Last week was somewhat traumatic in the Algarve.
For those of you in Northern and eastern Europe life presumably went on relatively normally, but from parts of Southern France and all across the Iberian Peninsular there was a major electrical outage.
For me the whole thing started late morning with the electric supply going down. I was annoyed, but these things happen. I checked next door and they had no electricity either. I assumed it was a local outage.
Unfortunately, my daughter and family were due to return to the UK that afternoon. I assumed there would be electricity in other parts of the country and so took no particular precautions.
The thing is, what precautions can one take? And who insures every minute of the day?
The really problematic situation was that without electricity we could get no news. We were in all respects in the dark.
The scenes on the motorway to the airport were rather alarming. This showed two things. First, that apparently the whole of the Algarve had no electricity, and that if you were short of petrol you simply weren’t going anywhere. At the first motorway stop there were queues for petrol. At the second there were queues right down the hard shoulder for about a quarter of a mile. Secondly, it posed the question: what else was failing? Without electricity we could not find out because all electrical transmissions were down.
Luckily we had enough gas to get to the airport where there is a petrol station for when power would be restored. Apparently Faro airport had local backup systems and the place appeared to be operating.
Unfortunately, the flight scheduling and routing system was down, so there was no way flight paths could be monitored.
My kids boarded their return flight. I stayed in the airport. Luckily I was short of petrol and could not get home. I resigned myself to a night in the airport.
Two hours later my kids spotted me and joined me at my table. They had been disembarked and told their flight was cancelled.
The news from England had been that this was an international outage but would probably be remedied some time within the next six to ten hours, which meant some time during the middle of the early hours of the following day.
We needed somewhere to kip, at least relatively comfortably, and some food for breakfast if we were still here by then. I thought it prudent to stock up with breakfast before the queues emptied the food stores.
Luckily it was after 10. p.m. when we got power again, and we could get the car to the gas station and fill up, and drive home, and get some reasonable kip.
The kids got away a further day later at the crack of dawn on an alternative flight, which meant another disturbed night.
In short, we survived.
However, what are the consequences of this episode, and has anyone taken on board those consequences?
Let’s break this down. We are a modern civilisation that is almost completely dependent upon electricity.
Let’s run through this.
Without electricity:
1 we dont have water because water needs to be pumped from source to homes. We can last out for a while, but more than a few hours and things start to look very dodgy
2 we have a limited supply of fuel, so the car wont go very far, the buses stop running, so do the taxis, so do the trains and the planes
3 there is a follow-on to all this, as it means that petrol stations dont get deliveries of more fuel, supermarkets’ fridges fail and therefore stores of food start to go bad after an outage of more than six to ten hours, and they dont get any new deliveries
4 hospitals can function for probably up to 24 hours or more on back-up systems, but these need petrol, so after that period they cease to function, and patients that need special treatment are at risk, and close to death,
no businesses can function without electricity, and without transport no-one can get to work
5 the ATMs no longer work, neither does the visa system function, so shops close, and everybody stays home, and nothing now can function until the electric supply is restored, and if that takes more than two or three days people start to starve
Let me give you one more problem.
Carefully organised cyber sabotage could put an entire country out of action within minutes at minimal cost. That puts all existing war machines out of business. Modern warfare is going to change within days.
I could go on, but I hope you get the message. Without electricity life as we know it implodes. And warfare is reduced to enforcing an enemy’s suicide.
This leads me to a couple of questions which someone needs to take seriously right now.
Why is it that our electric supply is centralised? We urgently need to make sure that electricity is routed on a node to node system whereby if one node fails, the supply can be routed through a different node.
And one also has to ask why there seems to be one central control system. Surely the best part of about seventy million people cant get the electricity from one source? That is insane!
The second question concerns the decision of the lunatics in Brussels to hurry through the use of a digital currency. Common sense says that one major failure of the electricity supply wipes out all ability to do anything at all.
As regards going completely digital with money, what are the failsafes? What independent nodes will exist that will prevent one area in trouble from exporting that trouble to other areas? The obvious answer to that question is that there are none.
In short, this outage has made it abundantly clear that the electrical system needs to be re-designed before any attempt is made to add to the list of systems that can be struck down by a major electrical outage.
Any chance of that happening?
I for one will not be taking bets.
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