

Recent Weather In The Eastern U.S. Illustrates How Fragile The Power Grid Is

WASHINGTON, DC – Governors of Virginia, West Virginia and Ohio have declared a state of emergency in the wake of violent storms that ripped through the region this past weekend. Millions still remain without power and at least a dozen people are confirmed dead.

As efforts are underway to restore power and offer aid to those in distress, the country is also faced with a disturbing reality; the nation’s power grid is extremely vulnerable. Mike Adams of Natural News recently identified ten lessons we should learn from this recent disaster. Here are few of those:

  1. The power grid is ridiculously vulnerable to disruptions and failure.
  2. Without electricity, acquiring food and water in a major U.S. city can become a difficult task. As bad as it is in the Eastern U.S. recent events are only a shadow of what would happen in a total grid failure. Some malls and many gas stations are still open, providing food, water and air conditioning. Even the Washington Monument is lit. The reasons is because the power outages are fragmented, affecting some neighborhoods but not others. A total grid failure would be far more devastating.
  3. Most people are simply not prepared and therefore worsen any crisis. The average American citizen is 100% dependent on the power grid, the city water supply, and long-distance food deliveries to their grocery store. They have no backup plans, no stored food, no emergency mindset and no hope of surviving a real crisis. All they know to do is call 911 when something goes wrong. But, for over 48 hours the 911 system was down in two states.
  4. Cell phones are a fragile technology that can’t be counted on in an emergency. When the grid is up, and there are no storms, solar flares or disruptions, cell phones are truly amazing devices, but they are vulnerable to even small-scale natural events, and they therefore cannot be relied on when you need them most.
  5. The internet is wildly vulnerable to natural disasters. The storms took down a portion of the Amazon Cloud which in turn shut down Netflix, Pinterest and Instagram. Those services were offline for several hours during which many of their users no doubt thought the world was coming to an end.
  6. A national grid-down situation would be far more complex to repair. The recent storms that caused this “grid down” situation for millions of Americans was a local event, and its repair and restoration has been aided by workers arriving from outside the affected regions. In a national grid down scenario, however, there will be no excess human capital to lend to the situation. Every worker will be busy trying to restore the power grid in their own home regions. Only Texas has its own independent power grid, and even that grid has been strained by recent high temperatures.
  7. Many emergencies arrive unannounced. The Eastern seaboard of the USA was shocked by this recent “derecho” wind storm. Unlike a hurricane which approaches over a period of several days, this derecho event arrived without notice and struck without warning.

Recent events should only strengthen our resolve to be less dependent on “the system” to protect us and more self-sufficient.

© 2008-2014 Off The Grid News


  1. Sadly most of the folks currently affected will not learn the lesson and will go back to sleep soon. The entitlement class will demand that I pay to replace their lost food. They will demand that I provide them with a generator and a window airconditioner. I say no, and that makes me a racist cause I don’t feel for their loss.

  2. If there is anything good that can come out of this, it would be the explosion of village, individual, and other decentralized power systems. Look at Germany, when Chernobyl happened, there were only 4 suppliers of energy, elven years later there were several hundred, and now it is projected that Germany will have millions of suppliers of energy. That the individual, village, and other decentralized power systems have gone from being suppressed and maybe a passion of a few to now being offered as an option by major companies like Siemens is clearly one of the more positive legacies of the Chernobyl nuclear fallout.

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