"a lack of basic supplies like ladders and cable" gives me the squicks because of the research I did on Fukushima Dai-Ichi. The meltdown happened because they couldn't connect to grid. They kept trying & failing because wrong cables, broken transformers, no electricians.
Workers were desperately unraveling cables across the debris-strewn, tsunami-soaked plant and trying to figure out how to connect different sizes and voltages while the water in the reactors evaporated exposing the cores and bringing them closer to catastrophe.
If you MUST build your society on a dependence on electrical power, don't fuck around with this stuff.
if you're interested you can read the full or summary reports of my research here irsn.fr/EN/newsroom/Ne…
I did a talk on this at the beginning of March for @UniLeiden's very cool case study course studiegids.universiteitleiden.nl/en/courses/870… and it reminded me what a mess it was as they tried to rewire and reconfigure a nuclear plant BY HAND
The error with Fukushima Dai-Ichi was not lack of preparedness - they did regular drills and had a well resourced emergency HQ. It was hubris. They didn't think they had to worry about a station blackout because they didn't think grid electricity would fail for that long.
The roads were damaged. Power-generating trucks were too heavy to be airlifted in. One gets in and it has the wrong connectors and can't be used. Workers, who were not electricians, were studying electrical blueprints trying to figure out where to connect what.
Sound like something that could possibly happen where you live?
So when I say hubris, I mean that idea that our technology won't fail us, that our trappings of permanence in an impermanent world won't fall away, that we won't have to rebuild from the very bottom up in the middle of a storm on the hardest of deadlines
When we think about electrical blackouts we think of lights going out and maybe what we have in the freezer, but gas is pumped at gas stations using electricity. Is there anything you own that runs on batteries, that you don't have to plug in? Think about communications.
