For reasons that become evident later in the story, I wanted to focus on why this one narrator survived. I even had the grid go down while he was asleep in a motel on a road trip. But I find your description of folks’ moment-by-moment reactions to be extremely interesting. One of the goals with my new story is to encourage writers in other fields to explore their own ideas of how it might unravel. I’d love to get the guesses of nuclear plant engineers, police officers, nurses, etc. Hour by hour as the grid falters and dies.
Here in the Midwest, we often get storm related power outages. My plant manages with a generator in order to get things in a safe condition, and we don't do things that cool anyway.
But some places will get quite eventful if the outage lasts for an extended period of time.
now you just gave me another great idea- restart the story from several different points of view, and then somehow they all meet up at the end