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Another blackout hit Puerto Rico Wednesday morning [April 18], the Associated Press reported, cutting off electricity across the whole island and once again undermining the fragile progress made in restoring power in the [seven] months since Hurricane Maria struck.
The Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority said that it could be 24 to 36 hours before power is restored to the areas that had it. Its priorities are to get electricity back to hospitals, the San Juan Airport, water systems, and financial centers
The outage was caused by a bulldozer hitting a power line while trying to remove a collapsed transmission tower, according to El Nuevo Dia.[1] The company responsible was D. Grimm, a subcontractor for Cobra Energy, which received a $200 million contract to repair Puerto Rico's devastated power grid.
Cobra was selected alongside Whitefish Energy Services in the aftermath of the hurricane, but the deals drew scrutiny from Congress because the companies had limited experience in grid repair on such a large scale.
[...] more than 61,000 utility customers[PDF] haven't had electricity since last September, the US Department of Energy reported earlier this month. Since "customer" typically refers to a household, which can encompass several people, estimates indicate that more than 100,000 people haven't had power since the storm.
[...] The blackout is the largest[2] in US history and is now the second-largest in the world. Only Typhoon Haiyan, one of the largest tropical storms ever to make landfall and the deadliest storm ever to hit the Philippines, had a bigger impact on electricity service.
[1] En Español
[2] As measured in millions of customer hours of lost electricity service.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Thursday April 19 2018, @10:46AM (6 children)
I lived through the blackout in 2003 in New York City. It was in August, so a good day to get free ice cream. One of the best cakes I've ever had, the Brooklyn Blackout Cake (think, "Death by Chocolate"), was invented by a bakery near me because they had to use all their perishable ingredients. It was the only time I've ever been able to see the stars that well, here, and it was amazing to be able to go up to the roof and see the Milky Way yawning over the entirely dark city.
It was not the end of the world.
In a city like New York it would have been difficult to continue its primary industries without the computers, but let's remember that even it, and every other place, existed for a long time before electricity was even invented. So in a place like Puerto Rico, which is not a hub for manufacturing or knowledge work, they should have been able to cope after a period of adjustment. All the problems you listed, food preservation, cooking, heating, water, were solved without electricity a long time ago.
But for me, Puerto Rico's experience is another spur to move to distributed power generation by putting solar panels on your roof and a wind turbine on your property (provided, of course, that wind speeds where you are suffice) and adding a battery to smooth capacity over time. Independence and resilience are virtues in an inconstant world.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ledow on Thursday April 19 2018, @12:29PM (5 children)
Absolutely.
But it's not that simple.
For a start, I live in a country where solar /wind power, especially for heating, is so impractical as to be useless. Plus I don't own enough roofspace to make it viable even if I could afford the panels and was prepared to take the hit. Literally, I wouldn't be able to heat the house or shower most of the year, and the panels wouldn't pay back their purchase cost.
Then you have that all the other methods of heating are either illegal (e.g. burning wood isn't really viable for more than burning garden waste in or around any major city, and even wood-burning stoves have to burn approved fuel and can't do it at all in smoke-less zones) or require preparation (e.g. gathering lots of wood) or lots of manual labour (sure, granny might find a friendly woodcutter, but we know the trouble that gets you into).
It's not "end of the world" but it's certainly "suspension of modern life". We all do that at some point, deliberately or not, to go camping or whatever. But it's not anywhere near as comfortable or viable as you might think, especially if you've known nothing else. Run a scout group in a large city and you'll find out quite how many kids can't cook, light a fire (or sustain it), catch food, etc. etc. etc. That's not new either, we're several generations down the road of most people NOT being able to do that.
If you lost power in a major city nowadays, you're not far from the old "deny a meal three meals" concept - when they have not frozen or chilled food available, and nothing to heat up a tin of soup without having to gather materials, then you're into the point where modern civilisation is certainly tested even if it doesn't result in utter collapse.
When the temperature blips down a bit for a flash-storm, you get a spike of old people dying because they just can't cope with it. Such things as an extended power cut in, say, London would result in deaths. Maybe even riots. Certainly a suspension of modern lives that people would talk about for decades afterwards.
