In most of my personal experiences and videos seen online, lights seem to go out during strong earthquakes.
Why? I can grab the cord of a lamp and move it around without the lamp turning off, and I don’t think it has something to do with the power company. During earthquakes, some of my friends who live in the same zone or city as me do not experience lights going out.
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Earthquake prone areas actually have detectors on the electrical infrastructure that sense when a severe earthquake is happening. When detected it triggers substations to open their relays. Like a super sized version of the breakers in your house the current is cut off from the grid at multiple points. At the same time the power plants in the severe shaking slow to a stop to remove the source of energy completely.
This is because the movement of the earth can cause high lines to topple over. It can cause buried lines to float in the earth and rupture. And broken power lines don’t just sit there quietly. They whip around as the current in the line causes small explosions from overheating everything it touches. The last thing first responders need to deal with is electrical hazards. God forbid it floods and suddenly the water is energized as well. So for the safety of the survivors and responders the grid is shut off and only reconnected after the experts are sure of the integrity of that section of the grid. More importantly it allows local areas of the grid to respond. So if a far off power plant isn’t in danger from the shaking, the local stations can cut the power and keep the power from the power plant flowing to the undamaged areas.
Now in areas without those detectors the disconnection happens all the same as the moving earth breaks lines damages connections. However unlike the earthquake fail safe system there could still be a path from the power plant to the damaged area. Even worse the power plant may be so far outside the affected area that it doesn’t know a severe earthquake happened and keeps pushing power into the damaged grid. to make it more complex maybe that grid feeds undamaged areas. If you turn off the power to these undamaged areas then you’re just creating new problems to deal with.
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