What Will The Collapse Look Like?

A good way to visualize it is to look to the countries we are importing immigrants from.

The morning scene is increasingly routine for Kenyans. When it’s time to start the day, the power is already out. Somewhere nearby, the shell of a wrecked electrical transformer lies on its side underneath the pole where it had been fixed seven metres off the ground.

The culprit is an unusual one: A vandal who is selling the toxic oil, drawn from the transformer, to chefs who use it for frying food in roadside stalls. Five litres of the viscous, PCB-laden liquid sells for $60. It looks like cooking oil, but lasts much longer, users say.

Kenyans’ appetite for fried food and cheap frying oil is stalling the country’s urgent efforts to build a modern electrical grid, even as it sows the seeds of a public health crisis, experts say…

The copper wire from transformers is sold to fix motors and as scrap metal, which enters the global market and can end up as far away as India and China, Muhumuza said.

I never knew there was oil in power transformers until I happened on a survivalist blog years back. The guy there said his first move when he heard the EBT cards weren’t going to get filled up would be to go out to the highway, follow the power lines, and put a bullet up through the bottom of each transformer he came across. As the oil began running out he would drop a drum under the pole to catch it and continue on. When he had shot enough, he was going to backtrack, picking up all the drums, so he would have the oil on hand. I wondered afterward how many more there were like him.

He didn’t say what the oil was for, and I’m not even sure he knew. Clearly he was an amateur, because the pro’s actually take down the entire transformer for the scrap metal. Then they start on the lines.

In America I could see a pickup truck with a big jury-rigged motorized spool on the back. Pull down one end of the line, hook it to the spool, drive off, and as you yank the line down, it gets spooled right up. Believe me if you can imagine it, there will be some idiot somewhere doing it, and feeling like a genius as he rolls along taking down the entire US grid.

You can see how with a fully functional grid and a roaring economy, it is nothing to replace the transformers, but once you are looking at 20-30% power outages, combined with a lack of funds for upkeep and workers, things get dicey. Even worse,

Such power losses can cut revenues as much as 20 percent for businesses that can’t easily use or afford backup generators, World Bank said.

Even companies that don’t experience blackouts are likely to suffer as utilities pass on the price of continually replacing transformers.

Bad economy, meet worse economy.

Best have a generator and backups on hand, preferably buried and sound-proofed, so as to not attract leaches.

Apocalypse cometh™