Tired of the California blackout yet?

Honestly, I’m not. The number of lessons that we can learn from what is starting to appear as more of a man-made disaster than a natural one fascinates me.  Here’s a video from K6UDA, who was right in the middle of the thing. Some of the points I think are the most interesting:

• Even with some advanced warning, it seems a majority of people did little-to-nothing to prepare.
• Within a few hours, Internet and cellphones were down. Ham radio repeaters didn’t last much longer, apparently. So much for “When all else fails, ham radio!”, at least in terms of large pieces of ham infrastructure.
• The predicted winds didn’t happen, at least in his location. Bad intelligence causes problems.
• Many people simply bugged out for what they perceived as better locations to ride the thing out.
• Even after the winds didn’t occur, PG&E kept the blackout going.
• Noise on the ham bands dropped precipitously. Silver lining.

The video is 22 minutes long, so don’t fear the fast forward feature.

As more of these are showing up on YouTube, I’ll be tossing them out. As I said, there are lessons to be learned here.