through. Nor can police. Either can you, as a driver stuck in traffic.
So what do you think police do when there is gridlock an hour into the power outage? That's right, they get out into the middle of major intersections and start directing traffic.
Incase you missed it, the keyword was "start". The police "start" directing traffic an hour into the power outage after traffic has become a severe problem.
That means it takes them another hour to get traffic flowing.
In this 2 hour window, you have people running out of gas, fender benders, road rage, and other nasty things going on. People's patience are at a minimum.
THAT'S JUST TRAFFIC!
Try getting gasoline. Try pulling money out of your account. It's impossible.
Here's some questions for YOU:
1. During a blackout, why don't banks have generators? Computer server datacenters have diesel generator backups. So do hospitals. Why not banks?
Is it because banks can't afford it? Is it because money isn't important?
2. Why, in every major city, does not at least ONE gas station have a manual gas pump? We ran on manual gas pumps for a very long time in the early days of the automobile. I believe that every major city should have 1 or 2 gas stations that have a standby "manual" pump that can sell exactly $20 of gasoline during an emergency. This will fuel ambulances, police cars, or the waiting public. In the event of a disaster, gasoline becomes an extremely important commodity.
Is it because oil companies can't afford to install a manual pump? Is it because the government can't give them a tax credit or incentive if they do?
I COULD GO ON AND ON ABOUT THIS - BUT I WON'T.
I will leave you with one last situation that caused me to write this post..
AFTER the electricity came back on, I happened to be at a gas station. Cars were "camped" at the pumps that ran out of gas. When the city power came back, people clapped and cheered. The same energy and excitement you'd see after an earthquake when they pull a survivor out of the rubble.
...and then it happened..
The clerk of the gas station quickly ran out side, locked the door behind her. With a bright cheery smile she announced to the crowd. "Sorrrryy.... but the computers have to boot back up again and sync with the head office. Even though the power is back on, we have to wait another 1/2 hour for the pumps to work".
...and if that wasn't stupid enough..
A woman came up to her, and said, "Could I at least buy a bottle of water from you? I'm so thirsty."
The clerk beamed another big smile, and happily said... "No, I can't. There is no way for me to ring it in."
ARE YOU KIDDING?
She has cash in the drawer. Even if the bottle of water was $2 or less, it is sitting right there. Even as a good gesture of customer service, give her a bottle of water.
A solar calculator didn't work here. Writing down the sale (and ringing in the sale after the computers booted) didn't work here.
Common sense, and humanity didn't work here.
That woman remained parched for the next 30 minutes even after the hydro came back on, because the employee couldn't figure out how give water to her without a computer.
ALL OF THIS HAPPENED IN ONLY 4 HOURS.
Imagine a week? A month? A year.
Zombie apocalypse? I don't fear that..
All I fear is when the power goes out for an extended period of time, people get down right stupid and no one is prepared for this..
Shocking as this is.. it is a world wide epidemic because of the dependence on computers and electricity.
Without electricity, we'd all dehydrate or starve each other with water or food sitting right in front of you because a clerk is unwilling to sell it to you without scanning it in first.
This is only going to get worse.
Remember, next earthquake, natural disaster, riot, blackout, war, anything. If we lose hydro or computers, the whole system stops. Immediately.
Your comments? Do you care? Am I talking about something rarely thought about?
My power just went out; first thing i thought about was this post that i read earlier today...
i am currently sitting in a very quiet dark room, my UPS seems to not be functioning any more as everything has gone dark, my laptop screen and my back lit keyboard at beaming with light; the wind is howling in the trees outside (maybe something to do with my current lack of power; not sure i have not investigated yet) the buffer on my youtube music just ran out before i had my hotspot, as i sit here typing this comment i am still wearing my lifeless over ear headphones and my mobile phone battery is down to 17%... the battery in my laptop report 4 hours of capacity but what use is it without the internet?????
this would want to be resolved soon or i feel i may get crazy; it is late-ish so i could go to bed although i was in the middle of doing research for my latest Bitshares State of the Network report...
i better go outside now and investigate before the crazy come out; i think i have about 20-25 minutes according to your post; wish me luck
P.S mobile phone battery now reports 15% power; i am starting to lose it..
its back online; the world seem like a much happier place with electricity... first order of business; charge my phone :)
What are the chances you'd have a blackout on the same day as reading this post? Ty for using your last bit of power to comment on this post. :) Hopefully you didn't need any gasoline, or to try and buy a bottle of water.
