Signed copies of my new book, Engineering In Plain Sight, are starting to run low. Pick one up before they run out (they make great gifts)! store.practical.engineering/
Don't have a signed copy but got my pre-order the other week, plenty to keep me entertained 👍 Edit: Just realised the chapters are colour coded as well. A lot of thought went into the book
Preparing for a Black Start does not make sense in a democracy, since the funds can be better deployed elsewhere. The chances of a total system collapse within any particular administration is very low, and can always be blamed on prior administrations anyway. Therefore, it makes no logical sense to invest in this emergency preparation
@@TechIOwn The illustrations are so great! And it was especially fun to read Grady's introduction, explaining how his RUclips channel and the book came to be! 😎✌🏼
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!!
That's exactly what it feels like !! Northern Maryland, after a "minor" but slow moving hurricane. My small old town of 10,000 , lost power for 2-3 days. But the electric pole for me and a cfew neighbors fell so we went without for almost a week until the pole was replaced. It was August which normally would be intolerable without AC, but the storm had cleared out the humidity thank god and we had power at my job, so I was able to recharge my cell there. |Fortunately, the town had its own water plant with emergency power , so I had water which is so much more important! Came home one night and the lights were on and AC had kicked on!! So happy !! It really makes you appreciate modern life. Lost about $150 of food though.
I remember that, too. I was only 10. My family evacuated to the Northshore, and our relatives' house was supplied by well water, so when they lost power, they also lost water. They thankfully had a generator, so we at least had AC and could watch TV. A few years later, we moved not far away from them. Then Ida happened last year. It felt like the sequel to Katrina, except without NOLA being flooded.
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.
A non-engineer friend worked for a large electrical utility became frightened when they learned how vulnerable the system really is with some critcal pieces not being replacable for months or even years.
Up in the Glen Ellen area in NorCal in October of 2017, the massive wildfires burned up big power lines in the area. The woke people running the State of California ordered the removal of diesel powered emergency water pumps at the Water District facility ''because they pollute our atmosphere''. They went to 100% electric pumping. As a result, one of my firefighter friends working that area sent me video of dead fire hydrants....no water at all. Their truck carried 400 gallons of water and it normally gets hooked up by a hose to the fire hydrant for almost unlimited water flow. He and his crew had to watch houses burn down and could do nothing about it. Water Districts very commonly had diesel emergency water pumps. Stupidity caused them to be removed.
TV news anchor Ted Koppels non-fiction book "Lights Out" detailed this problem years ago...its real and it's a matter of time before it occurs again...the longer it last the worse things will get.
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 happened to be there when it happened. It was a surreal experience, seeing lights gradually converted to darkness before your eyes within minutes. People were walking in the park with their smartphone torches, like fireflies in a forest. One could even see the light pollution in the sky, from the other districts with intact power. btw it was June 2022, not yet last year😂
I'm an electrician and frequently upgrade distribution systems on large apartment buildings and my god even with advanced notice all hell breaks loose when we cut the power to transfer onto a portable generator to preform work. "It's too noisy, can you turn it off. How long before we get power back (15minutes into an 8hour scheduled outage)" We were having mechanical issues with the 500Kva generator where it would only run for 2hrs before shutting down and people were throwing food off their balconies because it was spoiling and screaming while doing so.
@@Alexanderthegreat616 I have some friends that work for CLP, and we happened to be talking about this a few days ago - to me, the most worrying thing is that they have no idea what the initiating event was - they have determined it wasn't mechanical damage, overload or overvoltage, but nothing past that. Since there are 4 more of those cable bridges in other locations in HK, it makes we worry they might just decide to catch fire at some point..
That kind of lifestyle combined with a lack of disaster preparedness does not sound like a good blueprint for society. I live on the east coast of the US where big snow storms and hurricanes are a regular part of life. I've lived through multiple multi-day electrical outages to include a several day grid collapse. People were annoyed yes but panicked? Absolutely not.
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…
Sounds like a really nice town! I lived in Florida and heard stories from locals where neighborhoods form heir own little watch groups to prevent looting when hurricanes take power out for a week or two.
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.
Hey at least he tried. Unfortunately, it looks like an entire powerplant would have to be destroyed and millions lose electricity before something will actually be done.
Almost surprised they didnt call him and accuse him of something. Thats usually what happens to people in the software world that report these kind of vulnerabilities.
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).
That is actually encouraging. As a fighter pilot, we do EP (Emergency Procedures) "tabletops" and "stand ups" and basically just walk through the problems too. An instructor will put you in a scenario and say "and you feel a vibration and get a Master Caution XYZ or whatever...you have the aircraft" and you ask questions to analyze the situation and take it to a logical conclusion. It is an incredibly effective way to prepare and it is encouraging to hear that our critical infrastructure providers are doing something similar! Thank you!
I live in Prince Edward Island, Canada. When hurricane Fiona hit us this fall our entire province lost power, and it took 13 days to restore power to 50% of the province. My area of around 3000 customers was without power for 17 days, but even entire neighbourhoods in the capital city of Charlottetown were without power for more than two weeks. It was a difficult time for my family, but infinitely worse for people in apartments and nursing homes that had no lighting and limited heat and water access.
Lost power for 10 days and was cutoff by flood in 96 in rural CA. Our pantry came through and our wood burner kept us warm. The city freaks out us rural folks make a cup of coffee and relax.
When we had the big ice storm here in Toronto some areas were without power for 6 days. People in apartments with no running water, no toilets, no elevators or lights. Older people living high up were trapped without those things. I'm glad I live in a house.
I lost electricity for 27 days after hurricane Sandy and it was a nightmare even though my ex and I were prepped to a certain extent. We had two generators and three small children at the time , plus a neighbor with a newborn and two more small children. No one would have survived without working together and I mean that quite literally. Seven of my neighbors in my area of far Rockaway, nyc, died during or in the aftermath of the storm and all of my neighbors lost everything they owned if they lived on a lower level. I can’t stress enough the importance of both preparedness and the kindness of neighbors and strangers. I’m forever grateful and thankful for my neighbors and friends who did fuel runs, donated money for fuel and food, and helped with childcare, snow shoveling, etc etc etc. I know the world can be a scary place but people can surprise you with their generosity and kindness too.
I have been working hard on this problem accidentally for my whole life. I have gotten the idea to the cascade party, soon hopefully you won’t need to worry. So much is coming for you, so much good. I picked you to tell because “Hurricane sandy” Little hint
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.
Obviously I can only speak for myself, I didn't mind the blizzard or the blackouts. So don't let that bother you too much. Some of the best sleep I've ever had under a good pile of blankets!
@@trentvlak we have dedicated phone lines and back up phone lines along with cell phones. We also have a satellite phone system to stay in touch with ERCOT and neighboring utilities in case all phone lines and cell towers go down. If all of that fails we still have 2 way radio. Communication is a big part of what we do.
I live in Oklahoma and experienced a power outage that lasted for 20 and some odd days due to a major ice storm a long while back. I’ll never forget the sounds…shortly after the rain started and the temperatures dropped, the electricity failed. A few hours after that I stepped outside on my front porch. It was eerily quiet. Nothing much more than the incredibly soft sound of the freezing rain…at first, that is. All around me I started to hear loud cracks and popping sounds. It dawned on me fairly quickly that those sounds were coming from the woods in which my home was located. Branches, and shortly after entire trees, were snapping due to the weight of the ice that was accumulating everywhere. Trees were falling all around the area. Roads were blocked with branches and trees…not that getting around on the ice covered streets was even possible…let alone safe. Eventually my roof gave way in a number of places as trees were falling on my home. Holes in the roof, windows broken, cars trapped, and not much that could be done about it. It was so bizarre hearing not the background noise that everyone no longer really hears…but only the sound of the outside world breaking and crashing down. People were gathering in groups in houses that had fireplaces and other means of keeping warm. Houses were filled with three or four families. People were having to trek through the fallen trees to check on family, friends, and neighbors. Ambulances were parked and the EMTs were carrying stretchers with patients strapped to them for long distances over the accumulated debris. It was rather difficult for a lot of people, and really made people understand just how fragile things really are.
i live in florida so we get hurricanes every so often for many years. as a result the power companies have learned how to deal with them better. one of the things they do is make sure there are no tree branches overhanging lines and for homes in general, people keep trees that will fall over away from homes. most of the trees that fall over were no meant to be here and have shallow root systems rather then ones that go deep into the earth. in other cases someone will buy a grown palm tree that just has a small root ball and prop it up, well they have no real amount of roots and naturally fall over no matter what you do. the ones that grew from a seedling however? they dont budge. though im not sure of the details, we used to have lines that would just go down in high winds, even during regular storms the lights would flicker, now the lines are strong enough to withstand a category 1 without issue and the power usually doesnt go out at all. So i do see similarities, im sure people there now get rid of trees that arnt in good condition and remove ones that are near their home. hopefully the power company takes better care of the lines by keeping trees trimmed or removed from near lines. during one really bad storm we went without power for somewhere around 6-8 weeks. followed again by another hurricane a week or so later for no power again for another week or two. definitely not fun but thankfully we had a generator and were able to run it long enough for a fridge and a small window box AC unit to keep it cold enough at night to sleep. People at that time still went around as normal for jobs and the like. lots of people eating out in the few places that had generators or had grills. for a number of weeks there were only 2 such places for a city of over 100,000 people. im not sure of the exact population since its been growing for years and this was probably 12-17 years ago.
I think I know which storm you are talking about. I drive OTR. I was hauling a load thru OKC during the late 2000's when a major ice storm hit. Was difficult to even see the road there was so much ice coming down. I was on I-40 around 1600. Was starting to ice up pretty good by then. When I reached OKC about 90 minutes later it was really bad. The last lights I saw were at a Wal-Mart. As I passed it up it's lights also blinked out. I couldn't even tell I was driving thru a city it was so dark and silent. I cracked my window and it was creepy how little sound there was. Was so dark I couldn't see more than a few feet beyond the truck. But I did manage to make it thru OKC. It was slow going and very dangerous. Definitely some white-knuckle driving! Up thru I-35 and out of the ice.....right into a snowstorm on I-70. That was a pretty rough weather event for a lot of people!
@@lukesmith4440 You are absolutely correct! It was honestly one of the fastest “turns of events” I’ve ever dealt with before. It was fairly warm outside…then the rain started to fall. Worse yet…the temperature also started dropping. Together it made for one of the fastest and one of the worst winter storms I’ve ever experienced. Things happened ever so quickly, and no one was truly prepared for it. How could you be ready for something such as that? The only other “event” that I feel comes anywhere close to it was the tornado that touched down in Joplin, Mo…which was basically in my backyard. I have photographs of the devastation left in the wake of that EF-5. It’s heartbreaking. Again, these situations show how fragile our society can be once the electricity we depend on has been stripped away from us. Thank you for sharing your experience of this incident with us. I am glad that you made it through it safely…as being an OTR driver tends to be incredibly stressful and difficult at the best of times.
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 East Texas and was without power for 9 days during the 2021 freeze. My standby generator kept my house going and my fireplace kept my house warm. Our home went from accommodating just my wife and I to hosting about 14 people. They all brought food from their homes and we probably had enough meat to accommodate the whole crew. We were glad to be able to comfortably help out two more households without any discomfort. We were truly blessed.
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
yea, we had a small power outage here and that silence is deafening. I had to turn my laptop on and turn on a movie so I could go to sleep. I need the hum of the refrigerator or my tv to sleep.
Only tangently related, but I wonder if that phenomenon is some kind of evolutionary/instinctual reaction. Imagine how a loud jungle/savannah environment quiets when a predator is about. Sudden silence of the din of usual bird/insect sounds triggering some kind of survival alertness instinct
the noise aboard navy ships is a constant roar. no noise means something very bad just happened to the power plant, as an emergency generator electrician that was more effective than an alarm clock for me. it literally took years for me to sleep at night after i retired.
@@AI_Overlord Nature is often extremely silent. It can be loud, sure, but frequently it's far quieter than our modern environment full of fans and compressors.
During my apprenticeship training at a power station, I was stationed in a remote rural area which was generating 700 MW. I remember there was a cyclone warning. I've experienced blackout and total grid failure inside the control room of the power plant, It was the most tiresome and adventurous and dangerous work i had to do with the team it took about 2 hours to bring back power, it was night time and it was raining heavily and there was thunderstorms outside. I respect the engineers who work at the power stations.
I worked at a 1,200 MW power station during the east coast blackout. That was weird. A massive 13 story building that was normally so loud that ear plugs are required that was now so incredibly quiet with nothing but the sound of pipes ticking and other items making slight groaning as they slowly cooled. A layer of smoke was from the roof all the way down to about 6 feet from the turbine deck. As we walked along with flashlights or lights on our hardhats the still layer of smoke would part and move along that night like an inverted wake from a boat. It was quite surreal.
The most practical alternative for the individual is to Just STOP Being A SLAVE The Grid altogether !!! Many people around the World have already chosen to Live Off The Grid as a part of the Minimalist Movement, which encourages people to grow their own food and to generate their own electricity. Kirsten Dirksen's RUclips channel has 100's of cases of people who have found ways of becoming Self Sufficient and Independent by learning How To Live Off The Grid !!! Of course, there are people like the Dummy Engineer who made this video who actually like being a Slave of Big Brother.
Puerto Rican here. I spent three months without power in 2017, knew some who spent many, many more. There was a total breakdown of the healthcare system. Many people died of things like asthma attacks and diabetic shock simply bc the hospital couldn't treat them or they couldn't get to the hospital. I remember being very afraid of getting sick or having an accident in those first few weeks because I knew going to the hospital might end up killing me. Five years later, three-day blackouts are normal. Brownouts are a daily thing. The grid still isn't fixed.
This is unacceptable. You're an American territory and should never have to experience this. I don't know the specifics of the politics but it's better to help you now instead of helping you after a crises.
@@teddybar66 Thank you. The fact that we are an American territory does not mean we should not go through this; no one should go through this and yet it happens every day all around the world. Our grid relies on coal and oil, which most people here agree need to be phased out, but the political situation in which we are beholden to the whims of the US Congress means we can’t make decisions about our own energy future. That is why I personally support the independence of Puerto Rico and breaking all ties with the United States. We are going in different directions as nations, and Puerto Rico is entitled to make its own way.
186 days on the street in st croix. We still get outages weekly, new solar now short of 3 days of total cloud cover we can stay up. May not have ac all day but we can keep things going
The system in its entirety is larger than we can even fathom. I own my home, without a mortgage but I fear I could still lose it in a total collapse to the county that would still demand the property taxes, regardless of what is happening in the world around us. Could you pay your bills without a banking system? How about feed yourself, your family, and your pets when grocery stores are empty? Could you defend yourself from your neighbors who may just become desperate enough to decide to take what little you have by force? A power outage is one thing, a prolonged collapse of the power grid is a whole other nightmare.
@Shadow_Banned_Conservative I think if it gets that bad, the last thing the government would worry about would be property taxes...and we probably wouldn't give that a second thought. We own our property, and live in the mountains well away from major cities...we could last longer than most but I still would have to resort to desperate measures to ensure my families survival. Remember one thing...WSHF we are absolutely on our own. If you consider someone a threat in a situation, you are probably right and should take appropriate action.
@@smokerise I agree with you on taking care of your family, but government will not stop in the revenue collection department, if anything they'll be even more aggressive going after those of us who still have some means to pay or confiscate from. Sure, you may get a temporary reprieve from your taxes due today, but they will be tallying the total and coming for them tomorrow. The question is, will we be able to pay on that day if we've been financially wiped out?
@@Shadow_Banned_Conservativethis is why guns are so important. If they collapse the system and demand property tax you have to use other means to keep your property
I worked with SCADA in an industrial facility and due to the high pressure and high temperature processes our engineering department made sure all our PC's within the control station and the sensors throughout the facility had UPS backup in case of power loss. I was on shift when the local power grid went down. The lights went off inside, but all the computers kept on going. Unfortunately they hadn't thought to add a UPS unit to the router/comms unit that sent all the commands from our PCs to/from the sensors, etc. So I sat there for a minute hoping it was maybe taking a while to kick in, before madly running around manually operating various valves before pressure relief valves started blowing all over the site. That was fun.
That's more normal than people think. And nobody plans for long-term. Many don't even maintain the UPS equipment they have not realizing that this is necessary. We can't do a real-life test of a major grid-down event so really we're only guessing what will need to be dealt with when it comes; like you've seen there's going to be many surprises, and not happy ones
@@P_RO_ Yeah. The real failure in planning is often that people do individual checklist items, such as "have backups of your software and data," but don't focus on _disaster recovery._ In IT I've seen plenty of situations where people had backups, but were unable to restore them after an event because they'd never even worked out how they would do it, much less tested a system for doing it.
@@Curt_Sampson That knowledge that the system has to work end-to-end is what made my personal HD backup be as simple as possible. It's just rsync, so if my HD fails (its the main failure mode I want to protect against) then once I have a re-installed OS, I just drag the files back over, because the backups aren't in some special compressed format, they're just regular files (and links when the files haven't changed between backups).
I think the worst part for us during the Texas Snowpocalypse was when the main water supply line between our small town and Luling burst because of the freezing temps, and our water towers were dangerously low because everyone had been dripping their faucets at night to keep their pipes from freezing. The lack of clean water was horrific, and the stores were running out. We saved the bottled stuff for drinking and melted snow to flush toilets. Then we were asked to conserve natural gas, so we huddled up in one room to save heat and cooked on the fire pit outside. The good news? We managed to clear a lot of dead wood in the back yard!!
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.
I heard a guy say "pretend it's the 1800's. That's what might happen someday when you least expect it. Being prepped helps because it doesn't matter what's up...we will deal with it 👍👍
@@lisalee2885 It wouldn't be like the 1800's. it would be much worse because our infrastructure isn't built that way anymore. In the 1800's you'd still have a store to go to, and likely a farm yourself. You'd have horses for transportation. Etc.
@@lisalee2885 yeah but think of the number of people who wouldn’t even survive without toilet paper. A large percentage, likely a majority, would be totally and utterly lost
Im 48 and grew up poor in southern ohio. We used to hunt and farm alot of our food. We had power and tv but tv really didnt come until i was older except for the 3 channels we could pick up with rabbit ears. We had wood burner and kerosene heaters. I also had what would likely be worth a good sized house worth of arrow heads from that land. I wouldnt trade it for anything either. I can still cure hides not to mention farm and hunt. Even better, i can teach others to.
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.🤷🏽♀️
First they say it will never happen. Then they say "It will never happen again". Well done for being humble enough to learn from the experience! I'll never understand the deliberate arrogance and foolishness of many people these days.
You learned a valuable lesson in a bad but less tan lethal situation. Good for you on changing directions and being better prepared next time.there will be a next time and your inlaws might be coming to you for help.
