this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2025
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Europe

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‘No one knew what to do’: power cuts bring chaos, connection and revaluation of digital dependency (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 15 hours ago by jandoenermann@feddit.org to c/europe@feddit.org
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[–] tal@lemmy.today 4 points 12 hours ago

It was fun, everyone was out on the streets, kids were playing and laughing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_European_power_outage

On 28 April 2025, at 12:33 CEST (11:33 WEST; 10:33 UTC), a major power cut occurred across the Iberian Peninsula affecting mainland Portugal and Peninsular Spain, where electric power was interrupted for about ten hours in most of the Peninsula and longer in some areas.

Ten hours isn't a huge deal unless you're maybe in an elevator or train or something where you get trapped.

But if it goes up to multiple days, things like availability of water or ability to receive communications become increasingly-important.

And while it didn't happen here, sometimes the reason that power is out is because of a larger disaster. Maybe a wildfire or earthquake or whatever. And a lost of power can make responding to problems that that creates a bigger problem.

Also, we're switching from ICE vehicles to EVs, and while the up side is that that means that a lot of people probably have a much bigger-than-in-an-ICE vehicle battery handy that they can power small devices from for a while, it also means that without grid power, more transportation infrastructure goes down. Someone in this thread mentioned the postal service. I don't know whether the USPS can generally operate without electricity (lighting in mail rooms? Automated sorting machines? Mail transport via airplanes? Maybe at reduced capacity...), but they're migrating to battery electric vehicles, and with those, I don't know what kind of mail service they could provide if the electrical grid is out.