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Comment by inferiorhuman | Hacker News Reader

Counterpoint: huge swaths of the Bay Area went dark for a few days (9–11 October 2019) and we did not descend into martial law.

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The Night of Terror during the 1977 blackout in NYC led to 1000 fires, 4000 arrests, and 550 injured police.

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.

A curfew is not martial law. Regular daytime law abides in all cases, there's just a curfew.

The 2019 outage affected a small fraction of people. It mostly hit rural areas and small towns or subdivisions in hills. It affected only a few hundred thousand accounts in a region of 8 million people.

Yeah, no. Pretty much all of Sonoma and Marin lost power for days. Most of the rest of the cuts were in more rural areas but UC Berkeley and East San Jose got hit. The only county spared entirely was San Francisco.

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.

Over eight hundred thousand is a bit more than a few hundred thousand.

800,000 was the entire state. For example, they turned off the entire city of Red bluff. Red bluff is not in the Bay area. The number of customers that got turned off in the Bay area was much less than 5% of the population. I am sure you can see that that is very different from a nationwide blackout.

Counterpoint: The Bay Area is not a dense metro area.

The blackout of 2003. That took out Toronto and New York (among others) for a few days in August.

And several locales called for curfews as well..

Not in Toronto

Rolling portions of the Bay Area (but by no means all, or even most) had well communicated power outages due to weather conditions during that time.

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.

It really is remarkable how a little forewarning can help. Sure, there was no cell phone service along stretches of 280 but overall it was calm.

Planned outage vs unplanned outage.

  contingencies

Caltrans and PG&E had to be shamed into providing power for the Caldecott tunnel. The contingency was basically just shut everything down including tunnels and whatnot.

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".

I wouldn't say that's any more right or wrong. Localities have to deal with things according to their context, which will have to account for lots of variables.

What is the difference in preparation thought?

Does the Bay Area have generators, battery backup for critical emergency services like police and emergency medical care?

I don't have to live there to tell you they do. Generators are very common in the US, though they are generally placed in locations where they are easy to ignore. I expect every hospital has them, as will your water department, natural gas utility, cell phone towers (hit and miss, many don't have them, many do), any business with a data center on site (the generator might not cover the rest of the building, but the data center and HVAC will be on it).

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.

Yes, backup generators are required by the NEC for hospitals and certain other facilities (I’m at lunch and don’t have my copy of the NEC handy).

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.

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