It's called "live and learn". I live in a hurricane zone and I can tell you from experience: - At the first sign of a power outage lasting more than maybe 8 hours, take a shower / shave and clean up (you won't know when the next opportunity will be), and fill your bathtub with clean water to drink. - Put a few buckets outside to collect rain water for flushing toilets and washing stuff. - Take your cars out and gas them up. Also, fill two 5-gal jerry cans with gasoline. You can always use it later if nothing bad happens. - Always keep some canned foods in stock on your pantry. Just Beefaroni, Spaghetti-O's, Deviled ham or beef, you get the picture. Protein drinks like Ensure or Boost are also good, and they don't have to be refrigerated. These are foods that can be eaten cold if necessary, even if you don't like that sort of thing. Like my Mom would say, "If you were hungry, you'd eat it!" - Charge all cellphones and keep them charged. They are your first line of information and communication. Also, make sure you have a portable battery-powered AM/FM radio available. - Your gas or oil heating system will run off of a 12-volt battery. Look up how to connect one on RUclips. A/c; not so much. - Have a good first-aid kit in your house, always stocked. If you use something, replace it immediately as soon as you can. If you are on prescriptions, always make sure that you never have less than a 90-day supply on hand at ANY time. Make sure you explain to your doctor why you need this. If he's reasonable he'll comply with your needed Rx refill dates. - Always keep $1000 in fives and tens hidden somewhere in your house. If credit-card machines go down, how will you buy anything? - Have a few cheap battery-operated lanterns in your house that you can take room to room at night. And make sure you have the batteries! - If you can't afford the cost of a portable gasoline generator, and a switch into your house (less than $4000 installed by an electrician), buy a power invertor for your car for less than $100. At least it will give you a source of low emergency AC power if you should need it, and on the road. - Some might debate this, but I think it's always wise to have a small firearm available for self-defense. Criminals run wild in the dark. And the police will have their hands full as it is. - And most of all, HAVE AN ESCAPE PLAN. Friends or relatives that you can go to in a REAL social emergency until things pass. You can go 300 miles on a tank of gas; 600 miles if you can refuel along the way. That's a pretty big radius and will only take you one day to traverse. Your best bet is always to get out of the danger / disaster zone. These aren't "prepper" plans. They are just common sense in a disaster situation. If you do all this I think that you'd last longer than 90% of the population (outside of maybe, public shelters, which I never plan on going to again).
I was a technician at a power plant before I retired. Everything you said about the grid is correct. I usually volunteered to stay at the plant for hurricanes. No one was allowed to leave until everything was back to normal. The food was terrible but double time after 12 hours made for a great paycheck.
@@OptimusWombat We had the same thing essentially. time + 1/2 8-12 hours, double time after that in a single day. After 20 hours of OT in a pay period it was all 2x. Big paychecks with big taxes....sigh.
I remember when the bad ice storm took our power out for two weeks in rural Ohio. We did fine due to having a wood stove, and the ability to melt ice in pans on said stove. Many were not so lucky to have wood heat, and even then many didn't have to wait 2 weeks like us. Cant imagine wide spread loss witbout alternative heat sources.
I was close to panic from even 2 days where we had no wood heat, no food that didn't need to be heated, and almost no gas in the car. Laying in bed shivering and hungry with literally nothing to do for 20+ hours a day is...not feasible long term.
Back in the 1970's I was a Stationary Engineeer at University of California San Francisco. This included 2 hospitals, 4 medical schools, a number of medical buildings and research facilities. One rainy day some water got into the conduit to a 12,000 volt transformer in the basement of a medical building and knocked out the whole campus, trapping people during operations, in elevators and on dialysis machines. Thankfully the Assistant Chief Engineer and I were in the turbine generator room when this happened. The main electrical distribution board was at one end of the room. We were able to get the power back on to most the campus within a minute. The building with the blown transformer was left black. Inside that building were people on dialysis machines that were stopped. The San Francisco Fire Department came to the rescue with portable generators with connectors specifically for these buildings. It was amazing how fast they were able to get power to those patients. Just one lesson about how dependent we are on the power grid. I'm no hero but wanted to give a big shout out to the San Francisco Fire Department.
We went through the outage in Texas. We lived out in a rural area an hour south of Houston. As the storm started to move in but it hadn't gotten to the peak yet, and they shut us all off out where we lived. They had us off for almost 3 days. Even running our fireplace and shutting off the living room as our "hold up" location, we couldn't get above 50 degrees. The second full day without power, the water in the toilet bowl was frozen solid. The failure of the system was an eye opener, "they" don't actually care about "us" as long as they have theirs. While I don't feel that the answer to much is to trust, believe in or ask the government for help. Be prepared to self rescue, no one is coming.
@@lauracooskey9481 "Even running our fireplace and shutting off the living room as our "hold up" location, we couldn't get above 50 degrees." Ran it all night with oak and pecan. Fireplaces are just innefficent, and the house was built in the late 60's, also innefficient and never built for those temps. Two years ago we built our own home [in a much cooler place, in the mountains] and installed a wood stove and that is, by far, the way to go. It's not as aestheticly pleasing but it is much more efficient.
Water freezing then broke pipes. Broken pipes water damaged items in homes. (Yes, pipes sometimes travel through the ceiling.) There weren't enough plumbers. And many had moved in with friends or family after the second day and weren't home when the first signs of the water started.
In case of an extended power outage shut off the water and heating to your hot water tank. You will then have about 20 to 30 gallons of drinkable water which will last a week or more depending on rationing and the number of occupants in your household. Also in a cold weather scenario, open up all you faucets and showers to drain the water into containers. This gives you a bit more water to drink, but it also prevents the water from cracking your pipes as the internal temperature of your house drops. So that when power is restored you will have safe and undamaged supplies again.
@@alexsimmons1803 is there some additive you could put in the hot water tank in this scenario that would kill legionella and allow you to drink the water?
@@cnafyi No. You need to heat the water, preferable to at least 60°C for about an hour once every couple of days to be safe. Allowing water temps to sit at 20-45°C for a few days (which is what an unpowered hot water tank will do as it gradually loses heat) is asking for trouble. Legionella is deadly. In any case, if town water supply is cut off, a mains pressure hot water tank isn't going to deliver much water anyway, unless you undo the drain plug (and probably deal with scale and sludge at the bottom of the tank). We have 5000 litres of tank water we can use in a pinch. Normally for garden only, it can be boiled for potable application. I also have an off grid solar PV and battery storage system which has the capacity to keep us going, even in our Winter. Also a backup generator which can run on fuel we normally have for general property maintenance equipment, and even use fuel from a car tank if necessary.
@@alexsimmons1803 Technically you could also still use that water if you sterilize it with bleach (make sure you know the correct percent per volume, and only use bleach with zero additives!!!!) once you need that water. It's normally prevented using chlorine in water systems, and the water in the tank is probably chlorinated anyways, through that will evaporate quickly when exposed to air. And really the risk comes for aerosolized particles that you inhale, more than drinking. But in cold weather, I would drain any water into other containers for sure just to save the tank from damage. That's an expensive repair!
The way you described the atmosphere when you first wake up during a power outage is spot on! I was in Austin when the power first went out and I'm a pretty heavy sleeper. There's very little that will wake me up. Hearing absolutely nothing coming from the things in my apartment that normally hummed away (fans, my PC, my fridge, the heater, the water heater) instantly woke me up in a sweat. I got on my phone and opened Twitter and the 1st thing I see is the message from ERCOT saying they were in a state of emergency. I had literally never heard of ERCOT before that morning. What followed were days with very limited power and by the 3rd day, the water stopped flowing. I feel like I can go quite a while without power, but when the water stopped, the situation got dire. Thankfully my parents were on a critical circuit in a different town and brought me water but a lot of people weren't as lucky. Nothing will make me forget how close it felt like the state was to a complete collapse.
@@jamescollins3647 nothing like a long outage to make the green idiots suddenly the local geniuses for having solar cells on the roof. now... if only someone had a water well
For SHTF comms, is why I was SO against getting rid of AM radio for widespread use. FM and even digital FM can easily be knocked out, or blocked, but AM is only as strong as the signal driving it. It may not be crystal clear, but easily audible enough with its simplicity to be useful.
I'm 53 and remember a snow/ice storm that hit us here in Northeast Georgia in the early 80's. We didn't have electricity for over 2 weeks and it was one of the most exciting things ever. At least for me at 12yrs. We took water ski's and made them into snow ski's, eating all foods cooked from a fire place and wood stove. The only entertainment was a radio and especially the weather radio in the hopes of more inclement weather and no school (very rarely). It was great times because I'm smiling ear to ear typing this...
I'm 62 and I grew up in the S.F.Bay Area in the '60's, '70's and '80's. I never knew a time when we didn't have dependable electricity. Oh there were times when the power went out for a few minutes, but the scenario that Grady mentioned, people in the S.F.Bay Area know absolutely nothing about!
@@goysb4jays566. Wow, that’s dark, really almost anything is survivable with the right attitude, and remember the old saying; what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”.
As a SCADA Specialist here in Texas, this video is the breakdown of one of my greatest fears - systemic breakdown of infrastructure. This is also why I got into the hobby of overlanding to see what I did and did not need to survive off grid for short to long durations of time while also getting to explore our country (and someday beyond that). I cannot recommend your channel enough. Thank you for making these videos!
I used to design SCADA interfaces for substations and once even for a static VAR substation. We embrace the gravity portrayed shown here. Have been to the Miles City DC to DC interchange.
20 years ago when I decided to become an apprentice electrician, a lot of my friends thought it was a poor decision. I had to explain to them how truly dependent we are on electricity. Even if new construction stops due to a recession or other cause, existing electrical systems in buildings still require maintenance.
I had it explained like this if all the doctors in the world disappeared we would survive. If all the electricians and electrical engineers disappeared everything collapses.
Your friends were fools. I have been an electrical contractor for almost 20 years and even through the worst financial strain, we made money. I always advise young men to go to trades, if even only to learn a real skill and then drop it if it ain't for you. If that trade is electrical...you will NEVER be unemployed.
This is extremely false, and I think it’s funny how you think that society depends on electricity. Electricity has some uses, but it’s mostly just a fad and it will wear away and people will realize that we can live without electricity, we did it for thousands of years and we can do it for thousands more. Once people realize that they don’t need electricity as bad as society tells them to you and all your electrical engineers will go out of business once and for all.
At some point electricity became just as essential as food and water. I highly encourage getting a generator installed, pretty much any electrical contractor has this service nowadays. Not only are you preparing yourself for the worst, but you are also helping the grid decentralize and become more robust.
So you get a gen and a diesel storage of 100-200L because of not then it's pointless.. because you have no power left to pump ⛽ at the station.. and if your talking a 6month -10year black out well your only buying time... Until everyone starts killing each other for resources.. no different from governments today
During hurricane Hugo I lived in a very rural area. 13 weeks with no electricity. We were one of 4 houses on a 9 mile dirt road. We took our tractors and chainsaws and opened the road ourselves. It took 15 days, Luckily my Dad had a 500 gallon diesel tank and a 300 gallon gasoline tank ready. The logs are mostly rotted but still visible to this day. They serve as a reminder how helpless the government is in a situation like that. Don't rely on anybody but yourself.
Not disaster related but relying on the govt related...I have pictures from the late 1800's of my Family and neighbors just BUILDING their own roads!! No Govt just area families and their draft horse teams with graders and everything needed to build a dirt road!! Same with dredging farm ponds or small lakes on their properties....they DID IT THEMSELVES!! Something we as a society have fallen TOO FAR away from!! Luckily I have learned some of those do it yourself skills from both sides of my Family but in a SHTF scenario where the power doesn't come back on for a very long time......I can tell you I'm glad I don't live in a major metropolitan area!! LOTS OF DEATH'S will occur!!
After the big freeze here in Texas the mill I work at was one of the first large energy consumers to come back online. For 9 days we were paid to stay running to keep load on the grid. It didn’t really make sense at the time, but since so many large consumers went down. It made it easier to keep power plants under load and bring things back.
What kind of milling? If you don't mind my asking, that is. Certain kinds of mills (i.e. grain mills) would still be worth running so long as you have the resources that need milling. Flours can be cooked into a variety of simple breads fairly easily, even with rudimentary fires.
Some commercial customers (and residential ones for that matter) are also just fortunate enough to share a feeder with critical utilities, and it’s not worth switching to partially shed the feeder for various reasons. So there were a lot of times people and companies experienced dramatically less time without power compared to others, and it would seem inexplicable unless you had an intimate knowledge of the interconnections you shared with critical infrastructure.
Ah! Nothing says the holiday spirit of friends and family gather like watching a video on total collapse of our infrastructure, plunging us into the dark ages! haha, Love the videos Grady you are doing us all a big favor
i lived 3 weeks in total black out in the montreal ice storm in 1998 when i was teenager. it was freakishly eerie. where i live now, we have massive wind storms that will knock power out for 1 to 7 days due to not being a priority to restore during outages. people will learn that how we have chosen to live in this modern society is beyond fragility, there is no structure to our technology, it's merely a house of cards
Hydro Qc. couldn't find the triangle of cities like Montérégie! It took them too long! We in Montréal,3 days without power. A woman had a gas heater so we went there! I helped @ a Tim Horton's to clean and serve clients. There was 3 times a welfare line waiting for hot food and beverages at night! La Belle Province was opened cause they had back-up and were gas. My comfort food was onion rings for sure!!! Came back the power @ about 5h30 AM. The streets were like icing on 🎂!
My parents in Châteauguay were the only people around, they had a freezer of food, wood stove and generator. It was kinda eerie at night, nobody around,all at the arena, just the stars.
Great point! Because of this risk (or vulnerability), everyone should really watch the award-winning documentary, Grid Down Power Up - Documentary, narrated by Dennis Quaid, which is now available free on RUclips . Additionally, on our website, we provide a mechanism to write emails & make phone calls to your specific legislators, regulators and board members of your public utility to ensure we get action taken to protect our great country. Please help us spread the word.
It’s hard to believe how fragile everything is until it’s broken down in such a detailed way like this! Makes me thankful for everything when I watch this channel. Thank you!
My family was stationed in Puerto Rico during Hugo. 3 weeks with out water, 4 weeks without power. I became very passionate about being prepared after that.
My family and I live in an isolated and remote Appalachian community of approximately 30 houses or so. We all know each other. When the power goes out we all check on each other and band together. Years ago the power went out for a week during a blizzard. We all heat with wood and checked up on each other. Blessed to live in a resilient community. Canning the produce from our garden every year gives us a solid food store too. Grew 500lbs of "taters" last season.
Grady, remember that when water pumping stops, so does fire fighting. Customers in the dark, start using fire for cooking and heat. Too often they end up with a structure fire. With no water, they can quickly lead to conflagration. Another hazard is overheated power lines, leading to lines sagging, and snapping. This can lead to widespread wildland fires, and fewer grid ties to perform restarts.
@@dbclass4075 Rivers and lakes aren't dependent on the grid. And generating power creates enough in-situ power to drive all the ancillary loads, like cooling.
@@benjaminjernfors A comment above literally said that technicians had to use PERSONAL generators' to power a company owned headend. So WHILE they SHOULD be backed up, you can't always be sure...
I'm an Electrical Engineer who's worked for a SCADA company providing software and hardware for utility and critical infrastructure. Having seen how these operators work and the level of importance they have, I never really considered in the past how important they were, now I feel they don't really get the recognition they deserve. If you are an operator working these industries and you happen to read this; You're doing a good job and don't let anyone tell you otherwise 👍
In South Africa we experience 4 - 10 hour outages most days. Surprisingly we have got used to it, some install solar, some have generators and many just adapt. What we have yet to encounter is a multi day blackout : that could lead to civil unrest, unfortunately.
We have been practicing for years for a total black out. Everything this guy talks about is already happening here. Stage 6 load shedding means no water. We already have had three Cholera outbreaks this year.
I purposely spend two weeks a year with no electricity on vacation. Plus we’ve lost electricity during several storms including blizzards. You either adapt or snap.
Have been in a black start situation at sea, it took several tries for various reasons, each try heated up the equipment rooms more and more, to the point the SCADA systems were overheating. The successful start up was a well choreographed dance of power and cooling. Energy and cooling for both equipment and people.
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.
I was here for that! I have a homesteading mentality and had stored oak wood in my back yard for the fireplace (every time anyone in the neighborhood cut any trees, I got what was available with my chainsaw). I was able to share the wood with my neighbor. We shared food and cooked in our fireplaces or grills. I duct taped flattened boxes together to make a barrier around my fireplace, with room for my chair and cooking needs. It was cozy there. I kept my phone charged so I would have something to do if I got bored. I used the car for that. Ha! I have since bought a BIG generator! Big enough to share with my neighbors and keep our freezers and refrigerators going. May never need it, but I have it and I have stored enough food to last 2 years.
We did fine during snowpocalyps. If you didn’t have a fireplace i bet that was terrible. Country folks fare much better than city folks and suburbanites. If there was no power for extended period thats a different ballgame. Propane runs out, marauders come in, now you’ve got Mad Max
@@RedRightHand652 didn’t hurt me any. It’s the people with their heads in the sand that had issues. While we don’t experience freezing that often on the Gulf Coast, it happens at least a couple times a decade and people should be ready.
It’s awful that they build houses without fireplaces now. Developers tell buyers “there’s no need for a fireplace in Texas.” I wanted a house with a fireplace but we couldn’t find one we could afford.
I live in Ukraine and right now our grid operates under literal missile strikes. And operates well given the circumstances, we have 4 hours rolling blackouts every day to reduce load. And full day blackouts on worst days. One thing i can say is having jackery-style charging station with full size outlet goes a long way. It allows to continue to power my gas house heating and other critical equipment. P.S. That's experience far away from frontline. People who live in southeastern regions have much more severe problems.
Our thoughts are with you. I never thought in the 21st century there would be anything like this in Europe. We are in awe of your determination to resist Putin and the bravery of your troops and people. Slava Ukraini!
Ihor, Ukraine is exactly what I was thinking about when I watched this video. In fact, Ukraine is a lot of what I think of every day regardless of what I'm doing or watching. Wishing all of you as close as possible to a safe and comfortable winter.
I live in rural Nova Scotia, Canada. We usually get hit with a hurricane, tropical storm or depression a few times every fall. Winter storms, although usually not as windy cause a lot of snow and ice damage to the grid. We lose power pretty well every storm, sometimes for days. Because of this, I have a gasoline powered generator connected to my house, with a minimum of three days worth of gas in jerry cans, preserved with fuel stabilizer. I make a concerted effort to rotate the gas out into a vehicle after six months, fill it with fresh gas and stabilizer, and store it once again. We have a wood stove with seasoned firewood available year round. Our camping gear is stored in the house, with naphtha for the camp stove and lantern. In addition, we always have a minimum of 72 hours worth of food, and cash on hand in small denominations ($5, $10 and $20s). I’m not one of those preppers that the History Channel would do a documentary on, but just a guy who has gone through this power outage thing more times than I care to think about. This is all fine in the short run, but should there be a system wide massive outage due to an EMP or solar flare causing the whole grid to go dark permanently, I really would not like to think of what that would be like for folks that aren’t even minimally prepared like we are.
I grew up out in the woods. There was a terrible ice storm once, about the year 2000, I remember we were out of power for two weeks. And the roads were so iced over that we couldn’t drive out to leave. Luckily, since we are so far from town and civilization we had a good stock pile of necessities. We burned wood in the fireplace to stay warm, and cooked over it too. Holiday season so family was over. It was a very nice break from normal life.
