"Living Without Electricity" - Royal Academy of Engineering, 2016
"In December 2015, life for more than 100,000 people in Lancaster reverted to a pre-electronics era. A flood at an electricity substation resulted in a blackout over the entire city that lasted for more than 24 hours. Suddenly people realised that, without electricity, there is no internet, no mobile phones, no contactless payment, no lifts and no petrol pumps. Although these dependencies were not difficult to see, few had thought through the implications of losing so many aspects of modern life at once."
Report published 2016, freely downloadable from
https://www.raeng.org.uk/publications/reports/living-without-electricity
Read it. Think about what it says. Pass it around your organisation, your neighbourhood. And see what precautions YOU can take, because Westminster and the corporates and their low-budget outsourcers sure as hell aren't going to bother.
Once upon a time there used to be "Civil Contingency" preparations in much of the UK. Time to revive them?
Then there's the small matter of mobile network congestion. Even without an extended total loss of mains power in a locality, who here has experienced what happens to mobile network connectivity when suddenly loadsofpeople in the same part of the world want to use the network at the same time, e.g. when a busy dual carriageway or motorway suddenly gets blocked, even if it's only for half an hour or so, and everybody wants to use their mobiles at the same time. Been there done that wasn't impressed.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
