Discussion»Questions»Entertainment» Five weeks laters lotsa folks in Puerto Rico are still without power. How is that a 10 Mr. P? How long couldja survive without electricity?
Electric power is a convenience, not a necessity. (Have you ever heard of the Amish ?) Big portions of the USA didn't have that convenience until the late 1940's, some even later than that. And that took an act of Congress to make that happen. (The REA, the Rural Electrification Act, later expanded to include telephone service.)
Which brings up a question about Puerto Rico . . . what do you mean by "lotsa folks"? Are we talking about large cities like Cagaus, Ponce, Mayagüez, Aguada, Arecibo (the telescope is back on line, by the way, and it's u"p in the hills", almost 9-miles south of Areccibo) so there must be some power there) being totally without power or are you referring to locations away from the coastal cities up in the hills? Once you get back away from the "superhighway" that rings the island it gets pretty wild and wooly (and mountainous) pretty fast. I think it's the latter and you're just being melodramatic.
Personally I would be in a bit of a bind almost immediately because I'd have no running water. (Fortunately I do have a generator that can run the pump and the water heater.) But I have been without electricity for as long as a week and a half and managed to do quite nicely. Could have survived for a LOT longer than that too, not that I would have been happy about it. I've got friends "back home" that have been sans electric power for over a month at a time due to snowfall. The people that REALLY get into trouble are those that live in places like New York City though. Imagine not having elevator access to your 40th floor apartment! Talk about a cardio workout . . .
This post was edited by Salt and Red Pepper at October 24, 2017 10:43 AM MDT
"Electric power is a convenience, not a necessity." Tell that to people who are on dialysis, who need it for their respirators to work, to pump water, for doctors to treat patients, for surgeons to be able to do necessary surgery.
That's odd. Most of the New Yorkers I know are big on self-sufficiency?
Anyhow, maybe you missed the part where I mentioned that I depend on electricity to pump water at my home? But I can survive without it. I have on-site storage to cover that possibility in the event of power loss (the well is 400-feet deep so I'm not going to be dipping it with a bucket). I can also get water from a near-by stream for non-potable use (flushing the toilet) and that water can be filtered to make it potable if really necessary. (Yes, I have a filter for that too.) So while the loss of electricity would represent a great inconvenience in that case, it's not a necessity, unless New Yorkers expect someone to actually deliver it to them by going so far as to hold the cup to their lips . . .
And then there's refrigeration. For a very long term loss of power I'd have to switch to a gas or kerosene-fired model. But I try to stick to canned items which don't have that dependency on refrigeration for storage.
How many of the hospitals in Puerto Rico were actually without power and are still without power (I SERIOUSLY doubt that any of the hospitals there were without power at any point in the last 5 to 6 weeks.) No, I think that I would tell those people that are apparently "medically dependent" electric power and are now in jeopardy that they should have utilized the services of an accredited medical facility. Hospitals and other critical-care medical facilities are REQUIRED BY LAW to have stand-by power systems with on-site fuel storage so that they can remain fully operational during long-term power outages.
But to the main point; yes, electric power is a convenience, not a necessity. Humankind managed to survive the first 250 millennia without it. We as a species could continue on for another 250 millennia (or longer) without it. And we humans are quite ingenious; we would find other ways to accomplish the tasks you refer to. In fact, without electricity we might even have to become more physically adept again and lose our dependency on such medial devices. In the meantime consider that we, as individuals, have no value to our species. The world and humanity would continue on with or without any one of us.
Maybe some people don't mind living in the dark and seem to live their life that way. But I am not one of them. Most everything in my home is run by electricity. My pilots for my stove, water heater and AC are all run on electricity. So if we have a power outage, everything goes out. I live in a senior community and several people are on oxygen and other lifesaving devices. So when the electricity goes out, it's not long before we hear sirens in the area to help those at risk in here. Unless you are a hermit living on a mountain and are used to forging for yourself, I would say most people would have a hard time not having it.
Salt and Red Pepper 