Is that in the north east? I remember a terrible ice storm around Ottawa, Canada either in 1997 or 1998. School bus wasn't going to come to pick me up and drive 1.5 hours for me to get to school.
LOL - he mentions in the video how a short time outage can be a fun sort of time. Two weeks??!! Lucky you were so well prepared! AND you had family over?? 😎 Definitely memories that will never be forgotten.......you lucky man..... 😘
I've already lived this. In 2011, a massive storm system caused a tornado outbreak in Alabama. One of the EF-5 tornadoes took down ALL the power transmission lines going into Huntsville, Al, bringing down the entire grid for the city and most outlying areas. It took nearly a week and a half to restore power to my apartment, and was an interesting way to end my last semester at college before graduating.
Rodney, I remember this quite well. Going almost two weeks without power was eye opening. The first few days we didn’t have water because someone shut off our water supply too…so not fun at all. I have lived through both the Bama and Texas power outages and neither were fun. At least it wasn’t as cold during the 2011 outage. In 2021, our house was 46 degrees when the power came back on.
No. You haven't lived through a Real event like Grady is talking about. In a disaster, it's usually a local event. He is talking about a National event. No one is coming to bring you water and food because it's the same where they are at. Within two weeks armed gangs will be hunting you to take whatever you have left. You will be joining one of them just to survive.
Not even close to being the same scenario. There was food being brought in, bottled water etc etc. if “the grid” goes down, it will be complete and utter chaos, especially in the big cities. 😂 and then it will spread, fast. 😂
The last 130 years of human civilization have been built on the widespread availability of electricity. From communication to banking, to city life to health systems, from transportation to logistics - the background of all our life depends exclusively on the power grid. Thanks for spreading this knowledge to a wider audience...
@Ray of Light 62 - You're not a ray of light- you're a beacon of intelligence 👍 There's a saying among old poor southern farmers you might understand: "A man with a mule can afford a tractor, but a man with a tractor can't afford a mule". With a field to eat from the mule needs nothing else but a tractor always does.
6 weeks was my personal record in Sept 1979 after a hurricane that hit Mobile. My wife said her family went about the same. We pumped gasoline at the stations by hand pumps through the plate cover fill holes. We had a gas range and waterheater and never lost gas or water. However other cities had power and sections of the city and county got water, power, gas every week during the cleanup. We were about the last...ironically we both lived downtown. Just depended on the street and the lost lines or flooded underground. All grids go down....I'd estimate two weeks, then the violence in cities and the rural areas guarding or blowing ridges to keep thousands or millions of urban migrants from descending on the short supplies.
Between earthquakes and winter storms, I’ve been without power for over 3 weeks this winter. Where I live, it’s pretty normal. As such, I have a gas generator, a portable solar battery system (Jackery 1000), a well stocked pantry, and the ability to light and heat without electricity. Redundancy is a good thing when we are talking about what is needed to live.
Really described the interconnected infrastructure well. Worked in Baghdad as a Civil Affairs officer and saw first hand how the puzzle is structured, especially in urban areas. IMHO, rural areas and folks are more resilient when it comes to dealing with a grid down situation. They tend to live a lifestyle not as dependent on modern day infrastructure as do urban folks. Stay safe, be prepared.
I lived in Venezuela for 19 years. (1998 to 2018). I experienced countless, days long blackouts. It's a very humbling experience, especially when you have 80+ hours a week without electricity for years and years. It's one of the most demoralizing things I can imagine. Yet, the effects it had on my awareness and preparedness in life I wouldn't trade for anything else. There's value in misery. I don't want anyone to experience what I lived, but hell I wish they could learn what I learnt without living it.
@@panmoncada7257 Be grateful about what you have. Don't vote democrat. Build a good and worthy relationship with your neighbours, and don't let politics ruin those relations.
@@manuelmendez980 I've lived 30 in a communist country (I'm Romanian), so I know what it feels like, but I still don't associate catastrophes with politics)
I've lived a total blackout more than once, but the major one was the blackout after hurricane María hit Puerto Rico. We didn't have water service for an entire month and no electric service for more than 2 months. The reason for this is because the engineers focused on getting electricity to water services and critical services, like hospitals. Communication was completely out for little less than a month. The only people carrying information to the Police, Hospitals, Firefighters, and other government agencies and departments were the Radio Amateurs. I remember that my dad was listening to a frequency and suddenly someone mentioned to quickly go to the police station and tell them about a raid on a hospital, if I'm not mistaken. Social order was so chaotic during the first few weeks and communication between the government agencies was so cutoff that the National Guard had to be activated to achieve social order, but because of the lack of communication methods, the National Guard took a while to deploy. Ever since that blackout, there have been backup generators in the cell phone towers, allowing communication after blackout. Still, months without electricity (keep in mind other people spent more months without water and sometimes even a full year without electricity, maybe even more) because of the government's unpreparedness and the weak electric infrastructure costed lives, trauma, and most likely health problems. To finish this. I think that one of the many impactful yet uncanny views was a deep blue sky that had slowly turned completely grey due to the amount of generators active in the metro area.
Ice storms hit eastern Kentucky often when I was young and we often went 7-15 days with out power in the rural areas. Something to remember is that higher density population center are prioritized over rural areas so preparedness is key to better outcomes. Thanks for wonderful videos.
During the partial grid collapse of the 1998 Ice Storm in Boucherville, QC near Montreal, they used a locomotive as power (550kW). In fact the CN rail company voluntarily derailed it and drove it on the asphalt for 300 meters (984ft) to the nearby City Hall, and another was trucked to the school (emergency shelter). That’s Canadian-French ingenuity for you.
Would've been crazy if they realized it was politicians that created the mess and kept em shut down for a while and powered 'the people' instead but then people would've seen things continue to work and better without mind control and that's no good for the hidden hand to maintain a firm grip
Diesel doesn’t grow on trees. Quebecois don’t want pipelines but are happy to take delivery from authoritarian Middle East states. Makes perfect sense.
Edible Plant List (Not including most crops): This list is very incomplete but these are the species I know about. I strongly encourage you to look into and learn about these plants. Also grow your own crops (those plants are not on this list since most of them are common knowledge) and herbs (mint, parsley, etc.). Check your climate zone, USDA hardiness zone, annual precipitation and temperature before planting anything or attempting to forage for wild edibles. Temperate Bee Balm Bugleweed Cattail Chives Clover (both white and red) Coneflower (echinaceae) Dandelion Daylily Evening-Primrose Greenbrier (young leaves and stems) Hibiscus Hosta Plantain (weed) Rose (fruit/hips) Sunflower Tulip Wild Grapes (careful not to confuse with moonseed) Wild Rice Wood Sorrel (in small amounts; large amounts can be toxic) Desert Agave (sap) Pinyon Pine (seeds and inner bark) Prickly Pear (pads after removing spines, fruit) Polar and Sub-Polar Arctic Raspberry Cloudberry Cranberry
This is very important advice, thanks. People take power for granted, but they shouldn't. I wish that every child would go on a camping trip at some time in their lives. At least a car camping trip at a state park. Let them experience having to pack their food, clothing and flashlights. Let them experience having to use the water pump to fill the cooler and carry it back to the campsite. Let them experience the nearly total darkness that comes after the sun goes down and the walk to the bathroom before bedtime, holding onto their flashlight for dear life.
@@THX5000 I'm 76 now and spent my adult life hiking/backpacking - the #1 thing to me was that wonderful bed when I got home. The simplicity of BPing I think we'll help me if things go south.
My word, that last part makes it sound terrifying lol a few months ago we took our toddlers camping with friends. Our friends had 8 total kids (2 different families). Kids had a great time, even if it was freezing.
On August 14 of 2003 we had the east coast blackout. As an employee of a power plant I can clear up a few concerns and lessons learned. Power plants use many vehicles to perform duties on the vast area of property and store a lot of fuel so the employees that were low on gasoline were allowed to pump gas into their vehicles so that they could get to home and back so that was not an issue with the gas stations being inoperable. Coal transportation via rail was not an issue due to the large amount already on site. One new policy that was initiated was a yearly black start test where a unit is shut down and disconnected from the mat at the main breakers. A diesel peaker unit is then started (which is just an engine that is commonly used in a ship that generates electricity from its own generator) to begin supplying power to the ID and FD fans of the boiler, fuel is then initiated and the boiler begins the process of converting water to steam and eventually the turbine begins to ramp up its MW output to supply power to the unit without the aid of the peaker and eventually the breakers are closed as the power is restored to the grid. The issue during the 2003 blackout with restarting was that outlying plants had to restore electricity back towards the east coast because the plants in the central blackout area had no way to know what phase of the 60 Hz cycle to phase to. All power plants in the Americas have to be perfectly in phase with each other. One thing that I am curious about is now that the U.S. is decommissioning the coal fired power plants, what would a major outage do to the natural gas pumping ability to restart natural gas power plants?
The environmentalists are working toward zero fossil fuels and complete electrification of society, so if they are successful how do you think that type of grid would work? No diesel backup. No fuel for your vehicles. Everything reliant on the power grid. So if it goes down, there are no fallback sources of energy. No coal. No biomass. Certainly no nuclear. I think we’d have to start burning vegans.
We live in a rural area and, long before it became popular, we had the habit of always keeping a minimum of 30 days of food and drinking water on hand. It has served us well on the few occasions we've been cut off from the grid. Now we have a camping trailer on the property with a large propane tank and a dual-fuel generator and some solar panels just in case we have a lengthy outage.
I've lived without electricity on and off several times in my life. One time I was living in a camper and the temp got down to -13. The walls inside were literally covered with ice. All I had was myself and a blanket.
The CPAP clip really hit home for me. Luckily, I had a neighbor with a generator and we ran an extension cable across our front yards for three nights during the winter storm. But to be honest, the power being out was a walk in the park compared to having no water.
I grew up often preparing for the power and water to cut out for up to a week. We were near the Florida coast and we were on well water, so during hurricanes the power often went out for up to a week, and we'd lose water when the power went out. I still don't take the city water for granted quite as much as other people.
@@Kenriko Not saying its the original poster, but it is nutty to me to see people around me saying they cant afford certain preparedness items and then skirt away to a far off land. Same people that want to mooch when disaster strikes.
When I was a senior in high school (1973) we had an arctic blast hit us. We lived on a cattle ranch in the mountains of Southern Oregon. We lost power for two weeks. Luckily we heated with wood and had a freezer full of meat in the garage and home canned food in the pantry. We had to draw water from the river because the pump on the well needed electricity. It was then I learned what the meaning of survivalism was.
what'd you guys end up doing with the freezer stuff? That's what concerns me most. We already collect water and have a stash of canned food, wood heat. But with half a steer and a whole hog in the freezer we worry about all that meat spoiling.
@@Ocker3 probably wasn't the biggest challenge, no. But it being cold outside doesn't mean your indoor freezer stays frozen for 2 weeks without power. Therefore my question remains.
James Burke, British science historian, did a series in 1978 called Connections. The first episode posited that a disaster in New York City forced everyone to abandon the city and try to survive in the surrounding countryside. It was a big, wet slap in the face with the reality that basically nobody in NYC could grow food, run farming equipment or have any clue how to slaughter and dress meat animals. Especially with no electricity or communication. Very good series; back in 1978 he warned of the coming disaster that plastic was sure to cause.
Thanks for referencing that, I should look that up. Did the author consider the fact that pretty much any urbanite could pick up the basics of growing food and operating farming equipment in like 2 days max though? Not enough to do professionally of course, but just as a means to help out if farm equipment is inoperable during such times. Anyone can learn to dig up and collect potatoes, it's why it's been the goto job since humans began.
@@supernenechi This assumes they could find a book - actual printed-on-paper book - on gardening. Without power, there's no internet, and thus, no youtube. Plus, they won't have the seeds to even begin the process. (eg. the potatoes in my house are dehydrated.)
@@supernenechi That's kind of a funny remark. The potato part; they are a Nee World plant, so definitely not known, much less dug in early civilization. And then there's that Irish potato failure. They became dependent on a single crop, with terrible results.
The comment on communications being down reminded me of the time the Koeberg Nuclear Power Plant went down and it was virtually impossible to make calls in and to South Africa. That cost the economy billion of dollars and scores of billions of Rand.
Unfortunately, humans are not hardwired to be interested in preventive actions. The hero isn't the person who prevents the disaster; instead it's the person who fixes the problem after it has occurred that gets the accolades. This was a pretty sobering video, nice job.
You're probably right, however after some people experience the misery of going through an event unprepared, they usually prep enough to make sure it never happens again.
Preppers are so conscience about future fails, they are prepared to live off grid long term with solar generators, water sources, ways to purify water, medicine, much food, etc.
This is actually entirely wrong, sorry. Humans are absolutely hard wired to predict and project, we developed imaginations specifically to plan for and execute a plan for perceived potential threats, we are exceptionally good at it. And our main motivational reasoning is not to be perceived as hero’s but you certainly revealed that to be yours.
I was an employee at a convenience store during major snowstorms where people lost power for several days. After a few days; most of them were going nuts. I can’t imagine what a real deal grid collapse would do to them!
If you are smart, you have prepared, go home, pull all the drapes, set sentries (YES, you NEED TO DO THIS! cameras with notification software can work well) and wait. Most of the violence will not start until people run out of food in their homes, after that? Keep your weapons handy if you live in urban or suburban communities. good luck. Ps this IS coming, prepare NOW!)
In South Africa we’re facing consistent power outages due to a lack of generating capacity, maintenance etc. The threat of a total grid collapse is one we’re constantly trying to avoid. This video put into context how hard it will be to stand up the grid in the event of that eventuality.
the political situation left theuipment in the hands of tribal style government those money grabbing gold mine owners woulg keep the lights on in the mines mother nature is not as tolerant of human nature
I am also from South Africa. I am a power systems engineer now in private practice. I loose sleep as I.know close we are. I worked man years for Eskom.
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.
These are the conditions in which life-changing money is made by those who remain calm, patient, and take controlled risks. Volatility goes both ways. The bigger the red candles, the bigger the green ones.
Investing in stocks can be a wise decision, especially if you have a dependable trading system that can lead to successful outcomes. Personally, I've been working with a financial advisor for about a year now. Starting with less than $200K and I'm now just $19,000 away from making half a million in profit.
I think this is something I should do, but I've been stalling for a long time now. I don't really know which firm to work with; I feel they are all the same. Is there any chance you could recommend who you work with?
I used to work in power production (my education is in power and marine engineering) and what is presented in this video is my worst fear. I bring this topic up a lot with people because it is always on my mind and very few people I've spoken with understand the severity of an event like this. I remember in my classes for my capstone one of my professors stating that "the North American electrical grid is the largest machine on planet Earth", that's really stuck with me. We don't usually think of the telephone poles and wires as being a part of a larger machine, but they absolutely are. Turning the grid back on isn't as easy as flicking a lightswitch.
That's not true anymore. First off, there are 4 interconnections covering the US and Canada. The "Eastern" interconnection _was_ the largest machine in the world. India passed us by a few years back when they interconnected their entire system into one grid. China is set to pass them, once they interconnect their entire grid. It remains to be determined if the US will sync up. Intermittency in renewables can be fought with better interconnection, so it might happen. Then again, it might not because of the ever improving DC systems making large AC systems less desirable.
if powerplants, which generating the most, are destroyed, it not matters how interconnected you are. The solution is an decentralized small/mid scale power plants, including ones below surface and hidden in the mountains......with interconnection made underground as well. (double reservation for one power line at least).
I worked in telecommunications for 8 years, things get pretty crazy when there are major disasters; I remember when a central office was both on fire and flooded out due to a large storm that moved through the Midwest and spawned multiple tornados, I was on-call that week, was working non-stop from 6:00 AM Friday to 5:00 PM the following Friday doing my part to manually reroute data and voice paths for critical customers (medical, emergency, financial, transport, power, fuel, hardware/construction and news agencies) between primary, secondary, tertiary and cellular paths so they could do their parts - I was even fielding some calls for the regional emergency services - very stressful but also very rewarding knowing that I was helping save lives.
One cool little bit involving water treatment. The Port Richmond plant in Philadelphia (for wastewater, this is) is a testbed facility. As of my last visit they generated the majority of their own electricity from methane that would otherwise be flared. Furthermore they were (and probably are or already have achieved) becoming a net contributor to the grid. The model doesn't work for drinking water treatment unfortunately but it's one example of how we can proof our infrastructure against catastrophic failures. It's not the only interesting project on site and really an interesting visit for any engineer in the area.
Lived on Richmond & Ann! Didn’t know about that, I always wondered what that factory is/smell is when on 95. Used to row on boathouse row and wondered what the Water Works actually does and how it’s all connected.
Great video. Thanks. You've reminded us all how interdependent we all are, and how fragile our lived reality is. More of us need to recognise this, and all work together to get ready for a loss of power.
I didn't expect you to be able to lay down a dystopian scenario quite as effectively as this. It's quite a contrast to your generally jovial demeanour, but it worked! 👍🏻
I spent summers on my dad’s small island in Canada as a kid. There was a fridge and stove that ran on propane and a hand pump for water. We bathed, brushed our teeth and washed our clothes in the lake. We swam, canoed and created our own fun, doing dances, plays, arts and crafts, sewing handmade dolls, etc. It was amazing and I’m grateful for the experience. Nevertheless, we were kids and relied on our parents to feed us, etc. I’m now an experienced camper with all the gear and know how but I wish I knew how to hunt, trap and fish! I have really good first aid, cpr and medical assistant skills so I feed that those are good bartering skills and I can sew and am very handy in general. I’m 52 years old but I’m in good physical shape as I workout daily usually. I have a bicycle with a basket on it, who will probably be very useful. I need to get binoculars for safety. I also took a very good self defense course years ago. These are all goofy things but I still feel woefully unprepared. I’m working on my preps as best I can with my budget and I have some preparedness books on hand. Get ready folks, stuff is coming our way and it ain’t gonna be easy!
@@Thornbloom. The United States could probably support no more than 10% of our population from hunting and gathering. All the game animals and cattle herds would be gone in a month. Modern agriculture makes dense population possible. Electricity makes modern agriculture possible. Basic agriculture (corn, squash, beans, tomatoes) is possible in some locations, but requires social cohesion. There might have been 100 million Native Americans in 1492, but they were living in societies adapted to the environment, and half that number is more likely.
Amy, hunting and trapping will be of almost no value. Just 1 quick example. There are about 35 million deer in the U.S. That is 1 deer for every ten people, which is less than 2 weeks of food. Actually, it is WAY worse than that. Imagine being the last million people in the U.S. looking for the last million deer. All species and most of the breeding populations would be gone within ten days, a month at the most. People just cannot fathom the speed and the to which things can collapse IF they ever start to collapse. Everything we think we can count on has a hidden vulnerability we did not think through.
It’s worth looking at the tiny Canadian province of Prince Edward Island. Hurricane Fiona knocked the entire Island offline, many for two weeks or more. The province’s fuel storage facility, which is privately owned by Irving Oil, had no generator, so gas stations quickly dried up. Cell tower generators could not be refuelled, so wireless communications was failing. Fiona was a wake up call for many people here.
