“How many of the technical people and engineers needed for a recovery do you think live in the outskirts of those cities?”
How many city technical people would it require in, let’s say Idaho, to get the utilities running? None?
How would they get the large step down transformer they’d need to do that?
Those are made in china. Need several months lead time for delivery and need to come through either a major port (hey, those big cities that burned to the ground within a month of the blackout) or an airport (hey, another city, what’s the odds their control tower still works?).
And that electrical power plant? It was connected to those long ‘antenna’ wires that were the biggest problem. It probably burned to the ground as well. Hope it wasn’t a nuke plant too.