latest version: The Walking Dead.
But I don’t understand why, especially in cases like this one, where it’s not a big bomb, it’s disease. If people are all killed off, why would the power grid automatically go down?
(IMHO not about fiction so much as how power grids operate, but mods decided all things…)
The power grid requires maintenance to keep going. If the maintenance is not performed, the generators fail. In a few months, the failures will bring down the system. It’s not just that one or two generators fail, but that the single failure can easily cause a cascade of failures as existing generators automatically try to increase power to compensate, causing them to go beyond design parameters.
Most power plants need some sort of fuel to generate their power. Once the coal trucks stop showing up, the plant’s going to stop generating power. And the plants that don’t need regular refueling (nuclear plants, hydro-electric dams, wind farms) still require a lot of maintenance, or they break down pretty quick. Additionally, even if the actual apocalyptic agent isn’t itself massively destructive to infrastructure, the way people react to it can be. Survivors who take over a power plant might cut outside lines, to preserve the plant’s power for themselves. If we’re talking about a super-plague scenario, once enough people have died, the survivors might start getting extremely irrational, and rioting, or general acts of nihilistic self-destruction, could cause significant damage to the power grid, such that even if the plant itself is still running, there might not be enough functioning power lines to get electricity everywhere. In some stories, the disease itself might cause psychotic behavior before it finally kills its host, which would add to the destruction. And in a zombie scenario, you’re going to get a lot of widespread destruction as people try to defend themselves from the zombie hordes.
Considering how hard it is to keep the power on with thousands of employees working around the clock, how is it surprising that the power will go off rather quickly when the number of workers approaches zero?
Not to mention the chaotic behavior of survivors. How many people do you think will crash into power line poles on their way out of town, just for starters?
And yeah, it may take longer in some areas. Hydro plants may go a little while without failing, and nuclear plants a little longer. But coal plants will fail in a matter of days; they have to refueled almost constantly.
Notice none of the disaster movies have used the wind turbine farms as power yet. All the more reason to head out to a house in the country with a giant working wind turbine close by. Eventually everything fails, but they at least won’t die quickly when the fuel runs out.
Have any zombie films really covered the period when society really breaks down and we can expect normal service to not be resumed?
Night and Dawn of the dead don’t really, in the first we have TV reports, uninfected folks roaming and shooting at will, in the second the TV works, even if it doesn’t pick up any signal some way into the film.
28 Days Later is set a certain number of days after all hell breaks loose, ditto for the TV series Walking Dead, so we don’t see any breakdown there either, it’s already happened. Day of the Dead and Land are both set in isolated locations expected to have their own power supply long after society breaks down.
I can only suggest that most zombie fiction seems to be set in a time when you wouldn’t expect your bins to be emptied either and not having internet access is the least of your worries. By the time we meet our intrepid heroes, oil and coal deliveries have stopped and whatever other part of the grid is supplying nuclear or renewable power has been swamped by demand.
According to the TV series, “Life After People,” one place that will have electrical power for some time will be Palm Springs, California due to the San Gorgonio Pass Wind Farm.
Lucifer’s Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle posits that one nuclear power station keeps running (at least for a fair period) after a comet hits the earth. IIRC they build a wall around it to protect it from a flood, aside from that it just keeps going with little manual intervention.
Stephen King’s book The Stand gave a pretty comprehensive look at exactly how the people in that fictional world would behave in the immediate aftermath of society’s breakdown, including the failure of the power systems. I don’t know if the miniseries version covered this also (haven’t seen it). He didn’t discuss the Internet, though, because the book was written in the pre-Internet era.
Isn’t it also true that when one plant fails the demand for electricity will be transferred to another plant? In this way just one or two plants failing (due to lack of fuel) can make the others fail as well because of demand* exceeding capacity. i believ this actually happened in the north east of the US a few years ago (not American, so am not too clear on the details).
*assuming people (or zombies) keep their leights/refrigirators/tv’s/etc turned on
Sort of along the same lines…
How long would unused batteries last? Say it’s been a few months or years since the apocalypse. I come across a CVS and there are still some batteries on the shelf. Should I expect them to work or does battery power naturally drain if unused?
Previous thread on topic More post-zombie power supply questions - Factual Questions - Straight Dope Message Board from almost 2 years ago. Please don’t wake the zombies, lest they eat our grid.
Unused AA or AAA batteries in the package seem to start fading after a couple years. I haven’t tested them to dead, but I bet after 5 years almost all thebatteries in a store would be dead or very close to it.
Depending on the climate, they’d also have gone through 4 or 5 winter/summer temperature cycles. Which would not be good for them in either Las Vegas or Fargo.
What you are describing is called a “cascade failure”. The northeast and southwest U.S. are both vulnerable to cascade failures due to the fact that these areas are very heavily loaded and can’t provide enough electricity to all areas if something fails, especially during the summer months when air conditioners push the electricity demand to the limit.
Wikipedia has a fairly detailed article describing the northeast blackout of 2003. If you read down through the sequence of events you can see how one failure ends up cascading into multiple failures on multiple systems.
There are protective devices all over the U.S. that are supposed to isolate parts of the various power grids in the event of a failure, so that failures such as the one in 2003 don’t take out quite as many systems over such a large area. After every cascade failure they end up improving these protective systems, but you don’t know how well they really work until something bad happens. Many experts think that a major cascade failure in the northeast or southwest could very easily happen again.
During a zombie apocalypse type of event, the grid is going to go down in sections. Some places will have power longer than others. Los Angeles, for example, has its own generators, and didn’t lose power at all when rolling blackouts hit California a few years ago (that was more of a problem with the bean counters rather than an actual shortage of electricity problem).
It looks like the factual aspect of the question has been nicely covered. May I suggest, plausibility aside, writers like it because it heightens the sense of helplessness, adds to the urgency of the situation and gives atmosphere.
Think of the scenes in videos, TV shows and films where the cops are using their flashlights at an indoor crime scene. (For instance, this moment in Aerosmith - Janie’s got a Gun.)Why don’t they just flick on the lights? Well, there might be a fingerprint there, but the more important reason is that those moving shafts of light against a dark background give a great atmosphere.
Remember ‘Shallow Grave’? It wasn’t entirely plausible that the character would hide in the attic and drill peep holes so he could watch everyone in the house, but it did give a new take on that great ‘shafts of light’ effect…
A somewhat related question. I’ve seen various post apocalypse/disaster movies or TV shows that depict a general blackout. They often show an aerial view of a city and then show the lights shutting off section by section. Is that at all realistic or is it just a good visual effect? What I’m wondering is whether an actual blackout would cause a section by section blackout or if it would just be a single blackout that would cover the whole area?
Two points- the nuclear station in the book was kept running by the heroic efforts of the crew, and the dike around it was built to hide it from the eyes of environmentalists. But yes, the basic point is sound; nuclear power plants require refueling so rarely, especially when the drain is low, and they’re usually defensible enough that one might expect them to last longer in any post-apocalyptic scenario, zombies or no.
Saw a silly example of this in an episode of CSI once. Warrick had been sent to collect evidence after a stabbing in a county jail. It’s nighttime and he’s going around collecting little fragments of evidence by flashlight. And I was thinking, “Maybe that would go a lot easier if you turned on the lights.”