[Squawk 8888]

"With power out beyond a day or two, both food and water supplies would soon fail. Transportation systems would be at a standstill ... natural gas pressure would decline and some would lose gas altogether -- not good in the winter time ... Communications would be spotty or non-existent. ... All in all, our cities would not be very nice places to be... Martial law would likely follow," This scaremonger obviously doesn't know what he's talking about. Firstly, it is unlikely that a grid failure would cause widespread outages for more than a day- the first thing Ontario did in the last outage was disconnect from the grid and some power was flowing within 5 hours, the whole province was back within 24 hours. Some areas never lost power because they were near powerplants that disconnected from the grid. Finally, his scenario of social unrest is a bit OTT- parts of Québec lost power for 33 days (Montréal was dark for a week) and everyone managed. Never underestimate the ability of resourceful individuals to make things happen.

[Free Trapper]

It's the "un"resourceful individuals that would be the problem,as always.

[HitmanLV]

I agree that a protracted power loss wouldn't destroy the USA. It would be a rough 1 or 2 days or so, but the USA would not 'collapse' nor would our economy come tumbling down if we were without power for 36 hours.

[M. Thatcher]

Never underestimate the ability of resourceful individuals to make things happen.

THANK YOU. This nitwit scenario implies we'd all sit around and moan. Sheesh. This is America; the ability and will to go into herculean overdrive when necessary is in our DNA. We'd assess, analyze, assign, and solve.