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Will the Lights Stay On During a Pandemic?
According to a new report, chances are any large and long lasting pandemic could cause serious disruptions to the national powergrid, because coal mining and delivery would be impacted severely. The authors point to two train derailment accidents, back to back, in 2005 that caused such a slowdown in coal deliveries that many generating plants went from a 30 day reserve to 10 days to a very low 2 days at one plant. We still only maintain such a 30 day reserve, and a widespread pandemic would disrupt coal mining and coal transfer most likely much worse than those accidents. With roughly half the nation relying on coal for electricity right now, they are recommending that emergency planning agencies take this into consideration, considering that only one of 12 major agencies involved with that even bother mentioning coal in any of their pre planning scenarios, and none of them really address the problem.
The authors reviewed a dozen pandemic planning guidance documents, including those from the federal government, the World Health Organization, and energy industry groups such as the North American Electric Reliability Council. While one plan, that of the National Infrastructure Advisory Council, notes the importance of coal transportation, "none of the 12 documents prioritizes the mining of coal," the report says. "This absence is likely due to coal not being listed as a critical infrastructure or key resource." ed.z.: I guess they could stockpile food and have pre positioned emergency lodging facilities directly at the mines and sequester the workers there for the duration of the pandemic. Of course, then you have to consider their families, then onto other industries and determine what is critical or not to keep running and...where do you stop?
Food, water, electricity, telco/data services, all important "governing", where? They all have weak links that are dependent on everything working with only the minor delays or glitches we have right now.
I can't state a percentage, but I doubt it is more than 1 or 2% "not working" for our system to function in any given industry. Past that point, it will be noticed, start to get into double digits, it starts to hit localized crisis proportions, mid to high level double digits would of course be general systemic collapse. Sort of a virus Y2K worst case scenario.
Our only other really high mortality rate pandemic incident was way way back, almost a century ago, when we still had more than half the population living on farms that were better able to deal with no outside deliveries of anything. I think it is hovering around 1% now still live on farms, and even now most farms are dependent on outside deliveries of a lot of "stuff". Electricity. This farm here relies on HUGE amounts of electricity, we have backups similar to datacenters, multiple large diesel generators and fuel tanks, good enough for a few days to a week,not nearly enough for months and months though. And we'd still be better off than most places today, which have zero backups for such things as electricity or water and food supplies. Our local little "export economy" would be completely b0rken, but we could still survive (depending on the pandemic and how fast we get medical supplies, no one has pre supplied us yet..I'm the only one here with decent medical supplies, at no small cost to meselfs..)
The collective societal "we" have no current scale of reference beyond incidents like Katrina, and that was mild compared to a national pandemic that comes in waves for months. A pandemic doesn't necessarily destroy infrastructure like a hurricane, but once you start removing a lot of humans from control of the infrastructure, the results are the same as if it was destroyed. (anyone chime in with an example, how many people lost at your shop, or no electricity or water or just very intermittent supplies before you just shut down?) And if it is widespread, north to south, east to west, across ther board, every place, you can start to guess what cost the JIT system really is in an emergency. It pretty much all has to work, or it just won't, or it gets rather dicey, put it like that.
Anyway, my posting theme for today has been "avoid the all the eggs in one basket" idea. We keep seeing real or probable examples of why this is a bad idea, even if it turned out to be "convenient". The economy got way too centralized and top heavy and removed from actual wealth production, we put too may of our collective eggs there, and once that basket started to spill, it went fast, and is already impacting hard at the lower economic levels where there is *no* reserve or backup, and it looks to be hitting the middle classes next. Probably not bottomed out yet is what I am saying. We have overly centralized energy sources, and it isn't near diverse enough. Food supply is *much worse* than electricity, IMO it is already way past OMG what were they thinking? stage, forget 30 days backup, all the big cities have *three days* backup, and that depends on long range shipping and cheap and *available* energy, from field to plate. And so on, right down the list of necessities. Heck, here's another one, it is tangential but follows the thought: collectively entrusting so much of our political life and "voluntarily" ceding command and control to one big giant "central planning" egg basket starts to smack of the Stalinist model, and we know how successful that was.