Most people in the US tend not to worry about blackouts because they still tend to be fairly uncommon and brief. Even in Phoenix, with its record-breaking stretch of daily highs at or above 110F, the grid is holding.
Fragility is commonplace across US energy infrastructure. “The wires and poles are getting older, and the weather is getting more difficult, and the population’s getting bigger,” says Michael Webber, a professor of energy resources at the University of Texas at Austin. Emergency managers are acutely aware of the threat. “Electricity is really the cornerstone of disaster recovery,” said Bryan Koon, vice president of homeland security and emergency management at IEM, a disaster management consulting firm. “When you don’t have it, everything is hard. When you have it, everything becomes a little bit easier.”
Immediately after an outage, the first and foremost line of protection is privately owned small generators. Many hospitals and nursing homes are required to have their own. This is in part because of Hurricane Irma in 2017, which knocked out power to. A dozen people died in a Hollywood, Florida, nursing home due to lack of air conditioning.