The cities are a death trap during this type of stuff. Back home in Indiana we had a big gas tank and we could have survived for months out there.
Interesting, I live in a rural area we tend to lose power a few times a year. I hadn't imagined how bad it would get... Quickly in the city.
I really enjoyed your post.
I didn't even cover the point - cell phone towers only have battery power for a maximum of 4 to 6 hours. When the cell phone towers die, and people's phones become useless, you get INSTANT panic after you have NO internet. You can't call anyone. There is no TV.
You bring up a very important point about power outage resilience. Mobile phone networks generally keep running, so do telephony networks, generally, as well as most data centres. In a blackout, blockchain monetary systems can continue running for quite some time, even long enough if the stock of diesel in the generators or the charge in the battery bank gets low, to send out someone to get more energy to keep running until the idiots running the electric get their shit together.
People need to think very seriously about the issue of decentralisation, in particular, to the matter of electricity and water supply. These two areas, if the power goes out, the water pumps stop and if the up-hill reservoirs run out, it can lead pretty quickly to quite a nasty situation. A week without power and water, and most cities would be struck down by sanitation-related diseases, as well as all kinds of panic as people's regular routine is disrupted.
Yes they do need to think seriously about these issues. But they won't. So if you're thinking about it, and so am I? What should we be doing? I think by the time it happens, it's too late. The time to do something is right now. But isn't it sooooooo much easier to do nothing and worry about it tomorrow.
well, they can languidly lie in their luxury. I've had mere hours, at best, days, of luxury in my life. I laugh at these fools so stuck in the eternal now that they are going to sacrifice their futures, and when they get the zombie virus, I will put one between their eyes with glee.
A very strong comment. I'd like to know more. Please consider writing a blog post about this.. I want to learn from experiences I've never had. Please consider sharing more about it.
disaster is everywhere. but infrequent enough most people don't factor it into their plans. but, how old are you? over 30?
Proceed with the next thing you were going to say. You are probably asking me if I am over 30, enough to relate to a possible situation, or if I can remember a certain time when xyz happened.
Even if I wasn't "over 90" but I needed to find out what someone "over 90" might have experienced back in 1930's, I feel that I could research or contact existing family to discover the info I'd need to interpret the discussion.
This is a long winded way of saying, don't ask me how old I am. It won't help or hinder the discussion. Please do go on though..
I didn't take the age question as an insult. I was just suggesting it's not important. Usually when someone asks how old they are, they are leading up to the next part of what they're going to talk about. You didn't talk about anything else... that is the only thing that confused me. If I said "yes I'm over 30" or "no, I'm under 30". Did you have something else to say? We were talking about your comment "mere hours, at best, days, of luxury in my life". That's not something normally a person would say. You obviously have some experiences that I'd love to read.
You know, I didn't mean that to be an insult on your age. I have to deal with being misjudged all the time, in fact, because I behave like a curious, earnest little 6 year old. Still, after all these years.
You don't wanna say how old, or young you are, who gives a fuck. answer the question, or don't resort to adhoms or stupid 'you are too old to understand the problems of the young'. sorry, but I may be 40, but life hasn't changed that much in how it has approached me.
Solve the problem, or not. I don't care who you are, what you look like, how old you are. In the end it is on you, and you get the result you make.
I was very surprised by your reaction, but maybe that is just because I am innocent. People don't understand me because of my age also. They think I am nearly 10 years younger than I actually am. And I'm pretty sure if I had a bit more money, I could make myself look another 5 years younger.
It's not about what you look like, how many years you have walked this sad planet, or how sick it made you. It's about how ready you are to face what is in front of you.
