I’d agree with that, in fact I think modern big cities would be an extremely dangerous place to be if things did come apart at the seams in a big way. Modern cities absolutely need electricity in order to function, and without it things would quickly descend into chaos. Their pumping stations use electricity and so if the electricity went off, the water supply would fail shortly afterward. Without water, there’d be no way of fighting fires and with all the looting and violence going on you’d soon have out of control fires all over the place. The whole city might well burn down in a firestorm (as happened to a few cities in Europe and Japan during WW2), and if that were to happen, anyone still inside would burn with it.
We had a small foretaste of what it could be like with the riots here in the UK in 2011, and I can tell you it was quite scary. I live in a street off a main road, and I could hear gangs rampaging down the main road smashing windows and looting the shops (fortunately they bypassed my street). A couple of days later I talked to one of the checkout operators at the local supermarket, and they were attacked by a gang of around 50 black youths who emptied all the tills and robbed all the customers at knifepoint. This is quite a large supermarket, and I don’t know how many customers were robbed (the story wasn’t covered in the news at all), but it must have been quite a few - dozens or more.
There wasn’t any warning that any of this was going to happen either, it was just a normal day and then suddenly there were gangs of mainly blacks all over the place looting the shops and beating up and robbing people with the police nowhere to be seen.
All I can say is, you people are very lucky you have guns and can defend yourselves in that sort of situation!
Very interesting, thanks. Stay safe, UK FRiend.
Regarding municipal water supplies, you are correct, I toured the water filtration facilities here and was told that my town would have between 1.5 and three days of pressure if the power failed depending on exactly where you are located. Fortunately, we are right on the banks of the Columbia River and with a modest population and lack of troublesome demographics we could probably get by, water wise (it least if the river isn’t frozen).
Your observation concerning fire during outages is accurate also. Just two weeks ago we had freak 83 mph winds with lots of powerlines down. At least two fires started during the power outage. Fortunately the fire department still had water pressure in the mains but landline phones and some cell repeaters were down. I shudder to think how those fires could spread with no pressure on the water mains, especially in summer (100F+ temps and wind). They could refill to some extent from the river but couldn’t possibly keep up if multiple areas were burning.