Towards the close of Wednesday’s morning classes, it wasn’t just the students and teachers that took a lunch break. Following a series of residential power outages in the early morning, the entirety of our school’s electrical supply was also cut off. The noontime blackout was due to the failure of one of Madison’s two main JCP&L feeders, while the morning’s problems sourced from a separate equipment failure. Electric Utility Superintendent Michael Piano and his crew did very well with troubleshooting, and took less than two hours to bring the power back up. However, to the protest of the seniors, sufficient time had passed for high school administration to suspend senior privilege.
Not that it is any longer a surprise, but this day once gain presents to us the degree of our dependency upon electricity. Little over a century ago, whole structures were lit by lantern and candle. Today, breaks in the assistance of electric power disrupt daily life and have even led to nations into paralysis. For example, an Indian power outage, which is now gaining repute as the greatest of global history, took place on July 31. This power failure took hundreds of trains out of action, crippling public transportation and also stripped power, including air conditioning, from hundreds of thousands of households scattered throughout the country.
What does this say about our security? Should more effort be put into developing portable power sources? Do instances like these warrant precautionary measures that enable us to operate more effectively without electricity? Should there be consideration of widespread revision regarding our systems of power? Share your opinion below!