- When bad things happen, and it's a near miss, we tend
to deny how serious it could have been. A high speed fender-bender. A slip
on a mountain ledge. "Too close for comfort" is the phrase, and
then we seek our comfort in getting as far away as possible from the memory.
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- So it was with the blackout in Toronto last month, a
dramatic but momentary insight into the abyss, mercifully over in most
areas within a day, giving only glimpses of the horrors that might have
been. Pushing those glimpses aside and getting back to normal is, well,
perfectly normal. But given the uncertainties of the age, we owe it to
ourselves to face the awful risks, and take just a few of the prudent measures
that could make the difference between a bad dream and a certain nightmare.
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- Let's start with water.
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- People living in most high-rise apartments lost water
immediately with the power outage, because water pressure in the city-wide
system is insufficient to reach the upper floors. High-rises pump water
to upper floors, and most of those pumps went down.
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- The rest of us enjoyed normal water service during the
blackout, because the water comes from reservoirs and arrives courtesy
of gravity (some people even continued watering lawns). But the reservoirs
themselves require filling from the city's water-treatment plants, and
those plants lost power to their major pumps as well, with no backup to
keep them going.
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- In an interview on CBC Radio the morning after the blackout,
Toronto water officials indicated that reservoir levels had declined to
less than 50 per cent by the dead of night, and, had power not been quickly
restored, would have run to bottom within a couple of days.
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- No water to drink for 2.5 million people living cheek
by jowl. No water to flush the toilets. No water for the fire hydrants.
Threatened by accidents and arsonists, and desperate for water, an entire
city would go looking for it. Happily, Toronto exists on a fresh-water
lake, so options exist in bucket brigades. But the scene would have become
predictably ugly quickly.
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- Let's talk about food.
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- If power had been out for two weeks, how would the food-supply
system have coped? No lights or refrigeration in the supermarkets. Panic
buying where food was available at all. How long would social peace last
in the face of food shortages in a city of 2.5 million people accustomed
to ordering in and eating out?
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- Are there any contingency plans for this eventuality?
What agency would have anything like the human resources to organize and
administer food distribution in the absence of power for a month?
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- And let's talk about heat. If the power went out for
a month in January, and most of the city's furnaces with it, where would
people stay? How would the city deal with thousands of fireplaces and opportunistic
fires in the absence of fire hydrants?
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- Without heat (one day), water (three days) and food (five
days), what would happen to social order in a city of 2.5 million souls?
Surely, with the terrorist and systemic risks to our power supply ó
not to mention ice storms ó and the horrifying scenarios of social
disorder that so easily come to mind, we should consider these questions
now and even urgently. Paranoia is not the same as prudence, which is sometimes
ignored so as not to seem paranoiac.
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- Water is the most important thing, which suggests two
immediate strategies: Reliable, robust backup power capacity is essential
to the water system, capable of keeping it functional for at least 60 days.
That should be a sine qua non in all major cities.
-
- And households should stock drinking water sufficient
for at least two weeks in the event of system failures.
-
- The same household-based rule should apply to food: a
month's supply should be quite easy to maintain and would take enormous
stress off the social fabric in the event of an extended blackout. Public
campaigns should encourage these simple precautions.
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- Heat is another matter. It would not be stupid for city
people with fireplaces to maintain a reasonable woodpile. It is essential
that public authorities develop plans to support many thousands more should
power fail for weeks at -20-C.
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- And, of course, the electronic money system will need
to work, and everyone should keep their car gas tanks topped up. Getting
out of town with something akin to cash could be the least of many evils.
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- It is easy to imagine an extended power outage, and quite
within reasonable measures to avoid its most predictable horrors. Blame
would be no substitute for prudence. Tragedy would have no excuse.
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- - William Thorsell is director and CEO of the Royal Ontario
Museum
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- © 2003 Bell Globemedia Interactive Inc. All Rights
Reserved.
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- http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20030908.wthors0908/BNStory/National/
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