[Travis McGee]

They’ll suddenly care when their TV, tuned to “Celebrity Addiction,” goes black, the lights go out, and the fridge defrosts. And the water goes to a gurgle and stops too.

[PA Engineer]

The problem is indeed not unique to the US. A good investigation is the Auckland CBD power failure. Human behavior was shocking, but not surprising. What stood out was the behavior of peoples in their homes and particularly apartments.

Water was lost when power stopped to the pump stations and apartment lift pumps. People continued to defecate in their toilets until they were full. They proceeded to fill their bathtubs and then the sinks. Finally, they started to defecate in the hallways until the buildings were no longer habitable.

Something worth investigating.

Great read and I appreciated the utopian arrogance described.

I don't think we are going to get out of this. In every engineering failure there are numerous points along the way that the problem can be avoided. There is never one failure, but an accumulation of errors.

There is one consistency in all my professional investigations, and that was what I like to call the culture of failure. In a macro sense that is western civilization today.