A Brief History
On July 30 and 31, 2012, Northern and Eastern India suffered massive electrical blackouts leaving 400 million people without electricity on July 30th and an even more incredible 620 million people without juice, but luckily only for about a day.
Digging Deeper
The previous blackout record, as measured by number of people denied use of electricity, had been 230 million people, again in India, in 2001.
While the scope of the outage in these cases is immense, the length of time people are denied electric power most affects them. In the summer of 2022, part of Ohio went several days without air conditioning, fans, electric stoves, and microwaves, but more maddeningly without television and computer use! The value of food ruined in non-working refrigerators and freezers was massive.
As horrible as a summer without power can be, a blackout during a cold winter is certainly worse, especially in an “all-electric” house with electric heating and cooking.
Question for students (and subscribers): What is the longest you have been without electricity? Please let us know in the comments section below this article.
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Positivity, Sue. Blackout Prevention: Notebook for Electricians and Electrical Engineers – Apprentices, Journeymen and Retired Electricians/Pensioners. Independently published, 2019.
Pry, Peter. Blackout Warfare: Attacking The U.S. Electric Power Grid A Revolution In Military Affairs. Independently published, 2021.
The featured image in this article, a map by w:user:Planemad of Indian states affected by July 2012 power cuts, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 1.0 Generic license.
You can also watch video versions of this article on YouTube.