@@GuacamoleyNacho no, not so much. I mean a wake up call as in the type of impacts these storms can have. We get strong tropical storms, but the intensity of them is growing. People are now talking about things like burying power lines, considering solar and battery, etc.
Prince Irving Island has been pounded by sever storms for decades and centuries. What we witnessed was incompetence. Pure and simple. And that's the nice way to say "ignorant".
Moving to a city, the most wild thing to me was that the water still worked after a power outage. We used to have a well that was shared with our neighbors, powered by electricity, so if the power went out you could flush the toilet maybe twice before the whole house just didn't have any. Even crazier is how now that we have a gas-powered fireplace, we can keep the whole house warm without power if necessary. And though we didn't have that luxury when power was out for a week, we fortunately did have neighbors with power, since our street was on a different circuit than the rest of the neighborhood, so we ran an extension cord to power the fridge, dressed warmly, and mostly just went on with our daily lives as normal. I charged my devices at school and aside from that used handheld lights rather than regular lighting. If that had happened while we still lived in the country, though? No water aside from our several gallon stockpile, way to preserve food other than dry storage, the only silver lining would be that the town proper was probably far enough away not to be effected by the same issue so stores would probably be open, at least some of them. Fortunately, while we lived there, the longest I remember the power being out was maybe a few days.
It's interesting to note that although going without power temporarily is tough, knowing that it may be gone for a very long time and there's nowhere to go to get gas, food, warmth, or communicate with family is a whole different situation.
wow, I never considered that going without electricity for a week is totally different than never having electricity for the rest of your life. Thanks for clarifying that. 🙄
@@Temulon I'm talking about the change in mindset. If there's a power outage you can expect normal life soon. If you know it will be months to years, you might have a different perspective. Your comment does not help anyone, and speaks volumes about you.
Your comment speaks volumes about you and also helps no one. Alcohol can be distilled and used as fuel, wood gasification also creates fuel. If you can figure out how to use alternators arranged on a wind or water mill or even a pedal-driven contraption that provides free electricity you can store in batteries then theres that. Solar power. Can make a solar power vehicle I'm sure with solar panels someone isnt using any more. For food you have far more options: gardening, fishing, hunting, foraging and preservation of these foods. Your main job will be gathering food in the good, bountiful warm months to store for winter months. Then saving seed from all the things you've harvested for future harvests. Transportation can be made also with the use of electricity and car batteries or solar power. Wouldn't be difficult at all to make an ebike or something along those lines with any working electric motors and batteries. This type of stuff would be laying about everywhere. Old radios would work for communication if you know people who have them and you have one yourself. My grandparents are only 2 miles or so away and they're the only family I'm truly concerned about. Warmth is probably the easiest. Not hard to make a wood stove or find one, I already have 4 myself. If you don't know this stuff you should start learning it. Just a suggestion.
My family kind of wonders the necessity of keeping our 12' pool full of water in the winter when everyone else empties theirs, as a source of boilable water and sanitary water. It also hit home more recently when one summer a while back Chlorine wasn't enough to purify our city water where we live in Salem Oregon, the state Capital due to a certain type of algae that our system couldn't adjust to until they upgraded to being able to use activated charcoal if needed. I also installed a weather vane cap on our fireplace since we didn't get good ventilation of airflow through the chimney besides birds wanting to nest in the chimney and the wood piles we keep. When growing up in Portland Oregon we were once out of power due to an ice storm for 2 weeks. That taught me the lesson that being prepared goes a long way. A fire place, propane, wood, water and a backup temp power generator goes a long way for us. Although solar is going crazy here, fog, ice, snow & clouds and being at the 45th parallel diminish how much solar will help in a extended event.
Few years ago, the DoD did a study to help determine best course of action in the event of a major grid loss - looking at everything from hypothetical cyber attacks to real life examples such as when PR was scoured clean by a hurricane. They determined that there was a very brief window for robust intervention otherwise in the face of no power, sanitation, water/food, medical help, power, communications and most importantly, a sense that things can/will improve, then the overall situation collapses into complete anarchy in less than two weeks.
We actually experienced something like this in my country last year. A strong typhoon tore through a large part of our country and left many millions without electricity for almost two months in some places. The effects were astounding; little to no fuel, with what little was left being 2x more expensive, people lining up for hours (2-8 hrs) for water, fuel and food, and intermittent mobile internet connection since all wired internet was down. I was in a city of about 1 million and we all struggled during that time.
Philippines. I was in the regional capital of Cebu City when it happened. Lemme tell ya, waiting in line for 2-3 hours in the sun to get water was not fun.
Thank you for a good overview of some of the interconnectedness issues that face our grid. I'd point out that as an amateur radio operator and member of ARES (Amateur Radio Emergency Services) we are an often-overlooked and sometimes critical resource that will continue to function long after conventional communications fail, in fact that's a motto of the service: When all else fails. We have been called up and provided critical information and communication services to Search and Rescue, storm warning, and Wildfire fighting, just this year! Modern 'Ham' Radio gear can interoperate with GPS, and some can provide and coordinate MESH and ALE networks. Almost all ham equipment can, with a laptop or tablet, send and receive email, text, and images across vast distances without a grid at all. Additionally, many have solar and wind generation, off-grid storage, and even significant EMP hardening. Our communications are capable of global reach, including the use of satellites and even bouncing signals off of meteor showers and the moon! If it sounds interesting or worthwhile, getting started in amateur radio is very inexpensive (Well under $100) and having a legitimate call-sign and understanding radio is a massively important step in being there for your community when all else has failed. KF7VML.
The unmentioned part of this is the boating communities, very few boats do not have a functioning VHF radio, some even have the Shortwave and UHF radio systems allowing them to add to the information collection and distribution. If you have navigable waterway nearby you likely have a boating community.
My out-of-state parents contacted me after a relatively major quake decades ago, when long-distance lines were all clogged... they had contacted via ham radio operators, who were local and could call local trunks instead of long distance. I told them we were all right, and... I had sent them an email saying so! (this was back in AOL days!) Technology can give good workarounds, but.. it does need power. and old-school tech can often work when new-fangled ones, don't (eg, physical landlines that don't need power/batteries like cell towers)
I'm in Spring, TX. Just north of Houston. Our house sustained extensive damage from our pipes freezing and bursting. Half the house was destroyed, not to mention how scary it was to be in below freezing temperatures INSIDE our house for 3 days with our toddler.
I was in that Texas snowpocalypse, we got grandma and dad into a hotel in town with a generator before it really hit so it was just Mom and I running the farm. We lost power with that first snow and were prepared to heat the house with candles under upside-down soup pots, which works really well! We kept the water running to prevent the pipes freezing and cooked on a fire outside, we had an elderly neighbor who stayed with us who brought her old Dutch oven so we made stew and overall, I had a ton of fun that week! Good memories, kind of like a surprise camping trip at home 😂 but I know it was very very bad for most people! I've taken to teaching my friends and anyone else who'll listen how to survive without grid power, if even one person in every household knows what to do then we'll all be better off!
I went 21 days without power after an ice storm. I live in a rural area and I wasn't as big of a priority as comunities were. Then the next winter almost a year later I again went 9 days without power after an ice storm. I have backup generators, a woodstove, and dozens of oil lamps.
I've been thinking about scenarios like this for a while... it's insane seeing how little time we've had this technology for compared to just how much we rely on it today, great video as always!
we lost power for 3 days. most stores closed (even 7-Eleven) except for the neighborhood Winn-Dixie. bring your own flashlight, and the staff brought calculators from home, and they sold groceries and survival supplies until the power came back, as the trucks kept arriving with loads. the other grocers and stores must have been smacking themselves. no cash but Credit card? remember those receipt slide-imprinters that rolled over the raised numbers on the card? they had those, too. i don't think we'd fare as well today. the imprinters won't work on flat-faced "chip cards", and few people carry cash anymore--forget your banking App.
Experienced this about 2-months ago with Hurricane Ian. Was without running water and electricity for 3-weeks and internet for 6-weeks, no traffic lights working in town for the first few days until they got emergency generators to them, lots of accidents occurred. Living in a 3rd-world within a 1st-world nation makes you really appreciate water and electricity, and realize the need for emergency-proof systems to back them up- and the need for backups like stored food and water (probably more than you think you need), just in case.
This information is very accurate, I am surprised because many get a lot of this wrong. I work for a power company and teach blackstart training to out power plant operators and this is by far the best vid on blackstart of the power grid I’ve seen in a while. During the last US northeast blackout I was operating a unit in Florida, I felt that voltage jolt on my 300+MW generator, we were lucky it didn’t continue to cascade. Good system protection saved the day. On generator synchronization, the great majority of them will not synch if any parameter is not right. The controls and relays will not allow it. Great job! Thanks!!
This series is the most fascinating thing you've ever done on your channel. Something in hearing your calm voice describe absolutely ghoulish scenario's in analytical terms is both educational and just very pleasing somehow.
Tornado hit our area a few years back, took out the power for a good 4 days. We weren't really prepared, but we did have friends lets us borrow a generator and some heating elements. Since then we bought two generators, one big one small, some solar generators to run things quietly at night. Bunch of phone battery banks of varying size and different USB lights that only use 1-3 watts an hour so will give us light for a long time. Also stocked up on 3 months of water and 3 months of food based on our usage. We would fair decent now. Summer though, with high humidity and high heat it would be absolutely deadly, would need at least 1 window a/c to barely survive in 1 room, and 2 window A/C's to keep at least part of the house cool. I live in the south, so winter tends to not be our concern, because we could burn wood, use low watt heating pads and heating blankets with our solar generators and then use propane heaters when needed. Summer blackout is our enemy. Made me tint all our windows to block out the light to try to keep it cooler, and put up temp resistant curtains.
Great point! Because of this risk (or vulnerability), everyone should really watch the award-winning documentary, Grid Down Power Up - Documentary, narrated by Dennis Quaid, which is now available free on RUclips . Additionally, on our website, we provide a mechanism to write emails & make phone calls to your specific legislators, regulators and board members of your public utility to ensure we get action taken to protect our great country. Please help us spread the word.
7:47 - for us country folk, water goes immediately with the lack of power to the well pump. In 2011 Hurricane Irene took out power in southeast Pennsylvania for (as my memory serves) about 24 hours, and we happened to be hosting guests at the time. They were city dwellers, and kept forgetting that the toilet cistern would not refill due to a lack of pressurized water. If we know that weather could disrupt power for more than a few hours, we fill up the bathtub ahead of time to at least have water with which to fill the toilet cisterns.
Well, if you lived in the real country, you would not be connected to the grid. Sure, eventually our solar cells and/or batteries will fail, but, probably not within a year or two. Until then, our pumps will keep on pumping, our lights will go on and off, our ice boxes and freezers will stay cold. And if we really need to, we can always butcher one of the steers in the field out back. Welcome to real country in Northern Arizona. 😃
@@MikeSmith-ul4iw Oh, we don´t heart our homes with solar power. That´s reserved for machines, like ice boxes and freezers and such. We burn wood, from Arizona cedar trees. That´s how I´m heating right now! And, states like California have been nice enough to build coal-burning electric generation plants near us. We don´t use their electricity, of course, but, there is that potential in a pinch. Thank you PacificCorp!
14 days without power from the super derecho in 2012. Of course lots of the grid was up around us in 3-5 days. One thing I learned, and you didn't mention, is that people will have to dump refrigerators and freezers out in a few days. If piling it at the curb is your only option..... some areas smelt so so bad. Lots of people didn't smell much better. Having proper generator setup was a real blessing
Food stockpiles thawing out and spoiling in freezers and refrigerators is likely the biggest problem in the pretty short run, ie 1 week. Also lack of access to potable water. You can do your physiological necessities into a bucket or something, but not having water or food is a problem. Most people don't stock up on too much canned foods or long lasting meals like MREs.
My family has always practiced being prepared for events like power outages and floods and tornadoes. We were fine during that winter storm but i l was hoping that event would be a wakeup call to a lot of people that they should put back emergency food and make plans for the next one, sadly I'm positive that most of them haven't done anything at all and when the next event comes they will needlessly suffer and then blame the government for not being able to protect them from every possible event just like they did after that winter storm. Many of those people that were unprepared would ridicule us as "crazy doomsday preppers" and then come knocking when they had no water and nothing to eat.
If the blackout is caused by frigid temperatures, you can at least save your frozen items by putting them out on the porch or back deck. Fridge items are tougher, but there's usually a cold room you can use.
I still don't understand how so much food went bad during the TX ice storm. You'd think that if you're covered in snow that people would think to move their perishables into the snow and ice outside.
It's much less than a week. Supermarkets close immediately and start discarding chilled and frozen foods within a few hours. There are few little shops anymore. So even if you have cash, 90% of food in the supply chain is inaccessible. Plus the supply chain stops.
This is why we as a society shouldn’t shoo off education on how to be self sufficient. When this happens, the government isn’t there to save anyone. Only your wits, tribe, and skills will be there.
"Nobody understands"... false. Many do, as this video proves. It doesn't help though, because bringing back the infrastruture from the dead is a colossal task.
@@astralux1732 most people don't understand the dependency on infrastructure, they don't see it, and they probably think water just comes at the tap water magically. I'll be laughing at the top of my basement with 20000L of water, a diesel generator with fuel for 2 months and guns (if someone try to steal my things) !
Signed copies of my new book, Engineering In Plain Sight, are starting to run low. Pick one up before they run out (they make great gifts)! store.practical.engineering/
Don't have a signed copy but got my pre-order the other week, plenty to keep me entertained 👍
Edit: Just realised the chapters are colour coded as well. A lot of thought went into the book
Preparing for a Black Start does not make sense in a democracy, since the funds can be better deployed elsewhere. The chances of a total system collapse within any particular administration is very low, and can always be blamed on prior administrations anyway. Therefore, it makes no logical sense to invest in this emergency preparation
@@John_Smith_86 I hope this was sarcasm.
@@TechIOwn The illustrations are so great! And it was especially fun to read Grady's introduction, explaining how his RUclips channel and the book came to be! 😎✌🏼
@@glennpearson9348 Er... you don't understand politics?
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!!
That's exactly what it feels like !! Northern Maryland, after a "minor" but slow moving hurricane. My small old town of 10,000 , lost power for 2-3 days. But the electric pole for me and a cfew neighbors fell so we went without for almost a week until the pole was replaced. It was August which normally would be intolerable without AC, but the storm had cleared out the humidity thank god and we had power at my job, so I was able to recharge my cell there. |Fortunately, the town had its own water plant with emergency power , so I had water which is so much more important! Came home one night and the lights were on and AC had kicked on!! So happy !! It really makes you appreciate modern life. Lost about $150 of food though.
Three weeks of food and water is really great though! Really helps you through the most.
I remember that, too. I was only 10. My family evacuated to the Northshore, and our relatives' house was supplied by well water, so when they lost power, they also lost water. They thankfully had a generator, so we at least had AC and could watch TV. A few years later, we moved not far away from them. Then Ida happened last year. It felt like the sequel to Katrina, except without NOLA being flooded.
That 1st hot shower must have been wunderbar
I think grid failure would be way worse though, it'd be what you went through, except no help from outside.
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.
A non-engineer friend worked for a large electrical utility became frightened when they learned how vulnerable the system really is with some critcal pieces not being replacable for months or even years.
Up in the Glen Ellen area in NorCal in October of 2017, the massive wildfires burned up big power lines in the area. The woke people running the State of California ordered the removal of diesel powered emergency water pumps at the Water District facility ''because they pollute our atmosphere''. They went to 100% electric pumping. As a result, one of my firefighter friends working that area sent me video of dead fire hydrants....no water at all. Their truck carried 400 gallons of water and it normally gets hooked up by a hose to the fire hydrant for almost unlimited water flow. He and his crew had to watch houses burn down and could do nothing about it. Water Districts very commonly had diesel emergency water pumps. Stupidity caused them to be removed.
I’m about to start as a Grid Operator myself!
What is scary is that people are that ignorant.
TV news anchor Ted Koppels non-fiction book "Lights Out" detailed this problem years ago...its real and it's a matter of time before it occurs again...the longer it last the worse things will get.
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 happened to be there when it happened. It was a surreal experience, seeing lights gradually converted to darkness before your eyes within minutes. People were walking in the park with their smartphone torches, like fireflies in a forest. One could even see the light pollution in the sky, from the other districts with intact power.
btw it was June 2022, not yet last year😂
exactly this ruclips.net/video/3ZWA_cw9tss/видео.html
I'm an electrician and frequently upgrade distribution systems on large apartment buildings and my god even with advanced notice all hell breaks loose when we cut the power to transfer onto a portable generator to preform work. "It's too noisy, can you turn it off. How long before we get power back (15minutes into an 8hour scheduled outage)" We were having mechanical issues with the 500Kva generator where it would only run for 2hrs before shutting down and people were throwing food off their balconies because it was spoiling and screaming while doing so.
@@Alexanderthegreat616 I have some friends that work for CLP, and we happened to be talking about this a few days ago - to me, the most worrying thing is that they have no idea what the initiating event was - they have determined it wasn't mechanical damage, overload or overvoltage, but nothing past that. Since there are 4 more of those cable bridges in other locations in HK, it makes we worry they might just decide to catch fire at some point..
That kind of lifestyle combined with a lack of disaster preparedness does not sound like a good blueprint for society. I live on the east coast of the US where big snow storms and hurricanes are a regular part of life. I've lived through multiple multi-day electrical outages to include a several day grid collapse. People were annoyed yes but panicked? Absolutely not.
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…
Have you taken steps to be prepared if another disaster strikes your area again!
@@JoelGrant-ie4ly ABSOLUTELY!! 💯
Sounds like a really nice town! I lived in Florida and heard stories from locals where neighborhoods form heir own little watch groups to prevent looting when hurricanes take power out for a week or two.
Sounds like you were in a great town with fantastic neighbors.
The little things like hot coffee in the mornings would be a big morale boost.
Thanks for sharing your story
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.
Hey at least he tried. Unfortunately, it looks like an entire powerplant would have to be destroyed and millions lose electricity before something will actually be done.
Almost surprised they didnt call him and accuse him of something. Thats usually what happens to people in the software world that report these kind of vulnerabilities.
@@stumpyplank6092 The profiteers? That could mean alot of things
@@JustinL614 it does mean a lot of things
@@SnifferSock Definitely. Most people are not the least bit concerned with these kinds of things until they happen.
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).
That is actually encouraging. As a fighter pilot, we do EP (Emergency Procedures) "tabletops" and "stand ups" and basically just walk through the problems too. An instructor will put you in a scenario and say "and you feel a vibration and get a Master Caution XYZ or whatever...you have the aircraft" and you ask questions to analyze the situation and take it to a logical conclusion. It is an incredibly effective way to prepare and it is encouraging to hear that our critical infrastructure providers are doing something similar! Thank you!
nova gang
Professional?
Used to do cipp, people really don't understand what they have delivered and removed and the entire process and people behind it.
It would be enough just to say what you work on, no need to point out all certificates etc, just sound cocky.
