I have this idea for a story were the surrounding infrastructure is intact. Now barring regular maintenance, how long would it take for existing infrastructure to not function? How long could a house run on existing utilities?
Thanks for the help!
In: Engineering
A solar power plant will likely be able to run fully on its own for 5 years before beginning to experience equipment failures. Wind farms should last a year before having serious failures but when they fail things will tend towards catastrophy. As long as there are not too many devices connected to the grid then things should maintain a relatively hands-off situation.
If you want to go really into the reality of things then the grid equipment will likely not want to start up the next day because of a lack of a signal to sync to. If your post-apocalyptic people keep a constant grid frequency signal on the power lines (maybe a simple gas generator or battery backup) you could make a reasonable argument that wind and solar power facilities would run automatically. I would not expect a wind farm to continue functioning for long without maintenance. Expect several turbines to die each year.
Lots of places still have personal or community wells to get water. If you have power then you have a functioning well for some number of years without maintenance. The parts would be easily replaced or repaired and anyone who has one of these probably already knows how to do this.
Sewer is an issue but it would take some time to fill up with use or until it rains. If you have a septic system then that can last for 30 years with no major work as long as it is managed carefully.
The internet would go down as soon as power was lost and would probably never start back up without the passwords. however, it is super easy to build a new internet with all the equipment you can find.
If you have hydroelectric power and gravity feed water supply will not be affected for a few days I would think but as power demand drops or spikes something would need to be done hydro electric power needs to be managed
Minutes to hours, even if the apocalypse suddenly killed all humans without breaking everything.
To start with water. The water treatment plant could run for a few days on its own likely. Depends if the control system has things like backwash cycles fully automated. Either way, it’s eventually going to fail. Things are going to go into alarm that need operator input, chemicals are going to run out, reservoirs are going to overfill or empty. Potable water production is going to stop within a couple days at best. The water distribution system again is somewhat automated. Depending on how well automated it is, it could run for a few days before things start to go sideways. But this is all rather irrelevant, as it hinges on electricity. Some parts of the water system might have back-up diesel generators to keep it going for a few hours, but that’s not going to last long.
Now onto power. The power system will probably crash and burn within hours. It’s a delicate balance of matching power produced to power consumed. Generators need to change inputs to maintain speed, generators need to come online and offline, power billing rates are adjusted on the fly, power is sold to other regions over lines. This need to happen every second, 24/7. A lot of this is automated, especially on the fast and small swing end. That’s why turning on your light switch doesn’t crash the grid to a hault. However, the larger scale fluctuations need human input. The issues and alarms of the plant and grid need human input. Everyone dying is definitely going to cause an unexpected shift in demand. And all it takes is one error not being addressed to crash a large part of the whole thing. In 2003 50 million people in North America lost power because of one hiccup at one plant. One plant took down about 250 of them. Things are going to get pretty out of control fast with cascading issues without anyone directing the system, without anyone responding to issues, and without the demanding being predictable.
Now, something immediately killing all humans but not damaging any of this semes unlikely. You more than likely are going to have downed power lines, broken transformers, ruptured water lines, out of control fires. Even if the apocalypse just kills humans, that’s a lot of car crashes. That’s a lot of planes falling from the sky. That’s a lot of stove tops setting buildings on fire. That’s a lot of factories and plants exploding.
I’m leaning on the answer is within an hour most shit is well beyond repair.
Think practically —
When was the last time you lost power? Why?
If no one was there to fix it….would it still be off?
I would say if the world broke tomorrow. you’d have one winter…maybe two before paralyzing failures would occur.
HELL there are Ice storms that take out entire cities every winter NOW….
There was a whole documentary series on the History Channel that went into detail about the idea of “what if all of humanity suddenly disappeared?” It’s called [Life After People](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_After_People).
The gist of it is that most stuff fails within hours or days without human supervision, such as coal power plants running out of fuel, but other places (like hydroelectric dams) can keep operating for months on end, or even longer, completely unsupervised. Almost everything fails entirely within a year however. The structures themselves, however, can last for decades, possibly even centuries, before they collapse.
Check out the ‘One Second After’ book (and series) if you are into this type of thing. Its a story about all electronics in the USA failing in an instant. With no electricity, most things in a house wont run. If you have City water (not a well), the water will continue to run so long as there is pressure in the supply lines, but that pressure would drop pretty quickly. Toilet will always flush as long as there is water in the tank.
Gas – depends on if you have a tank on your property or not.
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The water needs electricity to pump it and to power the processing so as soon as the water plants lose electricity there will be no mains water. Most electricity plants are automated so will continue to function for days after, however there may be issues with shorting happening in the distribution and some plants having automated shutdowns to avoid problems, coal fired power stations will rapidly run out of fuel so will likely be the first ones to stop.
In addition to having the utilities fail, a major concern would be how those utilities and industrial complexes fail. Without people to shut down petroleum refineries, or route new feedstock into the crackers, those refineries would end in catastrophic failure. Houston would end in a spectacular pyre. Nuclear reactors should all shutdown on their own, but every one has a potential for failure. Most of our livestock would die and start a plague of flies. Unmaintained storm sewer drains would quickly plug up turning cities and suburbs into a swamp and highways into rivers. Without people to keep Mother nature in check, she’ll quickly take back what is hers, but it’ll be a hell of a mess for years.
ELI5: Electricity is made by things that spin or panels which capture the sun. All of those things are connected together by a bunch of wires. Together those things and wires make up “the grid.” Hundreds of mommies and daddies have a job to make sure that every hour of the day, every day of the year, that grid is kept running. The #1 thing they do is to make sure the amount of electricity is just right for what everyone needs — not too much nor too little, but exactly the right amount. If the mommies and daddies don’t go to work, the whole grid is going shut down in an hour or less because it really can’t stand anything but exactly the just right amount of electricity flowing through it.
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