Hacker News Reader

A line that disturbed me with just how widespread the outage is. (And also people will die from it in all sorts of weird ways)

"In an update, Spanish power grid operator Red Electrica says it's beginning to recover power in the NORTH and SOUTH of the country."

View on HN

On the bright side. People die from electricity and from operating electricity powered machines, too. So those will be spared. :)

I've seen the assertion made that we can statistically measure how many people died due to (for example) a heat wave, but we can't say for sure which ones.

I'd imagine something similar applies here. You'd have some number of deaths specifically attributable to lose of power, plus countless other deaths caused or prevented in non-obvious ways. This might be visible at a high level as a statistical outlier in the total number of deaths during the time period of an outage.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com