I live in Prince Edward Island, Canada. When hurricane Fiona hit us this fall our entire province lost power, and it took 13 days to restore power to 50% of the province. My area of around 3000 customers was without power for 17 days, but even entire neighbourhoods in the capital city of Charlottetown were without power for more than two weeks. It was a difficult time for my family, but infinitely worse for people in apartments and nursing homes that had no lighting and limited heat and water access.
Lost power for 10 days and was cutoff by flood in 96 in rural CA. Our pantry came through and our wood burner kept us warm. The city freaks out us rural folks make a cup of coffee and relax.
When we had the big ice storm here in Toronto some areas were without power for 6 days. People in apartments with no running water, no toilets, no elevators or lights. Older people living high up were trapped without those things. I'm glad I live in a house.
Apartments and buildings have far better thermal insulation to resist the cold , whereas single houses leak heat from all sides
I guess when you live in a backward country this is to be expected when you vote for communists ?
Cobourg was fine. Buckhorn took a long time to get fully restored.
I lost electricity for 27 days after hurricane Sandy and it was a nightmare even though my ex and I were prepped to a certain extent. We had two generators and three small children at the time , plus a neighbor with a newborn and two more small children. No one would have survived without working together and I mean that quite literally. Seven of my neighbors in my area of far Rockaway, nyc, died during or in the aftermath of the storm and all of my neighbors lost everything they owned if they lived on a lower level. I can’t stress enough the importance of both preparedness and the kindness of neighbors and strangers. I’m forever grateful and thankful for my neighbors and friends who did fuel runs, donated money for fuel and food, and helped with childcare, snow shoveling, etc etc etc. I know the world can be a scary place but people can surprise you with their generosity and kindness too.
I have been working hard on this problem accidentally for my whole life.
I have gotten the idea to the cascade party, soon hopefully you won’t need to worry.
So much is coming for you, so much good.
I picked you to tell because
“Hurricane sandy”
Little hint
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.
Obviously I can only speak for myself, I didn't mind the blizzard or the blackouts. So don't let that bother you too much. Some of the best sleep I've ever had under a good pile of blankets!
I can only imagine the stress of trying to run a situation like that.
The unsung heroes, no doubt.
What are your comm channels for a restart? Surely it can't be cell phones.
@@trentvlak we have dedicated phone lines and back up phone lines along with cell phones. We also have a satellite phone system to stay in touch with ERCOT and neighboring utilities in case all phone lines and cell towers go down. If all of that fails we still have 2 way radio. Communication is a big part of what we do.
I live in Oklahoma and experienced a power outage that lasted for 20 and some odd days due to a major ice storm a long while back. I’ll never forget the sounds…shortly after the rain started and the temperatures dropped, the electricity failed. A few hours after that I stepped outside on my front porch. It was eerily quiet. Nothing much more than the incredibly soft sound of the freezing rain…at first, that is. All around me I started to hear loud cracks and popping sounds. It dawned on me fairly quickly that those sounds were coming from the woods in which my home was located. Branches, and shortly after entire trees, were snapping due to the weight of the ice that was accumulating everywhere. Trees were falling all around the area. Roads were blocked with branches and trees…not that getting around on the ice covered streets was even possible…let alone safe. Eventually my roof gave way in a number of places as trees were falling on my home. Holes in the roof, windows broken, cars trapped, and not much that could be done about it. It was so bizarre hearing not the background noise that everyone no longer really hears…but only the sound of the outside world breaking and crashing down. People were gathering in groups in houses that had fireplaces and other means of keeping warm. Houses were filled with three or four families. People were having to trek through the fallen trees to check on family, friends, and neighbors. Ambulances were parked and the EMTs were carrying stretchers with patients strapped to them for long distances over the accumulated debris. It was rather difficult for a lot of people, and really made people understand just how fragile things really are.
I had a tree fall on my home in the 09 ice storm. I know that popping and cracking sound and it is very scary!
Thank you for your experience, you could be a writer.
i live in florida so we get hurricanes every so often for many years. as a result the power companies have learned how to deal with them better. one of the things they do is make sure there are no tree branches overhanging lines and for homes in general, people keep trees that will fall over away from homes. most of the trees that fall over were no meant to be here and have shallow root systems rather then ones that go deep into the earth. in other cases someone will buy a grown palm tree that just has a small root ball and prop it up, well they have no real amount of roots and naturally fall over no matter what you do. the ones that grew from a seedling however? they dont budge.
though im not sure of the details, we used to have lines that would just go down in high winds, even during regular storms the lights would flicker, now the lines are strong enough to withstand a category 1 without issue and the power usually doesnt go out at all.
So i do see similarities, im sure people there now get rid of trees that arnt in good condition and remove ones that are near their home. hopefully the power company takes better care of the lines by keeping trees trimmed or removed from near lines.
during one really bad storm we went without power for somewhere around 6-8 weeks. followed again by another hurricane a week or so later for no power again for another week or two. definitely not fun but thankfully we had a generator and were able to run it long enough for a fridge and a small window box AC unit to keep it cold enough at night to sleep. People at that time still went around as normal for jobs and the like. lots of people eating out in the few places that had generators or had grills. for a number of weeks there were only 2 such places for a city of over 100,000 people. im not sure of the exact population since its been growing for years and this was probably 12-17 years ago.
I think I know which storm you are talking about. I drive OTR. I was hauling a load thru OKC during the late 2000's when a major ice storm hit. Was difficult to even see the road there was so much ice coming down. I was on I-40 around 1600. Was starting to ice up pretty good by then. When I reached OKC about 90 minutes later it was really bad. The last lights I saw were at a Wal-Mart. As I passed it up it's lights also blinked out. I couldn't even tell I was driving thru a city it was so dark and silent. I cracked my window and it was creepy how little sound there was. Was so dark I couldn't see more than a few feet beyond the truck. But I did manage to make it thru OKC. It was slow going and very dangerous. Definitely some white-knuckle driving! Up thru I-35 and out of the ice.....right into a snowstorm on I-70. That was a pretty rough weather event for a lot of people!
@@lukesmith4440 You are absolutely correct! It was honestly one of the fastest “turns of events” I’ve ever dealt with before. It was fairly warm outside…then the rain started to fall. Worse yet…the temperature also started dropping. Together it made for one of the fastest and one of the worst winter storms I’ve ever experienced. Things happened ever so quickly, and no one was truly prepared for it. How could you be ready for something such as that? The only other “event” that I feel comes anywhere close to it was the tornado that touched down in Joplin, Mo…which was basically in my backyard. I have photographs of the devastation left in the wake of that EF-5. It’s heartbreaking. Again, these situations show how fragile our society can be once the electricity we depend on has been stripped away from us. Thank you for sharing your experience of this incident with us. I am glad that you made it through it safely…as being an OTR driver tends to be incredibly stressful and difficult at the best of times.
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 East Texas and was without power for 9 days during the 2021 freeze. My standby generator kept my house going and my fireplace kept my house warm. Our home went from accommodating just my wife and I to hosting about 14 people. They all brought food from their homes and we probably had enough meat to accommodate the whole crew. We were glad to be able to comfortably help out two more households without any discomfort. We were truly blessed.
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
yea, we had a small power outage here and that silence is deafening. I had to turn my laptop on and turn on a movie so I could go to sleep. I need the hum of the refrigerator or my tv to sleep.
Yup. Electricity makes sound, even when not going through a speaker. The sound a ceiling light fixture makes is so negligible until it's gone.
Only tangently related, but I wonder if that phenomenon is some kind of evolutionary/instinctual reaction. Imagine how a loud jungle/savannah environment quiets when a predator is about. Sudden silence of the din of usual bird/insect sounds triggering some kind of survival alertness instinct
the noise aboard navy ships is a constant roar. no noise means something very bad just happened to the power plant, as an emergency generator electrician that was more effective than an alarm clock for me. it literally took years for me to sleep at night after i retired.
@@AI_Overlord Nature is often extremely silent. It can be loud, sure, but frequently it's far quieter than our modern environment full of fans and compressors.
During my apprenticeship training at a power station, I was stationed in a remote rural area which was generating 700 MW. I remember there was a cyclone warning. I've experienced blackout and total grid failure inside the control room of the power plant, It was the most tiresome and adventurous and dangerous work i had to do with the team it took about 2 hours to bring back power, it was night time and it was raining heavily and there was thunderstorms outside. I respect the engineers who work at the power stations.
I worked at a 1,200 MW power station during the east coast blackout. That was weird. A massive 13 story building that was normally so loud that ear plugs are required that was now so incredibly quiet with nothing but the sound of pipes ticking and other items making slight groaning as they slowly cooled. A layer of smoke was from the roof all the way down to about 6 feet from the turbine deck. As we walked along with flashlights or lights on our hardhats the still layer of smoke would part and move along that night like an inverted wake from a boat.
It was quite surreal.
For sure! -Ohio
The most practical alternative for the individual is to Just STOP Being A SLAVE The Grid altogether !!! Many people around the World have already chosen to Live Off The Grid as a part of the Minimalist Movement, which encourages people to grow their own food and to generate their own electricity. Kirsten Dirksen's RUclips channel has 100's of cases of people who have found ways of becoming Self Sufficient and Independent by learning How To Live Off The Grid !!! Of course, there are people like the Dummy Engineer who made this video who actually like being a Slave of Big Brother.
I work at a 1200MW combined cycle plant. Luckily I have not experienced a total loss of power yet.
Puerto Rican here. I spent three months without power in 2017, knew some who spent many, many more. There was a total breakdown of the healthcare system. Many people died of things like asthma attacks and diabetic shock simply bc the hospital couldn't treat them or they couldn't get to the hospital. I remember being very afraid of getting sick or having an accident in those first few weeks because I knew going to the hospital might end up killing me. Five years later, three-day blackouts are normal. Brownouts are a daily thing. The grid still isn't fixed.
This is unacceptable. You're an American territory and should never have to experience this. I don't know the specifics of the politics but it's better to help you now instead of helping you after a crises.
@@teddybar66 Thank you. The fact that we are an American territory does not mean we should not go through this; no one should go through this and yet it happens every day all around the world. Our grid relies on coal and oil, which most people here agree need to be phased out, but the political situation in which we are beholden to the whims of the US Congress means we can’t make decisions about our own energy future. That is why I personally support the independence of Puerto Rico and breaking all ties with the United States. We are going in different directions as nations, and Puerto Rico is entitled to make its own way.
Oh my God!
186 days on the street in st croix. We still get outages weekly, new solar now short of 3 days of total cloud cover we can stay up. May not have ac all day but we can keep things going
@@teddybar66 PR is run by democrats
It’s scary how vulnerable we are to the system.
most people R DEPENDENT on the "system"..
The system in its entirety is larger than we can even fathom.
I own my home, without a mortgage but I fear I could still lose it in a total collapse to the county that would still demand the property taxes, regardless of what is happening in the world around us. Could you pay your bills without a banking system? How about feed yourself, your family, and your pets when grocery stores are empty? Could you defend yourself from your neighbors who may just become desperate enough to decide to take what little you have by force?
A power outage is one thing, a prolonged collapse of the power grid is a whole other nightmare.
@Shadow_Banned_Conservative I think if it gets that bad, the last thing the government would worry about would be property taxes...and we probably wouldn't give that a second thought.
We own our property, and live in the mountains well away from major cities...we could last longer than most but I still would have to resort to desperate measures to ensure my families survival.
Remember one thing...WSHF we are absolutely on our own. If you consider someone a threat in a situation, you are probably right and should take appropriate action.
@@smokerise I agree with you on taking care of your family, but government will not stop in the revenue collection department, if anything they'll be even more aggressive going after those of us who still have some means to pay or confiscate from.
Sure, you may get a temporary reprieve from your taxes due today, but they will be tallying the total and coming for them tomorrow. The question is, will we be able to pay on that day if we've been financially wiped out?
@@Shadow_Banned_Conservativethis is why guns are so important. If they collapse the system and demand property tax you have to use other means to keep your property
I worked with SCADA in an industrial facility and due to the high pressure and high temperature processes our engineering department made sure all our PC's within the control station and the sensors throughout the facility had UPS backup in case of power loss. I was on shift when the local power grid went down. The lights went off inside, but all the computers kept on going. Unfortunately they hadn't thought to add a UPS unit to the router/comms unit that sent all the commands from our PCs to/from the sensors, etc. So I sat there for a minute hoping it was maybe taking a while to kick in, before madly running around manually operating various valves before pressure relief valves started blowing all over the site. That was fun.
personally i'd build out UPS's from the networking part first cuz computers nowadays are nearly useless without a network connection
Hahaha, I can totally picture it 😆
Very well-written! 👍🏼
That's more normal than people think. And nobody plans for long-term. Many don't even maintain the UPS equipment they have not realizing that this is necessary. We can't do a real-life test of a major grid-down event so really we're only guessing what will need to be dealt with when it comes; like you've seen there's going to be many surprises, and not happy ones
@@P_RO_ Yeah. The real failure in planning is often that people do individual checklist items, such as "have backups of your software and data," but don't focus on _disaster recovery._ In IT I've seen plenty of situations where people had backups, but were unable to restore them after an event because they'd never even worked out how they would do it, much less tested a system for doing it.
@@Curt_Sampson That knowledge that the system has to work end-to-end is what made my personal HD backup be as simple as possible. It's just rsync, so if my HD fails (its the main failure mode I want to protect against) then once I have a re-installed OS, I just drag the files back over, because the backups aren't in some special compressed format, they're just regular files (and links when the files haven't changed between backups).
I think the worst part for us during the Texas Snowpocalypse was when the main water supply line between our small town and Luling burst because of the freezing temps, and our water towers were dangerously low because everyone had been dripping their faucets at night to keep their pipes from freezing. The lack of clean water was horrific, and the stores were running out. We saved the bottled stuff for drinking and melted snow to flush toilets. Then we were asked to conserve natural gas, so we huddled up in one room to save heat and cooked on the fire pit outside. The good news? We managed to clear a lot of dead wood in the back yard!!
So glad you didn't melt the snow and drink it if you do that please use a good water filter the snow is toxic don't believe me have it tested
@Pepe Silvia starts twerkin
@Pepe Silvia no need to wait for the weather to get threatening, start living the lifestyle on your own volition
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.
I heard a guy say "pretend it's the 1800's. That's what might happen someday when you least expect it. Being prepped helps because it doesn't matter what's up...we will deal with it 👍👍
@@lisalee2885 It wouldn't be like the 1800's. it would be much worse because our infrastructure isn't built that way anymore. In the 1800's you'd still have a store to go to, and likely a farm yourself. You'd have horses for transportation. Etc.
@@lisalee2885 yeah but think of the number of people who wouldn’t even survive without toilet paper. A large percentage, likely a majority, would be totally and utterly lost
Im 48 and grew up poor in southern ohio. We used to hunt and farm alot of our food. We had power and tv but tv really didnt come until i was older except for the 3 channels we could pick up with rabbit ears. We had wood burner and kerosene heaters. I also had what would likely be worth a good sized house worth of arrow heads from that land. I wouldnt trade it for anything either. I can still cure hides not to mention farm and hunt. Even better, i can teach others to.
There’s no way in this world that today’s youth would be able to survive that way!
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.🤷🏽♀️
First they say it will never happen. Then they say "It will never happen again". Well done for being humble enough to learn from the experience! I'll never understand the deliberate arrogance and foolishness of many people these days.
You learned a valuable lesson in a bad but less tan lethal situation. Good for you on changing directions and being better prepared next time.there will be a next time and your inlaws might be coming to you for help.
I’m sure that was just a test run. It will happen again, so keep prepping
Solar and a generator bro
It's called "live and learn". I live in a hurricane zone and I can tell you from experience:
- At the first sign of a power outage lasting more than maybe 8 hours, take a shower / shave and clean up (you won't know when the next opportunity will be), and fill your bathtub with clean water to drink.
- Put a few buckets outside to collect rain water for flushing toilets and washing stuff.
- Take your cars out and gas them up. Also, fill two 5-gal jerry cans with gasoline. You can always use it later if nothing bad happens.
- Always keep some canned foods in stock on your pantry. Just Beefaroni, Spaghetti-O's, Deviled ham or beef, you get the picture. Protein drinks like Ensure or Boost are also good, and they don't have to be refrigerated. These are foods that can be eaten cold if necessary, even if you don't like that sort of thing. Like my Mom would say, "If you were hungry, you'd eat it!"
- Charge all cellphones and keep them charged. They are your first line of information and communication. Also, make sure you have a portable battery-powered AM/FM radio available.
- Your gas or oil heating system will run off of a 12-volt battery. Look up how to connect one on RUclips. A/c; not so much.
- Have a good first-aid kit in your house, always stocked. If you use something, replace it immediately as soon as you can. If you are on prescriptions, always make sure that you never have less than a 90-day supply on hand at ANY time. Make sure you explain to your doctor why you need this. If he's reasonable he'll comply with your needed Rx refill dates.
- Always keep $1000 in fives and tens hidden somewhere in your house. If credit-card machines go down, how will you buy anything?
- Have a few cheap battery-operated lanterns in your house that you can take room to room at night. And make sure you have the batteries!
- If you can't afford the cost of a portable gasoline generator, and a switch into your house (less than $4000 installed by an electrician), buy a power invertor for your car for less than $100. At least it will give you a source of low emergency AC power if you should need it, and on the road.
- Some might debate this, but I think it's always wise to have a small firearm available for self-defense. Criminals run wild in the dark. And the police will have their hands full as it is.
- And most of all, HAVE AN ESCAPE PLAN. Friends or relatives that you can go to in a REAL social emergency until things pass. You can go 300 miles on a tank of gas; 600 miles if you can refuel along the way. That's a pretty big radius and will only take you one day to traverse. Your best bet is always to get out of the danger / disaster zone.
These aren't "prepper" plans. They are just common sense in a disaster situation. If you do all this I think that you'd last longer than 90% of the population (outside of maybe, public shelters, which I never plan on going to again).
I was a technician at a power plant before I retired. Everything you said about the grid is correct. I usually volunteered to stay at the plant for hurricanes. No one was allowed to leave until everything was back to normal. The food was terrible but double time after 12 hours made for a great paycheck.
Only after twelve hours? How long was a regular shift?
@@OptimusWombat We had the same thing essentially. time + 1/2 8-12 hours, double time after that in a single day. After 20 hours of OT in a pay period it was all 2x.
Big paychecks with big taxes....sigh.
@@hosmerhomeboy Nice, You deserve it.
@@OptimusWombat Regular shifts were 12 hours. Hurricane duty lasted 2 or 3 days.
@@davidhomer78 bad food why that?
I remember when the bad ice storm took our power out for two weeks in rural Ohio. We did fine due to having a wood stove, and the ability to melt ice in pans on said stove. Many were not so lucky to have wood heat, and even then many didn't have to wait 2 weeks like us. Cant imagine wide spread loss witbout alternative heat sources.
I was close to panic from even 2 days where we had no wood heat, no food that didn't need to be heated, and almost no gas in the car. Laying in bed shivering and hungry with literally nothing to do for 20+ hours a day is...not feasible long term.
I'd be really worried that hordes of looters would come with weapons to my home if i was in your situation though.
