A government declaring a curfew (for any reason) is a bad thing, IMO, but I may be projecting a bit - how are people from Chile responding? I’m sure they’re not happy about the outage, but does the curfew etc. seem reasonable to them?
Plus, both natural persons and enterprises could ask for curfew passes via a website (Comisaria Virtual) created during the COVID-era for doing police paperwork online. Military/police staff were especially understanding and people who didn't have a pass when checked were allowed to get one on-site using their smartphones.
It was as soft as a curfew can get. I didn't see any important backlash on social networks if that says anything to you.
For the average chilean: As long as you had 4G-5G equipment with working batteries, you had internet and access to essential gov services.
Nowadays some antennas go down right after a power outage because they don't have backup batteries. People also realised that they are quite pricey, so people melting copper lines moved to stealing batteries after the shift to optic fiber. To me this activity is straight out terrorism as it takes down critical infrastructure, I'm generally leftist, but ready to shoot these people on the spot if I actually had a gun.
Luckily, I flew out of Chile on Saturday. Although it felt like it was the safest place I have visited in South America so far the empty white powdered dime bags on the sidewalk, people telling me to be very careful walking alone at night, razor wire and electrified fences around properties was a reminder of how dangerous it is.
All of South America is outside France.
Did you mean to type something else?
Most of France is in Europe, but most is different than all.
> Authorities also announced a curfew in effect from 10 p.m. Tuesday until 6 a.m. Wednesday.
Personally I could understand that both policing and emergency response with no light at night might just become impossible. All the streetlights are presumably out, making walking difficult. If all of the traffic lights are also not working at night, it seems extremely dangerous. And any criminal would be camouflaged by all of the chaos. Much simpler to police the very act of being outside.
I agree it's not ideal, but I wouldn't thin end of the wedge it.
Chile is also relatively lightly populated, with the vast majority of its population in Santiago - which is pretty dense.
If anywhere in Chile is going to have a sudden crime spree if there was an opportunity, Santiago would be pretty much it.
Since then night curfews are a given during and after disasters.
The blackout in 2003 in NYC had no looting or violence.
The blackout in Maracaibo Venezuela in 2019 had 350 stores looted and 550+ people arrested.
The difference was the economic and social challenges in 1977 in NYC and 2019 in Venezuela. A recession and high unemployment.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-10/unprecede...
PG&E has restored power to 228,000, or 31%, of customers in parts of the San Francisco
Bay Area after high winds died down and inspections and repairs were complete, Vice
President Sumeet Singh said during a press briefing. More than 100,000 had already
regained service earlier Thursday. About 510,000 were still without power.
Aka there was plenty of time for people to know what is going on, no one was really surprised, agencies had time to prepare and roll out contingencies, etc.
In this case, no one seems to really know what caused it, let alone have had any warning. And Santiago is the national capital.
For all they know, someone intentionally crashed the grid in order to take the country.
What would you expect the US gov’t to do if Washington DC suddenly and unexpectedly completely lost power? I guarantee it would be pretty much the same thing.
contingencies
PG&E didn't share their list of folks who required electricity for medical equipment with counties, didn't actually contact everyone effected, and didn't communicate specifically when the power was going to be on/off to most of them. PG&E (still) doesn't do "well communicated".
Planned outage vs unplanned outage.
Does the Bay Area have generators, battery backup for critical emergency services like police and emergency medical care?
In many locations your utility will give a substantial discount to power if you have a backup generator and will allow your utility to switch you to running only on the generator when power demand is high. It that is the case nearly every business will have a generator - it is almost paid for off the discounts and so the ability to run normally when the power is out makes it worth it.
In Mississippi I saw generators on 20 foot poles so they would keep operating even when a hurricane flooded the whole region (they probably went in after the hurricane where it would have been needed...). I wouldn't expect that in the Bay area, but it it shows what is considered normal in places that have earned a reputation as backward.
I know Chile is not the richest country, but my impression is they are good enough that I'd expect generators in all the important places at least. Though still power off will turn the city dark overall.
Generators are extremely common at hospitals, emergency dispatch centers, cell phone towers, nursing homes, natural gas and water pump stations, police and fire stations, data centers, etc.
Of course many drunken bonfires end up needing health care and/or firefighting. However they need not. How do you fix your friends?
One hastily put together without the benefits of electricity is less likely to be properly planned. Hundreds if not thousands of groups doing the same thing ensures a certain number are going to cause problems. And with emergency services already stressed, banning risky behavior seems fair.
A bonfire is what I want people doing. they have fun and with some care is safe enough. They can enjoy the power outage instead of complain about how awful life is.
Certainly some towers may have onsite generators with fuel set to automatically run, but not the ones around me, and I've had two multiday outages this winter.
