No? How can you generate electricity? With gas generators. How do you get the gas? Pump it with electrical pumps. It’s perpetual motion as long as you don’t run out of gas.
Why? Are you assuming that all refineries and all storage facilities have also been bombed? That’s not a scenario suggested by the OP.
Even considering that there is somehow no decrease in resource extraction or fuel refining (a dubious claim, I think), how much increased demand for fuel do you think all those generators would need? Anyone got any back-of-napkin calculations? Some rationing would have to be put into place, so try and figure that in, too.
Survive yes, but at what cost?
Factor in decreased demand for the fuel(s) used for those huge power stations that are not operating.
Sorry, my napkin doesn’t go that far. It’s used for other things.
How many gas stations are there in the country? How many of them have a generator (big enough to run a gas station)? Most do not. How many are wired up with a transfer switch or something that would allow the generator to easily power their pumps? Again, probably not most. How many minimum-wage employees are going to leave their families at home in the dark to fill their shift at the gas station? Few. How many customers would even have cash to buy gasoline in that situation (no electric grid means no internet service and no way to process credit card transactions). Not very many.
How many truck-drivers are going to try to leave their families to drive their route with a tanker truck full of (what would amount to) liquid gold in that situation. Ever seen videos of what they did to Reginald Denny? Most would stay home.
If you’re a business owner, and most of your customers can’t pay you, what’s the point in being open for business? If you’re an employee, and your boss can’t pay your (or even if he could), why would you leave your family during such uncertainty to go to work?
The immediate problem isn’t the fuel supply, it’s the lack of generator capacity. I live in a town of ~50,000 people. Maybe 5% of the households and businesses in this town have generators. There are maybe 4 or 5 retail locations that sell generators. They have, maybe, 50 additional generators on hand that they could potentially sell. There just aren’t massive warehouses full of generators waiting to supply every home and business with one in an emergency.
Most people would be without power. And some people would fight over the few generators there are, stealing them, killing for them, or killing to defend them.
Within a couple of weeks, most Americans would have lost the following:
[ul]
[li]a safe and reliable supply of drinking water[/li][li]the ability to replenish their dwindling food stocks[/li][li]heating / cooling in their homes[/li][li]the ability to travel farther than they can walk or ride a bike[/li][li]the ability to communicate with anyone farther away than their voice will carry[/li][li]refrigeration for food[/li][li]the ability to cook food in a microwave or stove top[/li][li]indoor plumbing[/li][li]the ability to withdraw cash from financial institutions[/li][li]emergency services (police, fire, medical)[/li][/ul]
and probably a dozen other critical things I can’t think of off the top of my head. It would be Armageddon.
Years probably.
Keep in mind, for those who aren’t fighting the hypothetical, that I said that the US power grids would go down, affecting the US and Canada. Could our allies help? Would they?
Thanks,
Rob
I think that it would depend on how organized your city/town was able to be. Ships and trucks should still work, so the distribution of food and fuel would still function.
Localized power should still be possible, so we should be able to do something like turning an ice rink into a giant refrigerator for the whole town should be possible. People would be able to go there, get food, and take it home.
Or we’d just all eat canned food for 18 months.
People living in the frosty North might need to move South for the winter, and stay with relatives, or in public shelters (maybe just use all the office space that’s going unused by tech companies and such).
The basics of life should largely keep going. It’s just businesses that would be hit. On the other hand, that’s a lot of labor sitting around, able to pitch in and build whatever needs building.
Even once you have the generator, you need fuel for the generator - they go through a lot of fuel. How long before you can’t get fuel - or its so expensive you can’t get fuel.
Our allies generally lack the logistics capability to be much use. Any assistance they provided would be dwarfed by the magnitude of the need.
