How long would it take for electricity and water (or general utilities) to stop being functional in an apocalyptic setting?

Question

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

Answer 1

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.