@@ArrowRaider I live in rural Ohio, no worries about hordes of looters w/ weapons ;)
imagine ukraine. 50% of power generation has been destroyed by russia. no heat no power for months
and no water except hand pumps and bottled water.
Back in the 1970's I was a Stationary Engineeer at University of California San Francisco. This included 2 hospitals, 4 medical schools, a number of medical buildings and research facilities.
One rainy day some water got into the conduit to a 12,000 volt transformer in the basement of a medical building and knocked out the whole campus, trapping people during operations, in elevators and on dialysis machines. Thankfully the Assistant Chief Engineer and I were in the turbine generator room when this happened. The main electrical distribution board was at one end of the room. We were able to get the power back on to most the campus within a minute. The building with the blown transformer was left black. Inside that building were people on dialysis machines that were stopped. The San Francisco Fire Department came to the rescue with portable generators with connectors specifically for these buildings. It was amazing how fast they were able to get power to those patients. Just one lesson about how dependent we are on the power grid.
I'm no hero but wanted to give a big shout out to the San Francisco Fire Department.
Oh trust me guys like you that know your job are Hereos 👍👍
You story is fake.
It doesn't make any sense and the data doesn't add up.
that is so true! anyone that can restore a single unit is worth praise.
We went through the outage in Texas. We lived out in a rural area an hour south of Houston. As the storm started to move in but it hadn't gotten to the peak yet, and they shut us all off out where we lived. They had us off for almost 3 days. Even running our fireplace and shutting off the living room as our "hold up" location, we couldn't get above 50 degrees. The second full day without power, the water in the toilet bowl was frozen solid.
The failure of the system was an eye opener, "they" don't actually care about "us" as long as they have theirs. While I don't feel that the answer to much is to trust, believe in or ask the government for help.
Be prepared to self rescue, no one is coming.
I've been wondering whether I should build a home with a wood burning fireplace or gas fireplace
Did you not have any firewood? Or was it just funky fir or something?
@@lauracooskey9481 "Even running our fireplace and shutting off the living room as our "hold up" location, we couldn't get above 50 degrees." Ran it all night with oak and pecan. Fireplaces are just innefficent, and the house was built in the late 60's, also innefficient and never built for those temps.
Two years ago we built our own home [in a much cooler place, in the mountains] and installed a wood stove and that is, by far, the way to go. It's not as aestheticly pleasing but it is much more efficient.
Water freezing then broke pipes. Broken pipes water damaged items in homes. (Yes, pipes sometimes travel through the ceiling.) There weren't enough plumbers. And many had moved in with friends or family after the second day and weren't home when the first signs of the water started.
@@Penny_Pincher_Outdoors You mean since that disaster with the frozen toilet? Yes, it totally makes sense to have a good woodstove! Good for you!
In case of an extended power outage shut off the water and heating to your hot water tank. You will then have about 20 to 30 gallons of drinkable water which will last a week or more depending on rationing and the number of occupants in your household.
Also in a cold weather scenario, open up all you faucets and showers to drain the water into containers. This gives you a bit more water to drink, but it also prevents the water from cracking your pipes as the internal temperature of your house drops. So that when power is restored you will have safe and undamaged supplies again.
Most people have combi boilers these days, at least where I live. So no hot water tank at all.
That's just asking for legionella bacteria to take hold. Keep water very hot, or cold. Never let it settle in between for long.
@@alexsimmons1803 is there some additive you could put in the hot water tank in this scenario that would kill legionella and allow you to drink the water?
@@cnafyi No. You need to heat the water, preferable to at least 60°C for about an hour once every couple of days to be safe. Allowing water temps to sit at 20-45°C for a few days (which is what an unpowered hot water tank will do as it gradually loses heat) is asking for trouble.
Legionella is deadly. In any case, if town water supply is cut off, a mains pressure hot water tank isn't going to deliver much water anyway, unless you undo the drain plug (and probably deal with scale and sludge at the bottom of the tank).
We have 5000 litres of tank water we can use in a pinch. Normally for garden only, it can be boiled for potable application.
I also have an off grid solar PV and battery storage system which has the capacity to keep us going, even in our Winter. Also a backup generator which can run on fuel we normally have for general property maintenance equipment, and even use fuel from a car tank if necessary.
@@alexsimmons1803 Technically you could also still use that water if you sterilize it with bleach (make sure you know the correct percent per volume, and only use bleach with zero additives!!!!) once you need that water. It's normally prevented using chlorine in water systems, and the water in the tank is probably chlorinated anyways, through that will evaporate quickly when exposed to air. And really the risk comes for aerosolized particles that you inhale, more than drinking. But in cold weather, I would drain any water into other containers for sure just to save the tank from damage. That's an expensive repair!
The way you described the atmosphere when you first wake up during a power outage is spot on! I was in Austin when the power first went out and I'm a pretty heavy sleeper. There's very little that will wake me up. Hearing absolutely nothing coming from the things in my apartment that normally hummed away (fans, my PC, my fridge, the heater, the water heater) instantly woke me up in a sweat. I got on my phone and opened Twitter and the 1st thing I see is the message from ERCOT saying they were in a state of emergency. I had literally never heard of ERCOT before that morning. What followed were days with very limited power and by the 3rd day, the water stopped flowing. I feel like I can go quite a while without power, but when the water stopped, the situation got dire. Thankfully my parents were on a critical circuit in a different town and brought me water but a lot of people weren't as lucky.
Nothing will make me forget how close it felt like the state was to a complete collapse.
You will own nothing and be happy tho lol
Remember the green idiots want the power to from renewables only, so get used to not having much of it. lol.
@@jamescollins3647 nothing like a long outage to make the green idiots suddenly the local geniuses for having solar cells on the roof. now... if only someone had a water well
@@element5377 Or a well with a hand pump as well maybe?
We in the country west of Austin didn't experience what Austin city folks did.
Society is far more fragile than any of us want to believe
Yes noone and definately not a lot of adults r smarter than you hahaha
The incredible rarity of events like this prove you to be absolutely wrong.
@Scooter reminds me of the opposite of Sarah Connors speech
MEN LIKE YOU BUILT THE ATOM BOMB
This is one way the world could end. That’s why I’m terrified of solar flares.
Isn’t it great … false security and dependency…….😊
For SHTF comms, is why I was SO against getting rid of AM radio for widespread use. FM and even digital FM can easily be knocked out, or blocked, but AM is only as strong as the signal driving it. It may not be crystal clear, but easily audible enough with its simplicity to be useful.
TOTALLY AGREE
HAM radio/SDR is pretty awesome as well.
I'm 53 and remember a snow/ice storm that hit us here in Northeast Georgia in the early 80's. We didn't have electricity for over 2 weeks and it was one of the most exciting things ever. At least for me at 12yrs. We took water ski's and made them into snow ski's, eating all foods cooked from a fire place and wood stove. The only entertainment was a radio and especially the weather radio in the hopes of more inclement weather and no school (very rarely). It was great times because I'm smiling ear to ear typing this...
You sound like the Four Yorkshireman. :J
ruclips.net/video/ue7wM0QC5LE/видео.html
I'm 62 and I grew up in the S.F.Bay Area in the '60's, '70's and '80's. I never knew a time when we didn't have dependable electricity. Oh there were times when the power went out for a few minutes, but the scenario that Grady mentioned, people in the S.F.Bay Area know absolutely nothing about!
@@goysb4jays566. Wow, that’s dark, really almost anything is survivable with the right attitude, and remember the old saying; what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”.
@@tc25d Ahaha!! you sound like a typical spoiled fragile American
Just commented on Kentucky no 911 or anything friends mom her town no juice for over a month
As a SCADA Specialist here in Texas, this video is the breakdown of one of my greatest fears - systemic breakdown of infrastructure. This is also why I got into the hobby of overlanding to see what I did and did not need to survive off grid for short to long durations of time while also getting to explore our country (and someday beyond that). I cannot recommend your channel enough. Thank you for making these videos!
I used to design SCADA interfaces for substations and once even for a static VAR substation. We embrace the gravity portrayed shown here. Have been to the Miles City DC to DC interchange.
20 years ago when I decided to become an apprentice electrician, a lot of my friends thought it was a poor decision. I had to explain to them how truly dependent we are on electricity. Even if new construction stops due to a recession or other cause, existing electrical systems in buildings still require maintenance.
I had it explained like this if all the doctors in the world disappeared we would survive. If all the electricians and electrical engineers disappeared everything collapses.
Your friends were fools.
I have been an electrical contractor for almost 20 years and even through the worst financial strain, we made money.
I always advise young men to go to trades, if even only to learn a real skill and then drop it if it ain't for you.
If that trade is electrical...you will NEVER be unemployed.
@@ananda_miaoyin i also give that advice, to young men And women
This is extremely false, and I think it’s funny how you think that society depends on electricity. Electricity has some uses, but it’s mostly just a fad and it will wear away and people will realize that we can live without electricity, we did it for thousands of years and we can do it for thousands more. Once people realize that they don’t need electricity as bad as society tells them to you and all your electrical engineers will go out of business once and for all.
My thoughts exactly when I became an electrician many years ago!
At some point electricity became just as essential as food and water. I highly encourage getting a generator installed, pretty much any electrical contractor has this service nowadays. Not only are you preparing yourself for the worst, but you are also helping the grid decentralize and become more robust.
So you get a gen and a diesel storage of 100-200L because of not then it's pointless.. because you have no power left to pump ⛽ at the station.. and if your talking a 6month -10year black out well your only buying time... Until everyone starts killing each other for resources.. no different from governments today
During hurricane Hugo I lived in a very rural area. 13 weeks with no electricity. We were one of 4 houses on a 9 mile dirt road. We took our tractors and chainsaws and opened the road ourselves. It took 15 days, Luckily my Dad had a 500 gallon diesel tank and a 300 gallon gasoline tank ready. The logs are mostly rotted but still visible to this day. They serve as a reminder how helpless the government is in a situation like that. Don't rely on anybody but yourself.
That's amazing.
What a waste to let those logs rot.
Not disaster related but relying on the govt related...I have pictures from the late 1800's of my Family and neighbors just BUILDING their own roads!! No Govt just area families and their draft horse teams with graders and everything needed to build a dirt road!! Same with dredging farm ponds or small lakes on their properties....they DID IT THEMSELVES!! Something we as a society have fallen TOO FAR away from!! Luckily I have learned some of those do it yourself skills from both sides of my Family but in a SHTF scenario where the power doesn't come back on for a very long time......I can tell you I'm glad I don't live in a major metropolitan area!! LOTS OF DEATH'S will occur!!
Amen
Hugo was devastating. I remember that. Our house only lost an attic fan. The one next to us had its roof ripped off. Flooding like nobody’s business.
After the big freeze here in Texas the mill I work at was one of the first large energy consumers to come back online. For 9 days we were paid to stay running to keep load on the grid. It didn’t really make sense at the time, but since so many large consumers went down. It made it easier to keep power plants under load and bring things back.
What kind of milling? If you don't mind my asking, that is. Certain kinds of mills (i.e. grain mills) would still be worth running so long as you have the resources that need milling. Flours can be cooked into a variety of simple breads fairly easily, even with rudimentary fires.
If it was East Texas, probably wood or paper.
Some commercial customers (and residential ones for that matter) are also just fortunate enough to share a feeder with critical utilities, and it’s not worth switching to partially shed the feeder for various reasons. So there were a lot of times people and companies experienced dramatically less time without power compared to others, and it would seem inexplicable unless you had an intimate knowledge of the interconnections you shared with critical infrastructure.
Ah! Nothing says the holiday spirit of friends and family gather like watching a video on total collapse of our infrastructure, plunging us into the dark ages! haha, Love the videos Grady you are doing us all a big favor
It reinforces what we have to be grateful for, doesn't it!
i lived 3 weeks in total black out in the montreal ice storm in 1998 when i was teenager. it was freakishly eerie. where i live now, we have massive wind storms that will knock power out for 1 to 7 days due to not being a priority to restore during outages. people will learn that how we have chosen to live in this modern society is beyond fragility, there is no structure to our technology, it's merely a house of cards
Hydro Qc. couldn't find the triangle of cities like Montérégie! It took them too long! We in Montréal,3 days without power. A woman had a gas heater so we went there! I helped @ a Tim Horton's to clean and serve clients. There was 3 times a welfare line waiting for hot food and beverages at night! La Belle Province was opened cause they had back-up and were gas. My comfort food was onion rings for sure!!! Came back the power @ about 5h30 AM. The streets were like icing on 🎂!
@@harfangdesneiges6680 the whole thing was quite the experience. definitely made me realize how fragile the structure of society truly is
My parents in Châteauguay were the only people around, they had a freezer of food, wood stove and generator. It was kinda
eerie at night, nobody around,all at the arena, just the stars.
Great point! Because of this risk (or vulnerability), everyone should really watch the award-winning documentary, Grid Down Power Up - Documentary, narrated by Dennis Quaid, which is now available free on RUclips . Additionally, on our website, we provide a mechanism to write emails & make phone calls to your specific legislators, regulators and board members of your public utility to ensure we get action taken to protect our great country. Please help us spread the word.
We've spent a lot of decades unintentionally setting ourselves up for a pretty incredible disaster without really preparing for the actual worst
I don't like to think negative...but your comment makes sense💯
Yes cuz u r lazy everyone is
@@rettebzky888 not really. Stop being scared weenies.
Its all a set up for the worlds best apocalypse story
@@pendingchange3776 the legends will be handed down for centuries to come ;)
It’s hard to believe how fragile everything is until it’s broken down in such a detailed way like this! Makes me thankful for everything when I watch this channel. Thank you!
My family was stationed in Puerto Rico during Hugo. 3 weeks with out water, 4 weeks without power. I became very passionate about being prepared after that.
NO picnic My bad.
How did u survive 3 weeks without water?
@@alm777 he said his family. Not him. Learn to read.
@@PolishBehemoth Learn how to write.Btw...him or them,not the point.Question still applies!!!How did they ,or anyone,survive without water?
They went out and found some dumbass
My family and I live in an isolated and remote Appalachian community of approximately 30 houses or so. We all know each other.
When the power goes out we all check on each other and band together. Years ago the power went out for a week during a blizzard. We all heat with wood and checked up on each other. Blessed to live in a resilient community.
Canning the produce from our garden every year gives us a solid food store too. Grew 500lbs of "taters" last season.
Stock up on food and water now. The economy is going downhill fast! (Take your money out of the bank and keep it at home).
Grady, remember that when water pumping stops, so does fire fighting.
Customers in the dark, start using fire for cooking and heat. Too often they end up with a structure fire. With no water, they can quickly lead to conflagration.
Another hazard is overheated power lines, leading to lines sagging, and snapping. This can lead to widespread wildland fires, and fewer grid ties to perform restarts.
Not to mention water is required for powerplants to operate, such as cooling and steam generation.
@@dbclass4075 Rivers and lakes aren't dependent on the grid. And generating power creates enough in-situ power to drive all the ancillary loads, like cooling.
@@bcubed72 Power is required to operate the water gates, though.
@@dbclass4075 powerplants and other critical infra have their own back ups independent from civilian infra.
@@benjaminjernfors A comment above literally said that technicians had to use PERSONAL generators' to power a company owned headend. So WHILE they SHOULD be backed up, you can't always be sure...
I'm an Electrical Engineer who's worked for a SCADA company providing software and hardware for utility and critical infrastructure. Having seen how these operators work and the level of importance they have, I never really considered in the past how important they were, now I feel they don't really get the recognition they deserve. If you are an operator working these industries and you happen to read this; You're doing a good job and don't let anyone tell you otherwise 👍
In South Africa we experience 4 - 10 hour outages most days. Surprisingly we have got used to it, some install solar, some have generators and many just adapt. What we have yet to encounter is a multi day blackout : that could lead to civil unrest, unfortunately.
If y'all didn't kill whitey you wouldn't be having these issues
Yeah but I'd imagine crime significantly goes up for those 4-10 hour outages...
@@evanpaluch6190In South Africa a rise in crime would need to be dramatic for anyone to notice.
keyword "yet"
We have been practicing for years for a total black out. Everything this guy talks about is already happening here. Stage 6 load shedding means no water. We already have had three Cholera outbreaks this year.
I purposely spend two weeks a year with no electricity on vacation. Plus we’ve lost electricity during several storms including blizzards. You either adapt or snap.
Have been in a black start situation at sea, it took several tries for various reasons, each try heated up the equipment rooms more and more, to the point the SCADA systems were overheating. The successful start up was a well choreographed dance of power and cooling. Energy and cooling for both equipment and people.
I'd love to hear more about that. Losing power at sea must be terrifying, especially steering.
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.
I was here for that! I have a homesteading mentality and had stored oak wood in my back yard for the fireplace (every time anyone in the neighborhood cut any trees, I got what was available with my chainsaw). I was able to share the wood with my neighbor. We shared food and cooked in our fireplaces or grills. I duct taped flattened boxes together to make a barrier around my fireplace, with room for my chair and cooking needs. It was cozy there. I kept my phone charged so I would have something to do if I got bored. I used the car for that. Ha! I have since bought a BIG generator! Big enough to share with my neighbors and keep our freezers and refrigerators going. May never need it, but I have it and I have stored enough food to last 2 years.
I apologize on the behalf of Canada, our weather got drunk and ended up in your yard, took us a little bit to find your house and bring it home.
We did fine during snowpocalyps. If you didn’t have a fireplace i bet that was terrible. Country folks fare much better than city folks and suburbanites. If there was no power for extended period thats a different ballgame. Propane runs out, marauders come in, now you’ve got Mad Max
@@RedRightHand652 didn’t hurt me any. It’s the people with their heads in the sand that had issues. While we don’t experience freezing that often on the Gulf Coast, it happens at least a couple times a decade and people should be ready.
It’s awful that they build houses without fireplaces now. Developers tell buyers “there’s no need for a fireplace in Texas.” I wanted a house with a fireplace but we couldn’t find one we could afford.
I live in Ukraine and right now our grid operates under literal missile strikes. And operates well given the circumstances, we have 4 hours rolling blackouts every day to reduce load. And full day blackouts on worst days.
One thing i can say is having jackery-style charging station with full size outlet goes a long way. It allows to continue to power my gas house heating and other critical equipment.
P.S. That's experience far away from frontline. People who live in southeastern regions have much more severe problems.
Our thoughts are with you. I never thought in the 21st century there would be anything like this in Europe. We are in awe of your determination to resist Putin and the bravery of your troops and people. Slava Ukraini!
Ihor, Ukraine is exactly what I was thinking about when I watched this video. In fact, Ukraine is a lot of what I think of every day regardless of what I'm doing or watching. Wishing all of you as close as possible to a safe and comfortable winter.
Well I'm also Ukrainian. And I get less than 10 hours a day. It's a VERY common problem here now.
@@user-lp3cf5yn5b
It is not very fun.