When the power goes out im good for a few hours until the batteries die then its nap time. When I was younger snow storms would put the power out for up to a week sometimes. We were just fine then but today Id be rigging up wind power from motors or something just to get a little taste of technology.
Yes, that's you. How about 99% of everyone else. When you have huge mobs of people freaking out. In a matter of days, you'll have people knocking on your door for help that you won't be able to provide.
All of a sudden, what you got, they want.
And Im in Canada the power going out is part of winter. But we scratch our heads at the americans freaking out when the power goes.
Ah I have a plan for that in the event it ever happens. Wont go into detail but I already have a group of people in mind I can actually trust an together people can want what we have all they wanna getting it without sometging to exchange will be difficult
You are the 1% that will survive this then... kudos.. Everyone else will start losing their minds and their common sense. They will quickly become uncivilized the longer a blackout goes..
Much truth to this article. I was once at a industrial camp where the power was down for around 4 hours. I had to deal with 1 client who was completely out of it after 15 minutes, tagged on to me, he spoke of how he becomes violent without electrical illumination. All he could talk of was aggressive reaction he was not going to be responsible for... it was hell. 4 hours of it. Had to keep him away from the staff and other client's bravely cowering in the "Rec" room staring at 1000's of dollars of silent entertainment. Buddy there was straight and sober too! Lalaland up top for sure. It was my innate sarcasm that saved me. The sound of those fancy "shacks" being re-energized was one of the greatest relief sensations I ever experienced. Never went back to that looney bin!.
I had a hard time wrapping my mind around what you wrote. This takes a situation to a completely different place. What you basically said, is that you had to deal with a person who went psycho during a 4 hour outage. Mental illness kicked in, and it kicked in big time.
I didn't even consider how the mentally ill handle such situations. You had experience with it. Wow.
We have the power go out here quite often due to storms. I actually haven't experienced any of the chaos that you described, but most of the time I have just stayed home. It has me worried now what I would run into if I stepped outside for a bit :)
The biggest issue that we always have is our refrigerator/food. Usually the power comes back on within 12 hours, but if it lasts much longer than that - the food goes bad and you have to throw things out. In my mom's neighborhood one time, their power was out for 4 days after a storm!
The problem, and it is a problem, is we look at ourselves individually during these crisis. Which is normally correct in the greater sense of things. Look out for yourself, and your family first.
However, that becomes hard to do, when the rest of the city and country is falling into turmoil. It's only a matter of time.. (we're not talking a 4 hour blackout. But consider a 4 month blackout), where even those that had the inclination of protecting themselves fall victim to people knocking (ok BANGING) on your door for help.
A Zombie apocolypse is a creation in theatre. Even normal people in need who failed to protect themselves become mean, angry, and downright vicious if you have something they don't.
All of this is related to constant electricity. Without electricity, most of us become savages. Not today, not tomorrow. But it could be next week, next month, or next year. Scary that it could happen in our lifetime.
Indeed; it's a scary thought!
One thing I've heard (totally unrelated to the electricity part), is that next to food and water - they say that fruit and vegetable seeds are the best thing to stock pile in case of an apocalypse level event. After the initial few weeks of craziness, people will be looking to form colonies and attempt to rebuild some form of a 'normal' life. Seed packets would be extremely useful once things got to that phase, and they are very easy to transport (light weight). They could be used to trade for other things that you need, and it would be easy to trade for a lot of things - because you can easily keep a lot of seeds :)
That's a warm fuzzy, that has little practicality to it. When people are starving, they will either steal the seedling or pick every tomato that grows before you get to it. Some people will eat the tomato plant itself.
There is a 99 year old woman that died in the last 3 years named Clara that did recipe demonstrations on youtube. She talked about living through the great depression. Her neighbors, who she had great repoire with, were scavenging her garden one day. It was a sad day for both her, and her neighbor, who only did what they felt they needed to do.
If you're interested in checking out some of her videos, try this link.
tl;dr you won't be able to grow a vegetable garden with seeds without someone stealing the seeds, the plant, or the fruit it bears when people are starving.
