[norwaypinesavage]

This reminds me of the time before I retired from a large automotive company that all management was required to develop a "disaster recovery plan". We were required to watch a video of a "disaster". In the video, a cleaning crew dumped an ashtray (remember those) into a wastebasket. A smoldering ash lit papers in the basket. Smoke detectors turned on sprinklers, and the entire high rise building was doused in water. It took the company in the video nine months to recover.

Not long after that, a tornado completely destroyed a tire plant that produced 30 percent of the tire production capacity of the company I worked for. It's not easy to find production capacity of specific sizes of tires for millions of tires per year. Friends of mine were responsible for this. It took them a whole week to find alternative sources. No auto production plant was even shut down. They did work very hard that week.

I vote for weeks, not years, to deal with "destroyed" substations. There are alternatives other than sitting around for two years waiting for China to build transformers.

[Former Proud Canadian]

I would not want to live near a large urban area that was without power for months or even weeks.