Jon's Blog

What happens when the lights go out?

On Tuesday, April 15, the lights went out all across Brazos County and much of the surrounding area. At around noon, something (no-one has bothered to tell us what, exactly) went wrong at the Gibbons Creek power plant in Carlos, just southeast of College Station, and a big chunk of power grid went black. The lights were off for about four hours, though nobody ever knew for sure when they'd come back on. Does a four-hour power outage sound like a cataclysmic event to you? Do you think your community could handle it? Consider what happened in the Bryan/College Station area:

• All the traffic lights were out. Traffic was unbelievably snarled, even when people seemed to recall their driver's ed instructions regarding the proper behavior at an uncontrolled intersection. In the main areas of town, it was faster to walk than to drive.
• Many schools and businesses, including Texas A&M University, sent everybody home after two hours of blackout (which didn't help the traffic at all).
• Grocery stores had trouble. Some closed their doors, some had employees leading shoppers around with flashlights. One or two stores had backup power and were able to remain fully operational. One or two, in an area with a population of roughly 150,000.
• Lowe's had a run on batteries, extension cords, and generators.
• Nobody could process electronic forms of payment; everything was basically cash-only. Cash registers didn't work; many places went to the "cigar box" method of cash handling.
• Local restaurants were forced to close after 30 minutes, regardless of whether or not they were serving perishable foods. Restaurants that refused to close were visited by health department officials who "encouraged" them to shut down immediately.
• The city requested that people use as little water as possible, for two reasons: one, the water towers weren't being refilled (by the electric pumps), and two, much of the sewer system is kept flowing via sewage lift stations (also driven by electric pumps).

Sure, the airport security scanners were fully functional out at Easterwood airport, and the 9-1-1 crew had their mobile emergency communications center online. Trouble is, most folks didn't give a rip about those wonderful taxpayer-funded services; for some reason, they were more concerned about those nagging little necessities like food and water, and getting home to their families to secure their houses and possessions in case of an extended crisis. When I realized the geographical extent of the outage, my first assumption was that it was a terrorist attack of some sort, and that power would possibly be out for a day or two, depending on how much infrastructure damage had occurred. I called my wife to be sure she knew how to load and fire my shotgun. She laughed at me; I don't think she realized just how serious I was. We live in a quiet neighborhood, but going without food, water, sewer, lights, and fuel for an extended period of time can do strange things to normally quiet people.

After 9/11 and all the ensuing official hullabaloo about "homeland security" and "emergency preparedness," it gives me pause when I consider the overwhelming unpreparedness of the community to deal with even a short power outage. No water, no sewer (or worse, backed-up sewers), no grocery stores, no gasoline (electric pumps!), no work, no school. If the lights hadn't come back on when they did, we'd have been very much in the dark, and very much in trouble. A four-hour power outage pushed this community to the edge. The "what ifs" are rather disconcerting.

Posted by jon at May 29, 2003 12:27 AM