Everyone has a little food and water at home, and grocery stores contain a few days of supplies as well. For the first few days, people deal with the inconvenience well.

'If anybody out there is listening to us: we are dying, and you are killing us with the inefficiency' /xXI3ScVAtKĮlsberg took account of some findings from the study in his novel, but he says he basically already had the situation described well. Those with backup generators would run out of fuel because the authorities would confiscate the available supply (fuel pumps require power) for emergency services. – would stop working, and people would lack power for batteries in their devices anyway (how many of you have a hand-crank flashlight or radio?).

Chaos would quickly break out because all forms of communication – cell phones, radio, television, internet, etc. Entitled “The vulnerability of modern societies: a case study of a large-scale blackout,” the study revealed lots of scary things.įor instance, people would not only be without drinking water, but the piping itself would become “irreparably” contaminated within weeks. Just before he finished, Germany’s Office of Technology Assessment (TAB) published its own scientific study on what an extended blackout would look like ( PDF in German). But Germany made it through the winter after Fukushima without any blackouts and has had none since.Įlsberg started work on the book in 2008. In the process, Elsberg’s book may have contributed to the exaggerated concern that Germany’s nuclear phaseout and the fast growth of wind and solar might endanger civilization itself. Elsberg’s book became a bestseller, and readers learned that almost nothing today works without electricity: from water supply to gasoline pumps at filing stations. There was much discussion about whether a blackout would occur in the winter (because of a power shortage) or in the summer (when solar power maxed out – no country had as much solar as Germany did at the time). After the accident in Fukushima, Chancellor Merkel had shut down eight of the country’s 19 nuclear reactors. The timing couldn’t have been better in terms of sales. We're too incompetent or uncaring to get them water? But in the case of Blackout by Austrian Marc Elsberg, there was a good reason for the head of Germany’s Network Agency (the grid regulator, a bit like FERC in the US) to do so in 2012: Elsberg’s book describes a Europe-wide blackout.Ĭases of cholera now being reported in Puerto Rico. It’s not often that a novel gets presented by a bureaucrat. The devastation from the recent hurricanes in the Caribbean, which is becoming increasingly vulnerable to disruption ( Public Domain). Akriti Bhargava, Karla Martínez Toral and Aradhna Tandon.

Black out elsberg