🖕🇺🇦
I live in rural Nova Scotia, Canada. We usually get hit with a hurricane, tropical storm or depression a few times every fall. Winter storms, although usually not as windy cause a lot of snow and ice damage to the grid. We lose power pretty well every storm, sometimes for days. Because of this, I have a gasoline powered generator connected to my house, with a minimum of three days worth of gas in jerry cans, preserved with fuel stabilizer. I make a concerted effort to rotate the gas out into a vehicle after six months, fill it with fresh gas and stabilizer, and store it once again. We have a wood stove with seasoned firewood available year round. Our camping gear is stored in the house, with naphtha for the camp stove and lantern. In addition, we always have a minimum of 72 hours worth of food, and cash on hand in small denominations ($5, $10 and $20s). I’m not one of those preppers that the History Channel would do a documentary on, but just a guy who has gone through this power outage thing more times than I care to think about. This is all fine in the short run, but should there be a system wide massive outage due to an EMP or solar flare causing the whole grid to go dark permanently, I really would not like to think of what that would be like for folks that aren’t even minimally prepared like we are.
I grew up out in the woods. There was a terrible ice storm once, about the year 2000, I remember we were out of power for two weeks. And the roads were so iced over that we couldn’t drive out to leave. Luckily, since we are so far from town and civilization we had a good stock pile of necessities. We burned wood in the fireplace to stay warm, and cooked over it too. Holiday season so family was over. It was a very nice break from normal life.
We had one in Hot Springs Arkansas in 2000
Is that in the north east? I remember a terrible ice storm around Ottawa, Canada either in 1997 or 1998. School bus wasn't going to come to pick me up and drive 1.5 hours for me to get to school.
LOL - he mentions in the video how a short time outage can be a fun sort of time. Two weeks??!! Lucky you were so well prepared! AND you had family over?? 😎
Definitely memories that will never be forgotten.......you lucky man..... 😘
@@cyclingzealot I lived in upstate New York between 97-98 and remember a huge ice storm without power for two weeks. I actually enjoyed it asa kid.
@@pookiesis1465 yeah! I’m from Arkansas too!
Same one! Haha
I've already lived this. In 2011, a massive storm system caused a tornado outbreak in Alabama. One of the EF-5 tornadoes took down ALL the power transmission lines going into Huntsville, Al, bringing down the entire grid for the city and most outlying areas. It took nearly a week and a half to restore power to my apartment, and was an interesting way to end my last semester at college before graduating.
Rodney, I remember this quite well. Going almost two weeks without power was eye opening. The first few days we didn’t have water because someone shut off our water supply too…so not fun at all.
I have lived through both the Bama and Texas power outages and neither were fun. At least it wasn’t as cold during the 2011 outage. In 2021, our house was 46 degrees when the power came back on.
No. You haven't lived through a Real event like Grady is talking about. In a disaster, it's usually a local event. He is talking about a National event. No one is coming to bring you water and food because it's the same where they are at. Within two weeks armed gangs will be hunting you to take whatever you have left. You will be joining one of them just to survive.
Not even close to being the same scenario.
There was food being brought in, bottled water etc etc. if “the grid” goes down, it will be complete and utter chaos, especially in the big cities. 😂 and then it will spread, fast. 😂
@@Gfysimpletons And the emojis are for what?
@@Gfysimpletons Based on a comment like that, it's safe to assume you've never experienced anything even remotely similar.
The last 130 years of human civilization have been built on the widespread availability of electricity.
From communication to banking, to city life to health systems, from transportation to logistics - the background of all our life depends exclusively on the power grid. Thanks for spreading this knowledge to a wider audience...
You will own nothing and be happy.
@Ray of Light 62 - You're not a ray of light- you're a beacon of intelligence 👍 There's a saying among old poor southern farmers you might understand: "A man with a mule can afford a tractor, but a man with a tractor can't afford a mule". With a field to eat from the mule needs nothing else but a tractor always does.
6 weeks was my personal record in Sept 1979 after a hurricane that hit Mobile. My wife said her family went about the same. We pumped gasoline at the stations by hand pumps through the plate cover fill holes. We had a gas range and waterheater and never lost gas or water.
However other cities had power and sections of the city and county got water, power, gas every week during the cleanup. We were about the last...ironically we both lived downtown. Just depended on the street and the lost lines or flooded underground.
All grids go down....I'd estimate two weeks, then the violence in cities and the rural areas guarding or blowing ridges to keep thousands or millions of urban migrants from descending on the short supplies.
Between earthquakes and winter storms, I’ve been without power for over 3 weeks this winter. Where I live, it’s pretty normal. As such, I have a gas generator, a portable solar battery system (Jackery 1000), a well stocked pantry, and the ability to light and heat without electricity. Redundancy is a good thing when we are talking about what is needed to live.
Really described the interconnected infrastructure well. Worked in Baghdad as a Civil Affairs officer and saw first hand how the puzzle is structured, especially in urban areas. IMHO, rural areas and folks are more resilient when it comes to dealing with a grid down situation. They tend to live a lifestyle not as dependent on modern day infrastructure as do urban folks. Stay safe, be prepared.
Are you saying that rural communities are more resilient because they’re also stuck in the 14th century like the Middle East?
I lived in Venezuela for 19 years. (1998 to 2018). I experienced countless, days long blackouts. It's a very humbling experience, especially when you have 80+ hours a week without electricity for years and years. It's one of the most demoralizing things I can imagine.
Yet, the effects it had on my awareness and preparedness in life I wouldn't trade for anything else. There's value in misery. I don't want anyone to experience what I lived, but hell I wish they could learn what I learnt without living it.
What are some things you’d recommend ppl look out for and can do to be proactive
@@panmoncada7257 Be grateful about what you have. Don't vote democrat. Build a good and worthy relationship with your neighbours, and don't let politics ruin those relations.
@@manuelmendez980 so, all of that "humbling experience" has taught you about politics, huh! Oh, how I knew where this was going!
@@blabla-rg7ky well, try living 20 years in a socialist country in your own flesh, and It will teach you a thing or two about politics.
@@manuelmendez980 I've lived 30 in a communist country (I'm Romanian), so I know what it feels like, but I still don't associate catastrophes with politics)
Thanks!
I've lived a total blackout more than once, but the major one was the blackout after hurricane María hit Puerto Rico. We didn't have water service for an entire month and no electric service for more than 2 months. The reason for this is because the engineers focused on getting electricity to water services and critical services, like hospitals. Communication was completely out for little less than a month. The only people carrying information to the Police, Hospitals, Firefighters, and other government agencies and departments were the Radio Amateurs. I remember that my dad was listening to a frequency and suddenly someone mentioned to quickly go to the police station and tell them about a raid on a hospital, if I'm not mistaken. Social order was so chaotic during the first few weeks and communication between the government agencies was so cutoff that the National Guard had to be activated to achieve social order, but because of the lack of communication methods, the National Guard took a while to deploy. Ever since that blackout, there have been backup generators in the cell phone towers, allowing communication after blackout. Still, months without electricity (keep in mind other people spent more months without water and sometimes even a full year without electricity, maybe even more) because of the government's unpreparedness and the weak electric infrastructure costed lives, trauma, and most likely health problems. To finish this. I think that one of the many impactful yet uncanny views was a deep blue sky that had slowly turned completely grey due to the amount of generators active in the metro area.
How do generators turn the sky grey?
@@msmith323 air pollution
Ice storms hit eastern Kentucky often when I was young and we often went 7-15 days with out power in the rural areas. Something to remember is that higher density population center are prioritized over rural areas so preparedness is key to better outcomes. Thanks for wonderful videos.
During the partial grid collapse of the 1998 Ice Storm in Boucherville, QC near Montreal, they used a locomotive as power (550kW). In fact the CN rail company voluntarily derailed it and drove it on the asphalt for 300 meters (984ft) to the nearby City Hall, and another was trucked to the school (emergency shelter). That’s Canadian-French ingenuity for you.
Makes perfect sense. A diesel locomotive is basically just a giant power plant after all.
Would've been crazy if they realized it was politicians that created the mess and kept em shut down for a while and powered 'the people' instead but then people would've seen things continue to work and better without mind control and that's no good for the hidden hand to maintain a firm grip
Diesel doesn’t grow on trees. Quebecois don’t want pipelines but are happy to take delivery from authoritarian Middle East states. Makes perfect sense.
Edible Plant List (Not including most crops):
This list is very incomplete but these are the species I know about. I strongly encourage you to look into and learn about these plants. Also grow your own crops (those plants are not on this list since most of them are common knowledge) and herbs (mint, parsley, etc.). Check your climate zone, USDA hardiness zone, annual precipitation and temperature before planting anything or attempting to forage for wild edibles.
Temperate
Bee Balm
Bugleweed
Cattail
Chives
Clover (both white and red)
Coneflower (echinaceae)
Dandelion
Daylily
Evening-Primrose
Greenbrier (young leaves and stems)
Hibiscus
Hosta
Plantain (weed)
Rose (fruit/hips)
Sunflower
Tulip
Wild Grapes (careful not to confuse with moonseed)
Wild Rice
Wood Sorrel (in small amounts; large amounts can be toxic)
Desert
Agave (sap)
Pinyon Pine (seeds and inner bark)
Prickly Pear (pads after removing spines, fruit)
Polar and Sub-Polar
Arctic Raspberry
Cloudberry
Cranberry
This is very important advice, thanks. People take power for granted, but they shouldn't. I wish that every child would go on a camping trip at some time in their lives. At least a car camping trip at a state park. Let them experience having to pack their food, clothing and flashlights. Let them experience having to use the water pump to fill the cooler and carry it back to the campsite. Let them experience the nearly total darkness that comes after the sun goes down and the walk to the bathroom before bedtime, holding onto their flashlight for dear life.
After a multi day backpacking trip, coming back to civilization can be overwhelming!
@@THX5000 I'm 76 now and spent my adult life hiking/backpacking - the #1 thing to me was that wonderful bed when I got home. The simplicity of BPing I think we'll help me if things go south.
My word, that last part makes it sound terrifying lol a few months ago we took our toddlers camping with friends. Our friends had 8 total kids (2 different families). Kids had a great time, even if it was freezing.
On August 14 of 2003 we had the east coast blackout. As an employee of a power plant I can clear up a few concerns and lessons learned. Power plants use many vehicles to perform duties on the vast area of property and store a lot of fuel so the employees that were low on gasoline were allowed to pump gas into their vehicles so that they could get to home and back so that was not an issue with the gas stations being inoperable. Coal transportation via rail was not an issue due to the large amount already on site. One new policy that was initiated was a yearly black start test where a unit is shut down and disconnected from the mat at the main breakers. A diesel peaker unit is then started (which is just an engine that is commonly used in a ship that generates electricity from its own generator) to begin supplying power to the ID and FD fans of the boiler, fuel is then initiated and the boiler begins the process of converting water to steam and eventually the turbine begins to ramp up its MW output to supply power to the unit without the aid of the peaker and eventually the breakers are closed as the power is restored to the grid. The issue during the 2003 blackout with restarting was that outlying plants had to restore electricity back towards the east coast because the plants in the central blackout area had no way to know what phase of the 60 Hz cycle to phase to. All power plants in the Americas have to be perfectly in phase with each other.
One thing that I am curious about is now that the U.S. is decommissioning the coal fired power plants, what would a major outage do to the natural gas pumping ability to restart natural gas power plants?
Actually its worse because the greens have targeted natural gas so we are more and more dependent on electricity only
The environmentalists are working toward zero fossil fuels and complete electrification of society, so if they are successful how do you think that type of grid would work? No diesel backup. No fuel for your vehicles. Everything reliant on the power grid. So if it goes down, there are no fallback sources of energy. No coal. No biomass. Certainly no nuclear. I think we’d have to start burning vegans.
Byedone, Harass, and Buttjudge will handle it.
We live in a rural area and, long before it became popular, we had the habit of always keeping a minimum of 30 days of food and drinking water on hand. It has served us well on the few occasions we've been cut off from the grid. Now we have a camping trailer on the property with a large propane tank and a dual-fuel generator and some solar panels just in case we have a lengthy outage.
Nice work i'd aim to try to have a 90 food supply with how wild things are getting.
I've lived without electricity on and off several times in my life. One time I was living in a camper and the temp got down to -13. The walls inside were literally covered with ice. All I had was myself and a blanket.
The CPAP clip really hit home for me. Luckily, I had a neighbor with a generator and we ran an extension cable across our front yards for three nights during the winter storm. But to be honest, the power being out was a walk in the park compared to having no water.
Check to see what the voltage on the CPAP because you can run them off of a 12 volt battery in many cases.
I grew up often preparing for the power and water to cut out for up to a week. We were near the Florida coast and we were on well water, so during hurricanes the power often went out for up to a week, and we'd lose water when the power went out. I still don't take the city water for granted quite as much as other people.
Get a solar generator like a Jackery and a few solar panels. You should be able to power a CPAP indefinitely off grid with about $1000 worth of gear.
@@Kenriko Not saying its the original poster, but it is nutty to me to see people around me saying they cant afford certain preparedness items and then skirt away to a far off land. Same people that want to mooch when disaster strikes.
I never understood why so many in TX were complaining about lack of water when they were covered in deep snow.
When I was a senior in high school (1973) we had an arctic blast hit us. We lived on a cattle ranch in the mountains of Southern Oregon. We lost power for two weeks. Luckily we heated with wood and had a freezer full of meat in the garage and home canned food in the pantry. We had to draw water from the river because the pump on the well needed electricity. It was then I learned what the meaning of survivalism was.
yeah. in today, if you get power outages frequently. youll need solar panels
what'd you guys end up doing with the freezer stuff? That's what concerns me most. We already collect water and have a stash of canned food, wood heat. But with half a steer and a whole hog in the freezer we worry about all that meat spoiling.
@@embramorgan6720 Considering it was an arctic blast, keeping things cold probably wasn't the biggest challenge.
@@Ocker3 probably wasn't the biggest challenge, no. But it being cold outside doesn't mean your indoor freezer stays frozen for 2 weeks without power. Therefore my question remains.
@@embramorgan6720
The freezer was in the garage, therefore the meat stayed frozen.
James Burke, British science historian, did a series in 1978 called Connections. The first episode posited that a disaster in New York City forced everyone to abandon the city and try to survive in the surrounding countryside. It was a big, wet slap in the face with the reality that basically nobody in NYC could grow food, run farming equipment or have any clue how to slaughter and dress meat animals. Especially with no electricity or communication. Very good series; back in 1978 he warned of the coming disaster that plastic was sure to cause.
thanks for the reference
Thanks for referencing that, I should look that up. Did the author consider the fact that pretty much any urbanite could pick up the basics of growing food and operating farming equipment in like 2 days max though?
Not enough to do professionally of course, but just as a means to help out if farm equipment is inoperable during such times. Anyone can learn to dig up and collect potatoes, it's why it's been the goto job since humans began.
They couldn't ever grow enough food, not enough room
@@supernenechi This assumes they could find a book - actual printed-on-paper book - on gardening. Without power, there's no internet, and thus, no youtube. Plus, they won't have the seeds to even begin the process. (eg. the potatoes in my house are dehydrated.)
@@supernenechi That's kind of a funny remark. The potato part; they are a Nee World plant, so definitely not known, much less dug in early civilization. And then there's that Irish potato failure. They became dependent on a single crop, with terrible results.
The comment on communications being down reminded me of the time the Koeberg Nuclear Power Plant went down and it was virtually impossible to make calls in and to South Africa.
That cost the economy billion of dollars and scores of billions of Rand.
Unfortunately, humans are not hardwired to be interested in preventive actions. The hero isn't the person who prevents the disaster; instead it's the person who fixes the problem after it has occurred that gets the accolades. This was a pretty sobering video, nice job.
You're probably right, however after some people experience the misery of going through an event unprepared, they usually prep enough to make sure it never happens again.
Preppers are so conscience about future fails, they are prepared to live off grid long term with solar generators, water sources, ways to purify water, medicine, much food, etc.
This is actually entirely wrong, sorry. Humans are absolutely hard wired to predict and project, we developed imaginations specifically to plan for and execute a plan for perceived potential threats, we are exceptionally good at it. And our main motivational reasoning is not to be perceived as hero’s but you certainly revealed that to be yours.
@@leebliss3622 I see your POV, but in my experience, folks just don't do that. It is the rare person that sees risk and truly prepares.
I was an employee at a convenience store during major snowstorms where people lost power for several days. After a few days; most of them were going nuts. I can’t imagine what a real deal grid collapse would do to them!
Don't worry, FEMA will come to our rescue. 😆😆😆
If you are smart, you have prepared, go home, pull all the drapes, set sentries (YES, you NEED TO DO THIS! cameras with notification software can work well) and wait.
Most of the violence will not start until people run out of food in their homes, after that?
Keep your weapons handy if you live in urban or suburban communities. good luck. Ps this IS coming, prepare NOW!)
@@Brian-pz3wh How you gonna have cameras with no electricity?
@@gatocles99 Use a camera that has a solar panel or a battery. And you can charge your phone and battery's with a portable solar panel charger.
@@Brian-pz3wh We are only 9 meals way from anarchy.... just sayin...
In South Africa we’re facing consistent power outages due to a lack of generating capacity, maintenance etc. The threat of a total grid collapse is one we’re constantly trying to avoid. This video put into context how hard it will be to stand up the grid in the event of that eventuality.
so true my fellow south african
the political situation left theuipment in the hands of tribal style government those money grabbing gold mine owners woulg keep the lights on in the mines mother nature is not as tolerant of human nature
Do people there finally regret letting this happen?
Yup. This hits different to South Africans.
I am also from South Africa. I am a power systems engineer now in private practice. I loose sleep as I.know close we are. I worked man years for Eskom.
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.
These are the conditions in which life-changing money is made by those who remain calm, patient, and take controlled risks. Volatility goes both ways. The bigger the red candles, the bigger the green ones.
Investing in stocks can be a wise decision, especially if you have a dependable trading system that can lead to successful outcomes. Personally, I've been working with a financial advisor for about a year now. Starting with less than $200K and I'm now just $19,000 away from making half a million in profit.
I think this is something I should do, but I've been stalling for a long time now. I don't really know which firm to work with; I feel they are all the same. Is there any chance you could recommend who you work with?
Credits to 'Natalie Lynn Fisk' she has a web presence, so you can simply
She appears to be well-educated and well-read. I ran an online search on her name and came across her website; thank you for sharing.
I used to work in power production (my education is in power and marine engineering) and what is presented in this video is my worst fear. I bring this topic up a lot with people because it is always on my mind and very few people I've spoken with understand the severity of an event like this. I remember in my classes for my capstone one of my professors stating that "the North American electrical grid is the largest machine on planet Earth", that's really stuck with me. We don't usually think of the telephone poles and wires as being a part of a larger machine, but they absolutely are. Turning the grid back on isn't as easy as flicking a lightswitch.
That's not true anymore. First off, there are 4 interconnections covering the US and Canada. The "Eastern" interconnection _was_ the largest machine in the world. India passed us by a few years back when they interconnected their entire system into one grid. China is set to pass them, once they interconnect their entire grid.
It remains to be determined if the US will sync up. Intermittency in renewables can be fought with better interconnection, so it might happen. Then again, it might not because of the ever improving DC systems making large AC systems less desirable.
"Turning the grid back on isn't as easy as flicking a lightswitch." Made me think of Jurassic Park.
if powerplants, which generating the most, are destroyed, it not matters how interconnected you are. The solution is an decentralized small/mid scale power plants, including ones below surface and hidden in the mountains......with interconnection made underground as well. (double reservation for one power line at least).