Sure, I'll be quite happy. I'll break out my camping gear and start improvising some gadgets. But without power, even petrol pumps (gas stations) won't work, so you can't even power your generator without getting in range of a fist-fight at the local filling station. Everything becomes a struggle again.
What happens in terms of business, industry, etc.? Who cares? They'll recover or not. But it's the effect on households and people that won't. Everything from running water (how's that work if they have no power) to cooking food, heating (or cooling) the home to transport, gathering food and supplies to dealing with things like burglaries and looting (no alarms!).
Electricity is one of the basic things that once you get it, you can't really take it away from people without risking some kind of degradation of society. There isn't a society in the world (that I can think of) that's truly reverted from electricity/Internet back to not having it by choice. There's a reason for that.
Pre-electrical eras were hard-living. People expect their 1/3rd leisure time these days and that would just evaporate, despite us being MUCH better off nowadays in terms of generation, lighting requirements, etc.
We can't go hoping that we can fuel the nation with renewables if we can't even manage to keep a country supplied with the electricity that we have no problems generating.
(Note: My employer has a large solar install, covering most of its roofs, in a property that spans a 28 acre site. It's maintained regularly. It's built in the last few years. It's very expensive. I just had a look at it. It would just about boil a kettle at the moment, if you were happy to wait a while for it).
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday April 19 2018, @01:04PM (2 children)
Chaos can follow electricity outages, but does not necessarily. New York City is as big as they come, but chaos did not ensue during the 2003 blackout. People walked home, offered total strangers rides if they lived further out, and helped each other out. It was extraordinarily orderly, and completely spontaneous. So many non-New Yorkers love to imagine the city as vicious and predatory, but that was not in evidence.
What did happen, as far as coping skills are concerned, is that people who do know how to rough it or make do without electricity, became local heros for a time. They taught others. And, New York being a city of immigrants from all over the world, there was no shortage of people who grew up in mud huts in Africa or shacks in the backwoods of Appalachia, who had those skills.
There is an adjustment period, to be sure, but people can be remarkable adaptible when they have to be. Losing power is not the end of the world, it's just a different world.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 19 2018, @10:02PM
During the NYC blackout in 1977, I was in Vermont at summer camp and missed all the fun. There was plenty of looting and mayhem and I (sadly) had no part in it.
During the blackout in 2003, I was in California at a family function and missed that too. However, the only looting shown on the news was that of a donut store in Flushing [wikipedia.org] (right next to an electronics store that was not looted). This strongly implies that it was the police [wikia.com] that were involved in that.
As a life-long resident of NYC, it was odd that I managed to avoid both of the city-wide black outs of the last forty years.
N.B.: My neighborhood did not suffer any power outages from Hurricane Sandy [wikipedia.org], although, horror of horrors, my window sills did get quite damp.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 19 2018, @10:26PM
Do you recall what the cause of the blackout was?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Thursday April 19 2018, @01:14PM (1 child)
Sewage is the real problem. You can drink out of the local river (well, I would filter it but animals and pets are unaffected so humans probably would survive off river water) and plenty of people fish the local river for fun, but when the sewage treatment plant anywhere local or upsteam shuts down and dumps untreated into the river, its all over. Nothing but 500 foot deep wells (admittedly all diesel backups; I have a diesel engine maint mechanic cousin who worked the maint contract for the pump stations)
I imagine even the sheer smell of a river turned into a cesspool would be problematic aside from disease.
Most residential buildings are still constructed to survive without electricity, enough openable windows, etc. Many (most?) large commercial buildings are definitely not. Pitch black, 150F in the summer, 100% humidity until the black mold destroys the building...
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday April 20 2018, @10:29AM
That might be true elsewhere, but NYC for one gets its water from upstate and that's gravity fed. Sewage flows into the harbor, which the ocean kindly flushes every few hours.
The smell would suck for the first couple of days, but the nose adjusts quickly. Ask people in farm country if they notice the smell of livestock.
Hot weather is much less fun without AC, but survivable. If the power went out long term people would rediscover dormers and other tactics used before electricity, and which many buildings in NYC still have (my 120-yr old building in Brooklyn does).
Washington DC delenda est.