Power out in India
Power out India
The nation of India in Southern Asia has been hammered this week by massive power outages. Due to a host of causes, it has impacted more than half of the nation’s population. Think about that: It would be like power being out for 150 million Americans. SHUDDER!!!
Think about it more than twice, because it CAN happen here. Oh, I know the US electric grid is in better shape than India’s but that does not mean it is invulnerable. Just a few weeks ago a couple millions of us got a dose of what it would be like to be without power, including 500,000 in the state where I live as well as myself.
What do you think would happen if the grid had a catastrophic failure or collapse, like back in 2003 when a good chunk of Canada as well as the northeastern quarter of the U.S. tripped the circuit breaker?
I don’t think we Americans really appreciate a) how much our lives depend on electricity and b) how lucky we are to have a stable source of it. A lot of countries don’t have that luxury. Like a lot of Americans, we take our luxuries for granted and think our privileges are rights. Well, folks, you need to disabuse yourselves of that notion.
You hear the warnings, and yet we all (including me for a great part) just slough it off as “it can’t happen here.”
However, there are people out there who would just love to see it happen, ranging from the environmental wackos who would shut down all the coal, gas and nuclear powered electric plants to various groups and nations which love to hack into the control systems of the power grid and crash it. And that is not counting the very few nations who possibly are toying with the idea of launching an EMP nuclear burst or two or three in to the atmosphere and frying the whole system. Now, that is a scary idea.
When you think about nuclear weapons, you usually think of Hiroshima or Nagasaki and scale it up a magnitude or two, but really that is not the threat. Oh, yes, it could be done, but why do it. It takes far too many bombs to do much damage and a few large Electro-Magnetic-Pulses from nuclear airbursts high in the atmosphere doesn’t have to cause a whole lot of damage to the environment or on the ground to wreak havoc. You see, when a nuke goes off, it sends out a huge pulse of electro-magnetic radiation. Some of this radiation can kill you, but a bunch of it that doesn’t just sends a huge surge through the electrical system of anything that doesn’t happen to be shielded (like the American power grid, or the grid in most nations) and while it is happily tripping breakers everywhere, it also is making toast of big chunks of the control hardware.
Can you imagine what it would be like in the U.S. if we didn’t have power? Does anyone remember what it was like on 9/12 when the American transportation system essentially was shut down? Well, take that in spades and add a few orders of magnitude to it, as not only transportation will be screwed but also most of the communications networks (think cell phones and probably a good chunk of the Internet, although it was originally designed to just take a lick and keep on ticking, just like the old Timex watch).
Anyway, it is enough of a horror story that you probably don’t need to go to a vampire movie for a while if you let your mind dwell on it. However, since most of us just ignore it, in our ignorance we blithely go along as if it will never happen. I think that is a blessing sometimes.
Still, my heart (what is left of it) goes out to the 680 million or so Indians who have been without power for much of this week. I do know somewhat of what you are going through and urge you to endeavor to preserve. But then I remember that much of India doesn’t have reliable electrical power, so I guess in a way they are much better prepared than I would be to deal with the circumstances.
Still, it sucks … to use that time-honored American phrase.
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