Wade, it is a mistake to think there is no one to watch it. Next time you see a report like "100,000 without power", examine the description to see how wide an area that covers. Likely there will be millions of people in the area, and only 100,000 in the cold and dark.
That is because, generally, weather (for example) causes hundreds or even thousands of local outages. That's why it takes so long to get them all back on line -- gotta fix them one by one.
There is practically no kind of single power outage that would take long to restore, because there are multiple paths to any local or regional area, and all it takes is some switching to isolate any single failure to a small area, while feeding the surrounding area from some other direction. The ability to do this is not an accident; it is the result of hard planning.
Huge numbers of local neighborhood-wide failures, on the other hand, require huge numbers of repair crews and take a long time.
There can be system-wide failures that put everyone down. In the Northeast Blackout of August 14, 2003, nearly the whole northeastern quarter of the USA (45 million people) was out, along with a huge area in Canada (10 million people). Within about 36 hours nearly everyone was back on the grid.
In the Northeast Blackout of November 9, 1965, most of NYC was darkened, along with parts of Michigan, Ohio, and other places; but some of Brooklyn and several counties on Long Island and in New Jersey were spared. Before 7:00 am the next day, all of NYC was back on line. Other areas took longer, but nowhere did it take half a week.
But when there are thousands and thousands of local outages, as in big ice storms taking limbs off trees for example, it can take weeks. These never put down whole metropolitan areas, though, and usually not even entire neighborhoods.
So, if the TV station has power, so will many of its watchers almost always.
__________________
-- Carl
|