phone disaster question

hey kids,
in the manner of research this one is.
lets say that all of humanity is wiped out except me. no nuclear explosions, just everyone disappears, and im left.
how long would everyday systems keep working for unmanned, specifically, telephones (landlines + cell/mobiles), electrical + gas power supplies and television / radio signals.
im aware that there would be no-one to ring etc, but i wouldnt know that til i tried without prior warning of impending doom.
any theories, or has this ever been tested?
cheers,
pauly t

Television and radio (except for unmanned stations) would go pretty quick, as soon as the current tape ran out. Electricity is generated mostly by coal fired plants (which would shut down very quickly once the coal stopped being fed into them) and nuclear plants (which I am not familiar enough with their operation to say how long they would stay up).

I would assume that most people would not be so courteous as to shut off whatever they were using as they were poofed to the netherworld, so there would still be a fairly large load on the power grid. Once a couple of the larger coal fired generators goes offline, the grid is going to start suffering some major collapses, and blackouts will start appearing all over the place. The places closest to the running plants will die last, assuming that all of the automatic devices on the grid work properly and manage to isolate those power networks from the grid before the faults shut down the generators from overload.

Once the electricity went, the telephones would switch to battery backup, then once the batteries died that would be the end of them as well.

Gas lines are controlled by electrical controls these days, so that would die a quick death as well.

The exact failure mode of the power system is mostly guesswork. There were some nasty power outages caused by surprisingly small events. Basically, a generator dies, and the grid (which is already nearing capacity in that area) tries to send more power to compensate, but can’t supply enough power in that area so that area shuts down, then the next area over tries to compensate and it too can’t provide all of the power needed so it is overloaded and shuts down, and so on and so on until you have a huge blackout. A lot of changes were made to the power systems after these sort of events left New York in darkness, but the reality is that the power system is very complex and we don’t know for certain if these types of gremlins still exist in it.

I’m sure if you do some research on what worked and what didn’t in the New York blackouts, you’ll get a good idea of what dies very quickly after the lights go out and what might keep working. One could safely assume that there would be no rioting of course, unless it was a one man riot. Even with a name like berserker I don’t think you’ll do as much damage as an angry New York mob.

Water systems are mostly gravity fed, so I think these would likely last the longest.

Since the “kids” haven’t shown up yet, I’ll take a stab at this.

When we lost commercial power to our central office at 140 West Street in Manhattan last September 11th, generators ran for about 8 hours until their supply of diesel fuel was exhausted. Battery reserves lasted for perhaps four hours after that. But in theory, the telephone company stays in service as long as it has power. People like me are needed only when there is a hard failure of a network element. Of course, if you’re the Omega Man then you’d finally have to haul out the phone book and look up your own damn numbers. :slight_smile:

So I defer to the local power grid. How long that stays up is a matter of how long the turbines can go in between feedings.