Blackout

Blackout - Tomorrow it is too late.

The name of the book by the austrian author Marc Elsberg that I 'had' to read over Xmas/New Year, as I will participate later this month to a seminar about critical, national infrastructure.  The novel is about an europe-wide power failure which lasts for almost two weeks. It started in Italy and Sweden, tearing down the electricity networks all over the continent. The power companies didn't realize for some days, that they were attacked through the smartmeters used in households. A further difficulty didn't allow them to restart the power production and re-establish the supply. The impact on people and society is enormous:
- no light, no heating, no fridge, etc. is anylonger working
- mobile phones cannot longer be loaded, communication comes almost to an end within a few days
- the food supply chain is impacted. Petrol stations cannot pump without electricity. Large farms don't have enough hands to milk the cows.
- Hospitals and other critical institutions have emergency power, but usually only foreseen for a few hours to days. Petrol supply becomes an issue afterwards. The same with nuclear plants that need to be cooled.
- Riots start
- ...
Don't want to detail too much. It is an interesting reading and clearly shows how depending our society is on some infrastructure. Although being a fiction book, it is not too far from some elements which already happened, e.g. the Stuxnet computer worm or the dramatic days after hurricane Katrina in News Orleans 2005.

So far the book is available in German, Italian, Dutch and Japanese - but not yet in English. While surfing I found another interesting link: National Geographic produced a movie about a similar scenario, called American Blackout 2013. It is available on Youtube (here the link). I haven't watched it so far, but I guess it not the sort of thing you want to see before going to bed and have a good sleep.