How Long Would Society Last During a Total Grid Collapse?

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I lived with out electricity for almost three weeks in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina. I washed my clothes in a swimming pool and bathed in a creek. Three weeks with no lights, A/C or running water. By that third week we had exhausted all of our food and water resources and had begun standing in lines for basic supplies. Then one day while sitting in the living room around sunset the power just turned back on. It was like a modern miracle!!

Society is far more fragile than any of us want to believe

It’s scary how vulnerable we are to the system.

I went without electricity for 10 days when Sandy hit in 2012. I almost feel guilty writing how it was an amazingly positive experience. A few neighbors had generators so we had hot coffee every morning (it was cold outside!) everyone worked together and we all considered it a forced “vacation”. But that was because we had trust that our town would take care of us. And they did. We went to Target with flashlights and paid cash for supplies. We gave snacks and drinks to the electric company employees who worked 24/7 out in the cold. When I look back, it was a positive memory but I can totally see things going “bad” if we didn’t get power back…

As a Grid Operator, you are spot on and no one thinks about the little things that electricity provides. No phone services, water, natural gas, gas/diesel. All powered by electricity. That same ice storm in 2021, I was sitting pretty with a generator, working heat and enough food for a week. But knowing what I know, had it been longer, it could have been a lot worse. Be prepared.

My father was an electrical engineer who designed power distribution systems in rural areas. He was always very concerned with the fact his industry and the government never seemed to take the threat of attacks on the system, or a system wide blackout, very seriously. He actually worked on a set of proposed guidelines to harden certain infrastructure. No one cared until 9/11 happened, and he actually had DHS call him (when it was brand new) because there was no guidance for that kind of thing, they had to start somewhere. I often think of what he would have thought of the way things are now, because he was obsessed with providing reliable electricity. He'd be livid I'm sure. But he would have enjoyed this video a great deal.

We lost power during that winter storm in Texas and we were NOT prepared. Ever since I’ve been storing water, wood, non perishables, everyday essentials ect. Out of all our immediate relatives we were the only ones who lost power and really felt the impact. We ended up going to my in-laws on day 3 without power. I’ll never forget how angry my father in law made me when I voiced how the whole ordeal made me realize how unprepared we were. He made the comment “oh this will never happen again” I was enraged. It made me prep even more and I’ve never stopped. Long story short that event shook me up enough to get my house in order.🤷🏽‍♀️

It was rough and I have a backup generator. Some friends of ours, an elderly couple, were out of power for 3 weeks. I took over a bunch of firewood and meals and we took hot coffee daily. This wonderful woman made 3 square meals a day in a Dutch oven set in the fireplace and shared food with us every time we came over. We all helped each other but learning to be more self sufficient is invaluable.

I live in Hong Kong, last year there was a total blackout occurred in a town of 300,000 population due to a power facility was on fire. In densely populated area like Hong Kong, especially when most people here had never live without electricity, the society show signs of breaking in a matter of hours. People were very worried and some even started crying on the street after about an hour without electricity and communication service. Because we house thousands of people in a single building and buildings are packed closely together. People who cannot go home due to the lack of working elevators, some of us cannot buy food and water immediately because we rely on electronic payment so heavily that we don’t have cash. Even for those who have cash, most stores do not trade because their cashier is connected via network and didn’t work properly. Those people started to break down and disrupt society order within a very short period of time. Luckily there were signs of power grid recovery and phone service were totally recovered within a few hours, otherwise the affect on human can cause more damage than the power outage itself. I think you may want to explore that issue in this series too.

I think the thing that scares me the most is nobody know how to make the grid run without the computer telling them how. That is alarming.

I weathered Snowpocalypse in Texas. I had food, gas heat, and a generator and did just fine. I did travel outside my neighborhood to get more gas for my generator and it was immediately apparent that we were close to having a total breakdown in order because no stores had power. I could see the panic on people’s faces and in how they were acting.

As a professional engineer who works for a water and sewer utility in northern Virginia, I can tell you that we conduct tabletop exercises all the time designed to simulate our response to events just like this. We also "game out" other events, such as water contamination in the Potomac River, contamination of water already in the distribution system, floods, fires, hurricanes, snow storms, transmission main breaks, and all manner of "Force Majeure" events that could potentially disrupt service to our customers. A lengthy outage in the power grid is certainly crippling, but it's not the only scenario that could potentially deprive water and sewer service to people who normally take it for granted, thanks to the hard work of highly trained, skilled employees whose work seldom is even noticed by their customers (unless something goes wrong).

Hey! I’m a Transmission operator at a utility in texas. I worked through the storm and it wasn’t pretty. A lot is going on in the background to keep things going. We were in charge of shedding firm load at the request from ERCOT. It wasn’t an easy job. We knew what we had to do but it was also in the back of our minds that we were effectively putting people back into the Stone Age in freezing temps. It still messes with me to this day. TSOs are also responsible for black starting the grid once it goes down. We have extensive process and procedures to do that and we train twice a year on a simulator to hone our skills. God forbid the grid ever does go down, but you can be assured a great group of people are behind the scenes doing everything possible to get the lights back on. Even on a normal day, with planned switching something bad can happen and bring down a part of the grid. It’s up to us to make sure that doesn’t happen. We don’t settle for being perfect only 98% of the time. We HAVE to be perfect 100% of the time.

"Society is, at any given time, two missed meals and a switched-off light from collapse.

A perfect storm is brewing in the United States. Inflation, bank collapse, severe drought in the agricultural belt, recession, food shortages, diesel fuel and heating oil shortages, baby formula shortages, available automobile shortages and prices, the price of living place. It's all coming together and it could lead to a real disaster towards the end of this year (or sooner). With inflation currently at about 6%, my primary concern is how to maximize my savings/retirement fund of about $300k which has been sitting duck since forever with zero to no gains.

That description of waking up not because of noise but from silence is so accurate. The eerie feeling you get and the slight panic realizing that you didn’t have a backup plan, and just the way the house feels when nothing is working as it should

I lived without electricity for the first seven years of my life and I remember it well. We farmed with a horse and plow, had an outhouse, a smokehouse, a woodpile for the woodstove, a well that we hand pumped and carried water inside and had kerosene lamps at night. I realize we bought gasoline for the car we had but the old wagon that they had used until I was born still sat outback. Life was good in a different way then. I don't think many people now would know how to do that anymore.

fist thing in a long term situation is as soon as you get the emergency broadcast of a serious blackout, fill your bath tub and bottles you may have with water

If it was a total grid failure after a month or two, we wouldn’t be able to keep or there’s a book called one second after and they go over that very thing.