Here’s the populations of just the states that border Canada:
AK: 0.7M
WA: 7.1M
ID: 1.7M
MT: 1.0M
ND: 0.8M
MN: 5.5M
MI: 9.9M
OH: 11.6M
PA: 12.8M
NY: 19.8M
VT: 0.6M
NH: 1.3M
ME: 1.3M
If my math is right, that’s 74 million people. Trying to resettle 74 million people even a couple hundred miles south of their current location would be impossible. There aren’t enough beds. We don’t have enough interior space for them to live anything like a reasonable existence. We wouldn’t have food to feed them or places for them to bathe. There wouldn’t be enough medical facilities / doctors to treat their illnesses.
Even if we did have the resources to receive them, how would you communicate this mass migration with 74 million people when they don’t have functioning TV’s, telephones, and in many cases even radios. Most won’t have functioning vehicles, etc.
I doubt highly that we have 18 months worth of canned food for ~325 million people. If we do, it’s stored in giant warehouses without a reliable method to distribute it. Within the first 72 hours, our grocery stores would look like Venezuela’s (empty), and they wouldn’t be restocked anytime soon.
I’m not sure how they could, though I’m sure they would try. The thing is, it would take something rather epic to take down our whole power grid, let alone take it down for 18 months. I guess it’s possible that you could do an EMP strike that takes down just the US and Canada…in that case I don’t know if it would take 18 months to get us back up or not. If it did, though, you’d have a large loss of life in the US and Canada regardless of if our allies or trade partners went into overdrive to sell us everything we’d need to get back online. Those positing gas generators I don’t think have a handle on the scale of the issue, or its impacts on logistics. Also, I’m unsure if whatever took out the power grid wouldn’t have a cascading effect on a bunch of other things, including those individual generators
If the power went out right now, how would you communicate this to the whole town? If you could, and told everyone and every grocery store in town to bring their perishables to the ice rink, what makes you think even 10% of the population would listen? It might have worked in Mayberry in the '60’s, but in most of America, today, people would hoard the little food they had or could obtain. They wouldn’t turn it over to be dispensed according to someone else’s whims and dictates.
Oh, please. You may have heard of a technology called radio. They even make some radios that are handheld and run on these things called batteries. Batteries supply power even when you’re not on the national power grid! Even better: lots of people own emergency radios with batteries powered by a hand crank so that they can run for years without external power.
Authorities have also heard of these radio things and they even thought to set up emergency broadcast channels for the specific purpose of telling people what to do when the shit hits the fan.
The OP is not suggesting that all electrical devices immediately cease to function. He’s only cut the national power grid. This is disastrous, yes, but it’s a disaster on the scale of the Great Depression in the 1930’s, not on the scale of a civilization-ending apocalypse.
I’ve got my ham radio (tech) license, so I have at least a passing familiarity with radios. Yes, authorities could use them to communicate some basic instructions to people, as long as the broadcast stations have power. Most people have a radio in their car that could receive public emergency broadcasts, until car batteries died. Quite a few homes will have a smaller battery-powered AM/FM radio and a supply of batteries that they could use for a while longer. Fewer will have FRS/GMRS radios that have an effective range of ~1 mile and only a handful of channels, which are likely to be cluttered with useless yapping idiots in a massive power outage. I doubt they’d be much use for most people. A relative handful of people have access to other radios that could be useful for communicating with select groups (emergency services personnel, military, amateur radio operators).
Would you trust what the authorities told you and obey them in that situation? If they said, “hey, everyone come to the Super Dome, it’s going to be great, we’ll have water there, we promise.” would you go?
What % of American homes do you think have dynamo-powered radios? 5%? 2%? 1%? I’ve owned several, and they’ve all worn out / gone bad in fairly short order once I actually started using them. I doubt there are many that could be used heavily for weeks or months without breaking / wearing out.
ETA: and receiving is only half the equation. There’s also the need for power to broadcast. How many radio stations in your state have battery / generator backups? How long will those batteries / generators’ fuel supplies last?
If the power grid was taken out by a Carrington event, then most of those modern cars wouldn’t run, either. Electronic ignitions.