Landlines should work, but I don't know if Chile has many of them. I know they're rare here in Washington State. Wired internet is a maybe, depending on provider choices.
If we had a system, were you could register yourself and the society would be allowed to not help you, that would be great. But no we have a medical code (which funny enough is not enough to let woman die when they have a difficult/livethreatening pregnancy...)
As I see it, in a well running society there is enough trust to give everyone flexibility in the short term. If everyone assumes worst intentions and outcomes then your society is effectively no longer functioning. At which point a curfew is the least of your worries.
Otherwise you can grab power and refuse to relinquish it after a real emergency that justified the executive powers.
In particular: getting Trump to rescind his border "emergency" will be a long slow process of organizing and accumulating public pressure, whereas there will be an overwhelming amount of public pressure to end the curfew as soon as the power is restored.
This comment doesn't seem to have gone down well with the community, but I wonder why. "Emergency" alone does not justify curfews. Curfews are only justified if they are reasonably expected to actually affect the thing that is driving the emergency. This may well be the case with a disease, but here the emergency is simply that the infrastructure needs to be restored.
My parents have a place in the German countryside and they are practically self-sufficient in terms of energy. I would definitely want to take the opportunity to visit them, catch up with them, use the time in a socially productive way, etc. I have done countless treks, even for weeks at a time, without having to depend on continuous electricity.
Why should there be a curfew just because there is no electricity on the grid?
Imagine doing rolling curfews in countries like South-Africa synced with rolling blackouts - just because some vague and hand-wavy "oh so dangerous". Sounds surreal.
There seems to be general distrust of government in western society. When people in Chile seem to have no problem with the curfew, why are non-Chileans so concerned?
>"Emergency" alone does not justify curfews. Curfews are only justified if they are reasonably expected to actually affect the thing that is driving the emergency. This may well be the case with a disease, but here the emergency is simply that the infrastructure needs to be restored.
This makes no sense.. Sometimes, you treat the symptoms, sometimes you take preventive measures against the symptoms while you buy time to address the root cause.
Why do you think that? Stating a difference in civic requirements does not change any of the arguments put forward. I can move around a city without electricity. And so can you.
> There seems to be general distrust of government in western society. When people in Chile seem to have no problem with the curfew, why are non-Chileans so concerned?
This may not be a popular view in the U.S. government right now, but there are good reasons to distrust governments. In fact, most societies have embedded this distrust into the government itself through interlocking powers, constitutions, rule of law, etc.. The desire for good government decisions is not unique to the people of Chile.
> Sometimes, you treat the symptoms, sometimes you take preventive measures against the symptoms while you buy time to address the root cause.
Note how vague you seem to remain about the actual benefits of a curfew. It's a pattern we see in many of the replies on this thread. I think this vagueness is probably an indicator that some commenters don't really know a good reason, but feel the need to argue in favour of a curfew.
... although I do not really understand this motivation. It's a policy decision like countless others, and I have no strong feelings one way or the other - but maybe I'm missing the emotional part.
Chile has a history of looting after natural disasters. It also has a history of massive protests that often cause damage and sometimes turn violent. (The current president certainly knows, as he was a big student leader during one wave of student protests.) In a country like that, a one-night curfew is a reasonable precaution after a country-wide blackout.
Then travel there during the day? Why do you then need to go outside at night?
Because that genuinely is dangerous?
Do you deny that people are more likely to commit crimes of opportunity when the lights are off, security cameras are offline, and communication systems are down?
A rise in the likelihood of crime is a gradual, probabilistic matter, whereas a curfew is an absolute, binary restriction on freedoms. (Although in this particular case, fortunately, it seems to be quite lax.) If power outages were a sufficient justification for curfews, we would need clear, documented evidence of the crime increase, measured against other contributing factors, and balanced with the fundamental rights being restricted.
In Germany, for example, crime (and hospitalization) spikes on New Year's Eve—yet no one seriously argues for a curfew every December 31st. The mere presence of an increased risk does not automatically override the need for a proportional response.
Otherwise, any statistical uptick in crime could be used as a pretext to suspend civil liberties without proper consideration of competing rights and interests.
None of this is new knowledge.
I was there for a couple of weeks visiting friends back then and we even used a ridiculous, ad-laden app to look up "our" blackout times. It is also a strong case study for large-scale consumer-led solar expansion, perhaps together with Pakistan. ( https://www.weforum.org/stories/2024/11/pakistan-solar-power... )
On the African continent alone, it is estimated that some 600 million people in sub-Saharan Africa still have no access to reliable electricity. (Src.: https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/0f028d5f-26b1-47ca-... ) Reliable and non-discriminatory (at least not prohibitively expensive) access to electricity remains a serious human development issue.
It's certainly the case in both the US + Europe in my experience.