@@s.i.m.c.a Also, distributed solar with local storage could make it so a power cut would hardly be noticed.
I worked in telecommunications for 8 years, things get pretty crazy when there are major disasters; I remember when a central office was both on fire and flooded out due to a large storm that moved through the Midwest and spawned multiple tornados, I was on-call that week, was working non-stop from 6:00 AM Friday to 5:00 PM the following Friday doing my part to manually reroute data and voice paths for critical customers (medical, emergency, financial, transport, power, fuel, hardware/construction and news agencies) between primary, secondary, tertiary and cellular paths so they could do their parts - I was even fielding some calls for the regional emergency services - very stressful but also very rewarding knowing that I was helping save lives.
One cool little bit involving water treatment. The Port Richmond plant in Philadelphia (for wastewater, this is) is a testbed facility. As of my last visit they generated the majority of their own electricity from methane that would otherwise be flared. Furthermore they were (and probably are or already have achieved) becoming a net contributor to the grid. The model doesn't work for drinking water treatment unfortunately but it's one example of how we can proof our infrastructure against catastrophic failures. It's not the only interesting project on site and really an interesting visit for any engineer in the area.
Good ole port richmond. Czerws kielbasa is the best. 👍🏼
Lived on Richmond & Ann! Didn’t know about that, I always wondered what that factory is/smell is when on 95.
Used to row on boathouse row and wondered what the Water Works actually does and how it’s all connected.
Great video. Thanks. You've reminded us all how interdependent we all are, and how fragile our lived reality is. More of us need to recognise this, and all work together to get ready for a loss of power.
I didn't expect you to be able to lay down a dystopian scenario quite as effectively as this. It's quite a contrast to your generally jovial demeanour, but it worked! 👍🏻
I spent summers on my dad’s small island in Canada as a kid. There was a fridge and stove that ran on propane and a hand pump for water. We bathed, brushed our teeth and washed our clothes in the lake. We swam, canoed and created our own fun, doing dances, plays, arts and crafts, sewing handmade dolls, etc. It was amazing and I’m grateful for the experience. Nevertheless, we were kids and relied on our parents to feed us, etc. I’m now an experienced camper with all the gear and know how but I wish I knew how to hunt, trap and fish! I have really good first aid, cpr and medical assistant skills so I feed that those are good bartering skills and I can sew and am very handy in general. I’m 52 years old but I’m in good physical shape as I workout daily usually. I have a bicycle with a basket on it, who will probably be very useful. I need to get binoculars for safety. I also took a very good self defense course years ago. These are all goofy things but I still feel woefully unprepared. I’m working on my preps as best I can with my budget and I have some preparedness books on hand. Get ready folks, stuff is coming our way and it ain’t gonna be easy!
Regardless only 50% of population will survive after a few months. Life will be hell for the survivors 😎
These folks might make it, though continents apart. ruclips.net/video/vY5yN4GrKyg/видео.html
ruclips.net/video/UhbooVZrh2o/видео.html
350 million people can't all be hunter-gatherers.
@@Thornbloom. The United States could probably support no more than 10% of our population from hunting and gathering. All the game animals and cattle herds would be gone in a month. Modern agriculture makes dense population possible. Electricity makes modern agriculture possible. Basic agriculture (corn, squash, beans, tomatoes) is possible in some locations, but requires social cohesion. There might have been 100 million Native Americans in 1492, but they were living in societies adapted to the environment, and half that number is more likely.
Amy, hunting and trapping will be of almost no value. Just 1 quick example. There are about 35 million deer in the U.S. That is 1 deer for every ten people, which is less than 2 weeks of food. Actually, it is WAY worse than that. Imagine being the last million people in the U.S. looking for the last million deer. All species and most of the breeding populations would be gone within ten days, a month at the most.
People just cannot fathom the speed and the to which things can collapse IF they ever start to collapse. Everything we think we can count on has a hidden vulnerability we did not think through.
It’s worth looking at the tiny Canadian province of Prince Edward Island. Hurricane Fiona knocked the entire Island offline, many for two weeks or more. The province’s fuel storage facility, which is privately owned by Irving Oil, had no generator, so gas stations quickly dried up. Cell tower generators could not be refuelled, so wireless communications was failing. Fiona was a wake up call for many people here.
Generators and diesel. 👍
Analog Diesel stations.
Analog Semi's.
Analog radios.
Redundancy.
@@GuacamoleyNacho no, not so much. I mean a wake up call as in the type of impacts these storms can have. We get strong tropical storms, but the intensity of them is growing. People are now talking about things like burying power lines, considering solar and battery, etc.
Prince Irving Island has been pounded by sever storms for decades and centuries.
What we witnessed was incompetence. Pure and simple. And that's the nice way to say "ignorant".
Lies
It's unfortunate that the people who need a wake up call the most won't get it
Moving to a city, the most wild thing to me was that the water still worked after a power outage. We used to have a well that was shared with our neighbors, powered by electricity, so if the power went out you could flush the toilet maybe twice before the whole house just didn't have any. Even crazier is how now that we have a gas-powered fireplace, we can keep the whole house warm without power if necessary. And though we didn't have that luxury when power was out for a week, we fortunately did have neighbors with power, since our street was on a different circuit than the rest of the neighborhood, so we ran an extension cord to power the fridge, dressed warmly, and mostly just went on with our daily lives as normal. I charged my devices at school and aside from that used handheld lights rather than regular lighting.
If that had happened while we still lived in the country, though? No water aside from our several gallon stockpile, way to preserve food other than dry storage, the only silver lining would be that the town proper was probably far enough away not to be effected by the same issue so stores would probably be open, at least some of them. Fortunately, while we lived there, the longest I remember the power being out was maybe a few days.
It's interesting to note that although going without power temporarily is tough, knowing that it may be gone for a very long time and there's nowhere to go to get gas, food, warmth, or communicate with family is a whole different situation.
wow, I never considered that going without electricity for a week is totally different than never having electricity for the rest of your life. Thanks for clarifying that. 🙄
@@Temulon I'm talking about the change in mindset. If there's a power outage you can expect normal life soon. If you know it will be months to years, you might have a different perspective.
Your comment does not help anyone, and speaks volumes about you.
Your comment speaks volumes about you and also helps no one. Alcohol can be distilled and used as fuel, wood gasification also creates fuel. If you can figure out how to use alternators arranged on a wind or water mill or even a pedal-driven contraption that provides free electricity you can store in batteries then theres that. Solar power. Can make a solar power vehicle I'm sure with solar panels someone isnt using any more. For food you have far more options: gardening, fishing, hunting, foraging and preservation of these foods. Your main job will be gathering food in the good, bountiful warm months to store for winter months. Then saving seed from all the things you've harvested for future harvests. Transportation can be made also with the use of electricity and car batteries or solar power. Wouldn't be difficult at all to make an ebike or something along those lines with any working electric motors and batteries. This type of stuff would be laying about everywhere. Old radios would work for communication if you know people who have them and you have one yourself. My grandparents are only 2 miles or so away and they're the only family I'm truly concerned about. Warmth is probably the easiest. Not hard to make a wood stove or find one, I already have 4 myself. If you don't know this stuff you should start learning it. Just a suggestion.
@@youtubecertified4643 I'm talking about the mindset. I'm pretty well versed in this realm.
@@Temulonway to be deliberately dense
My family kind of wonders the necessity of keeping our 12' pool full of water in the winter when everyone else empties theirs, as a source of boilable water and sanitary water. It also hit home more recently when one summer a while back Chlorine wasn't enough to purify our city water where we live in Salem Oregon, the state Capital due to a certain type of algae that our system couldn't adjust to until they upgraded to being able to use activated charcoal if needed. I also installed a weather vane cap on our fireplace since we didn't get good ventilation of airflow through the chimney besides birds wanting to nest in the chimney and the wood piles we keep. When growing up in Portland Oregon we were once out of power due to an ice storm for 2 weeks. That taught me the lesson that being prepared goes a long way. A fire place, propane, wood, water and a backup temp power generator goes a long way for us. Although solar is going crazy here, fog, ice, snow & clouds and being at the 45th parallel diminish how much solar will help in a extended event.
Here in Florida, one doesn't want an empty pool, lest it pop up out of the ground.
Couldn’t the oool freeze all the way down?
Few years ago, the DoD did a study to help determine best course of action in the event of a major grid loss - looking at everything from hypothetical cyber attacks to real life examples such as when PR was scoured clean by a hurricane. They determined that there was a very brief window for robust intervention otherwise in the face of no power, sanitation, water/food, medical help, power, communications and most importantly, a sense that things can/will improve, then the overall situation collapses into complete anarchy in less than two weeks.
If the grid shut down permanently, human society would last hundreds or thousands of years. But it would be a lot different from what we have now.
We actually experienced something like this in my country last year. A strong typhoon tore through a large part of our country and left many millions without electricity for almost two months in some places.
The effects were astounding; little to no fuel, with what little was left being 2x more expensive, people lining up for hours (2-8 hrs) for water, fuel and food, and intermittent mobile internet connection since all wired internet was down. I was in a city of about 1 million and we all struggled during that time.
Where are you from?
Philippines. I was in the regional capital of Cebu City when it happened. Lemme tell ya, waiting in line for 2-3 hours in the sun to get water was not fun.
Thank you for a good overview of some of the interconnectedness issues that face our grid. I'd point out that as an amateur radio operator and member of ARES (Amateur Radio Emergency Services) we are an often-overlooked and sometimes critical resource that will continue to function long after conventional communications fail, in fact that's a motto of the service: When all else fails. We have been called up and provided critical information and communication services to Search and Rescue, storm warning, and Wildfire fighting, just this year!
Modern 'Ham' Radio gear can interoperate with GPS, and some can provide and coordinate MESH and ALE networks. Almost all ham equipment can, with a laptop or tablet, send and receive email, text, and images across vast distances without a grid at all. Additionally, many have solar and wind generation, off-grid storage, and even significant EMP hardening. Our communications are capable of global reach, including the use of satellites and even bouncing signals off of meteor showers and the moon!
If it sounds interesting or worthwhile, getting started in amateur radio is very inexpensive (Well under $100) and having a legitimate call-sign and understanding radio is a massively important step in being there for your community when all else has failed.
KF7VML.
The unmentioned part of this is the boating communities, very few boats do not have a functioning VHF radio, some even have the Shortwave and UHF radio systems allowing them to add to the information collection and distribution. If you have navigable waterway nearby you likely have a boating community.
My out-of-state parents contacted me after a relatively major quake decades ago, when long-distance lines were all clogged... they had contacted via ham radio operators, who were local and could call local trunks instead of long distance. I told them we were all right, and... I had sent them an email saying so! (this was back in AOL days!)
Technology can give good workarounds, but.. it does need power. and old-school tech can often work when new-fangled ones, don't (eg, physical landlines that don't need power/batteries like cell towers)
I'm in Spring, TX. Just north of Houston. Our house sustained extensive damage from our pipes freezing and bursting. Half the house was destroyed, not to mention how scary it was to be in below freezing temperatures INSIDE our house for 3 days with our toddler.
I was in that Texas snowpocalypse, we got grandma and dad into a hotel in town with a generator before it really hit so it was just Mom and I running the farm. We lost power with that first snow and were prepared to heat the house with candles under upside-down soup pots, which works really well! We kept the water running to prevent the pipes freezing and cooked on a fire outside, we had an elderly neighbor who stayed with us who brought her old Dutch oven so we made stew and overall, I had a ton of fun that week! Good memories, kind of like a surprise camping trip at home 😂 but I know it was very very bad for most people! I've taken to teaching my friends and anyone else who'll listen how to survive without grid power, if even one person in every household knows what to do then we'll all be better off!
I went 21 days without power after an ice storm. I live in a rural area and I wasn't as big of a priority as comunities were.
Then the next winter almost a year later I again went 9 days without power after an ice storm.
I have backup generators, a woodstove, and dozens of oil lamps.
Congratulations?
@@marksparrow4038 Almost everyone else here is sharing their experiences with power outages. Why shouldn't this person?
indeed. That's what you do/have/prepare in a rural area. Right there with ye.
@@marksparrow4038 rude
@@marksparrow4038dumbass
I've been thinking about scenarios like this for a while... it's insane seeing how little time we've had this technology for compared to just how much we rely on it today, great video as always!
we lost power for 3 days. most stores closed (even 7-Eleven) except for the neighborhood Winn-Dixie. bring your own flashlight, and the staff brought calculators from home, and they sold groceries and survival supplies until the power came back, as the trucks kept arriving with loads. the other grocers and stores must have been smacking themselves. no cash but Credit card? remember those receipt slide-imprinters that rolled over the raised numbers on the card? they had those, too. i don't think we'd fare as well today. the imprinters won't work on flat-faced "chip cards", and few people carry cash anymore--forget your banking App.
Experienced this about 2-months ago with Hurricane Ian. Was without running water and electricity for 3-weeks and internet for 6-weeks, no traffic lights working in town for the first few days until they got emergency generators to them, lots of accidents occurred. Living in a 3rd-world within a 1st-world nation makes you really appreciate water and electricity, and realize the need for emergency-proof systems to back them up- and the need for backups like stored food and water (probably more than you think you need), just in case.
Kinda sad that people have gotten so dumb that they can't even drive through a 4 way intersection without some colored lights to tell em what to do
This information is very accurate, I am surprised because many get a lot of this wrong. I work for a power company and teach blackstart training to out power plant operators and this is by far the best vid on blackstart of the power grid I’ve seen in a while.
During the last US northeast blackout I was operating a unit in Florida, I felt that voltage jolt on my 300+MW generator, we were lucky it didn’t continue to cascade. Good system protection saved the day.
On generator synchronization, the great majority of them will not synch if any parameter is not right. The controls and relays will not allow it.
Great job! Thanks!!
This series is the most fascinating thing you've ever done on your channel. Something in hearing your calm voice describe absolutely ghoulish scenario's in analytical terms is both educational and just very pleasing somehow.
I hope Grady is the one that informs us when the world inevitably ends.
Tornado hit our area a few years back, took out the power for a good 4 days. We weren't really prepared, but we did have friends lets us borrow a generator and some heating elements. Since then we bought two generators, one big one small, some solar generators to run things quietly at night. Bunch of phone battery banks of varying size and different USB lights that only use 1-3 watts an hour so will give us light for a long time. Also stocked up on 3 months of water and 3 months of food based on our usage. We would fair decent now. Summer though, with high humidity and high heat it would be absolutely deadly, would need at least 1 window a/c to barely survive in 1 room, and 2 window A/C's to keep at least part of the house cool. I live in the south, so winter tends to not be our concern, because we could burn wood, use low watt heating pads and heating blankets with our solar generators and then use propane heaters when needed. Summer blackout is our enemy. Made me tint all our windows to block out the light to try to keep it cooler, and put up temp resistant curtains.
Great point! Because of this risk (or vulnerability), everyone should really watch the award-winning documentary, Grid Down Power Up - Documentary, narrated by Dennis Quaid, which is now available free on RUclips . Additionally, on our website, we provide a mechanism to write emails & make phone calls to your specific legislators, regulators and board members of your public utility to ensure we get action taken to protect our great country. Please help us spread the word.
7:47 - for us country folk, water goes immediately with the lack of power to the well pump. In 2011 Hurricane Irene took out power in southeast Pennsylvania for (as my memory serves) about 24 hours, and we happened to be hosting guests at the time. They were city dwellers, and kept forgetting that the toilet cistern would not refill due to a lack of pressurized water. If we know that weather could disrupt power for more than a few hours, we fill up the bathtub ahead of time to at least have water with which to fill the toilet cisterns.
Well, if you lived in the real country, you would not be connected to the grid. Sure, eventually our solar cells and/or batteries will fail, but, probably not within a year or two. Until then, our pumps will keep on pumping, our lights will go on and off, our ice boxes and freezers will stay cold. And if we really need to, we can always butcher one of the steers in the field out back. Welcome to real country in Northern Arizona. 😃
@@stephenlarson523 people that live in states that get below zero weather are not so lucky. Try heating a house with solar power.
@@MikeSmith-ul4iw Oh, we don´t heart our homes with solar power. That´s reserved for machines, like ice boxes and freezers and such. We burn wood, from Arizona cedar trees. That´s how I´m heating right now! And, states like California have been nice enough to build coal-burning electric generation plants near us. We don´t use their electricity, of course, but, there is that potential in a pinch. Thank you PacificCorp!
I'm trying to imagine real "country folk" who don't have generators. At least two of them.
@@SoloPilot6 hilarious have at it.
14 days without power from the super derecho in 2012. Of course lots of the grid was up around us in 3-5 days. One thing I learned, and you didn't mention, is that people will have to dump refrigerators and freezers out in a few days. If piling it at the curb is your only option..... some areas smelt so so bad. Lots of people didn't smell much better. Having proper generator setup was a real blessing
Food stockpiles thawing out and spoiling in freezers and refrigerators is likely the biggest problem in the pretty short run, ie 1 week. Also lack of access to potable water. You can do your physiological necessities into a bucket or something, but not having water or food is a problem. Most people don't stock up on too much canned foods or long lasting meals like MREs.
My family has always practiced being prepared for events like power outages and floods and tornadoes. We were fine during that winter storm but i l was hoping that event would be a wakeup call to a lot of people that they should put back emergency food and make plans for the next one, sadly I'm positive that most of them haven't done anything at all and when the next event comes they will needlessly suffer and then blame the government for not being able to protect them from every possible event just like they did after that winter storm. Many of those people that were unprepared would ridicule us as "crazy doomsday preppers" and then come knocking when they had no water and nothing to eat.
If the blackout is caused by frigid temperatures, you can at least save your frozen items by putting them out on the porch or back deck. Fridge items are tougher, but there's usually a cold room you can use.
I still don't understand how so much food went bad during the TX ice storm.
You'd think that if you're covered in snow that people would think to move their perishables into the snow and ice outside.
Luckily for us. You could just throw the food outside or gather up some of that snow and extend the thawing period
It's much less than a week. Supermarkets close immediately and start discarding chilled and frozen foods within a few hours.
There are few little shops anymore. So even if you have cash, 90% of food in the supply chain is inaccessible. Plus the supply chain stops.
This is why we as a society shouldn’t shoo off education on how to be self sufficient. When this happens, the government isn’t there to save anyone. Only your wits, tribe, and skills will be there.
The dread of a wide spread grid shutdown has been on my fear list for many many years. Nobody understands how dependent we all are on electricity.
Some of us do - that's why lead investments are prudent.
"Nobody understands"... false. Many do, as this video proves. It doesn't help though, because bringing back the infrastruture from the dead is a colossal task.
not nobody understands.. just 90% which makes the 10% need to hide they have from fear of the others getting desparate 🏡👀
Nobody understands - YOUR STATEMENT
@@astralux1732 most people don't understand the dependency on infrastructure, they don't see it, and they probably think water just comes at the tap water magically.
I'll be laughing at the top of my basement with 20000L of water, a diesel generator with fuel for 2 months and guns (if someone try to steal my things) !