If we set aside the impact of an asteroid, alien attacks, and the (inevitable) zombie invasion, what event could harm a city or town the most? Believe it or not, a long-term electrical outage appears very high on the list. A large-scale blackout doesn't only affect the residents of a region, but all its associated resources, from safe water distribution and basic telecommunications to wastewater processing and treatment.
Some regions of the globe must prepare for extremely cold seasons, while others already suffer 30-plus temperatures even during spring, when they should be enjoying milder climates. That means one thing: electricity consumption soars, the available infrastructure can't handle the pressure... and the outages come. As someone who has suffered blackouts for five days (or more), the impact of lacking electricity is gigantic.
Now, if it's so traumatic for one person, what happens on the scale of a town, a city, an entire state? The video published by Practical Engineering explores in its introduction the energy crisis that Texas suffered in February 2021. Two weeks and three days, between 246 and 702 deaths, $195 billion in damages, and the most disturbing: it could have been worse
The Consequences of an Electrical Collapse
Power grids are designed with redundancy and alternative connections in mind, allowing the scope of a technical failure to be limited. But it's a double-edged sword, because everything is interconnected. If something goes very wrong, no one escapes the blackout, as we've seen in cases like the aforementioned Texas blackout or the super-blackout that affected Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay in 2019.
The video presents two perspectives: that of an individual who wakes up and discovers the lack of electricity, and that of different services that depend on it, such as telecommunications (with heavy use of batteries and emergency generators), safe water distribution (which ensures water pressure by combining generators and elevated storage), and wastewater treatment. All these systems consume a huge amount of energy, and their backups were not designed for a prolonged interruption.
The video suggests that the first 48 hours of a blackout are relatively tolerable for a person, but that changes after a week. The lack of fuel and supplies becomes serious, paying with electronic means becomes impossible, and only high-priority services like public health have functional backups. Practical Engineering adds a very interesting detail: the lack of power 'feeds' itself. From the simple act of going to work (or trying to) to the use of SCADA systems (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition), everything needs gasoline, gas oil (diesel), gas, electricity, water, or a combination of these resources—which are unavailable due to the initial lack of power.