The seeds would only become useful if one managed to get past the survival 'every person for themselves' stage, and to the point where some level of civility returned, and a barter/trade system began to form. You are right though - as long as people are still stealing and killing to survive, then seeds will do no good :)
We don't have too many power outages here on the west coast except during heavy storms. Last winter, we had power knocked out three times, each time lasting about 7-8 hours but there was one time in Surrey (a suburb of Vancouver, BC) where we didn't have power for a day and a half. Nothing too serious happened though some of us lost food that spoiled when our freezers and fridges were down. I am much more concerned about a earthquake here in the Vancouver area. THAT would create so much chaos and I know too many people who don't have supplies and a fully-stocked backpack and first aid kit. I have one in the trunk of my car along with a set of warm clothes and sneakers (since I wear impractical suits and heels at work) in case the big one hits while I'm at work, and another backpack at home with enough supplies for three days (water, granola bars, several cans of food with can opener, extra socks, matches, flashlight, thermal blanket, whistle, small first aid kit, extra pair of glasses, and cash.
Does it bother you, that gas stations, which fuel police, fire, and ambulance vehicles, don't have any manual pumps to refuel these vehicles? There is no incentive or regulations or laws for oil companies to put them in..
It was just a couple days ago, I saw a fire truck at a regular gas station. I was astounded. Never saw that before. The reason is simple. Fire trucks don't fuel up that often, so it is quite plausible that 90% of us won't ever see one at a gas station. But that's where they get their fuel.
So even if you do have all the supplies handy. It's really horrible that emergency vehicles will run out of gas (and they have, if you research it) simply because we're not prepared for long outages.
I had never thought of the gas situation. It's horrifying to think that emergency vehicles, police cars, fire trucks, etc. could run out of gas. Ontario has had so many multi-day power outages in the last decade due to severe ice storms. I wonder now how they managed?
Good question. I don't think you want to know the answer. Whatever emergency vehicle unused in the parking lot, gets put out into service, as long as it has gas? Who even knows the answers to these questions. They get away with it, because the public hopes its under control. It really isn't.... I'm serious.
Many people have begun preparing for this, but many people live and thrive even without power... would it be such a bad thing really?
Consider the health benefits... it may make people wake up, to become more self sufficient, to reduce EMF toxicity, to become more active, to actually move in harmony with the earth (wake with the sun, sleep when it sets).
I am addicted like most so this is only a thought I think of often, like being in a lake cabin without electricity... it is possible.
In short, break the shackles of electricity.
You can't conceptualize the benefits of living without power to the very people who have spent all of their lives with it. The adjustment would take several years. During that time, many of us would rob and kill each other.
First of all, without power, and gasoline, we couldn't farm enough or process the food, to feed everyone. People would starve. You could run into the street and holler "hey everyone. Just start growing your own food!". "Where?" someone hollers down to you from the 12th floor apartment balcony. You'd have security issues with gardens. You'd need a lot of space to grow a garden just to feed a small family.
You can't take 7 billion people,move in harmony with the earth (wake with the sun, sleep when it sets) and break the shackle of electricity very easily. Starvation, theft, violence, riots, crime, all would ensure. I know you'd like to be at a lake cabin. The problem is, now you have 14,500 other people surrounding the lake and taking every last fish out of it. It would not be peaceful to say the least.
You do have the right idea. But that works for you. Not everyone all at the same time.
Of course nothing will work for all, nor for anybody all the time. However this was to point out how enslaved we are to electricity and that there could be other ways... nothing is possible without an initial thought of it.
last time our power went out it really made me realize how much I need a generator lol
Generator is good. I have one too. Problem is, I had it in storage which was locked up by electronic keycard for the gate to get in. Stupid me. Even if I could get it, I didn't have enough gas, and gas stations were closed.
The generator was 1/2 of the solution. I didn't consider the fuel part for long term.
Yup, fuel, a car with enough fuel in it to go get more from as much as 200km away, and NO! ELECTRIC! LOCKS! Well, it's a good lesson, and you'll be better prepared next time.