Ten years ago one late afternoon I was playing video games when the power flickered off and back on. I did not think much to it, turned the television and Playstation back on, but about a minute later the power went out completely. Power outages happen way more often than they should around here, but if you wait it out, the power will turn back on within the hour. But this power outage was different. By nightfall, the lights were still out and did not come back on until much later that night. I was lucky because in places the power did not turn back on for two days and was up to that point the second worst blackout in history.
Considering this happened almost a year after 9/11, conspiracy theories quickly popped up suggesting terrorists attack on out power grid (R.E.M. even referenced this in their song, Bad Day: “The lights went out, the oil went dry, we blamed it on the other guy.”). They were wrong; it was a tree growth and computer glitch that brought down the deteriorating power grid. This was not much more reassuring that a terrorist attack.
But what if terrorists did launch a cyber attack on our power grid and it took ten days to find and fix the malicious code? That is the basis of American Blackout. The special looks like something National Geographic Channel would air after the fact with many eye witness accounts via cell-phone and various camcorders (note to self, get a solar powered battery to charge my portable devises if this were to really happen).
Though it features a lot of different culminated “footage” it focuses mainly on four different groups and how they survived the hypothetical ten day blackout. There is the couple who lives on the 24th floor of a Manhattan (please note you need electricity to get water above eight stories). There is a group of four students stuck in a dorm elevator and since it is the end of the trimester, there will not be many people around to hear their pleas. There is a resident NYC blogger who is left home alone because his mom is a nurse who cannot make it home. There is also a pregnant woman who is already two days late when the power went out. And being that this airing on the same channel that airs Doomsday Preppers, of course there is a family of preppers.
Each storyline could have been its own found footage horror movie because American Blackout gets dark, real dark, and I am not just talking about the lack of light at night. They go worst case scenario in many of the storylines, and then, when you do not think it cannot get any worse, it somehow does. What makes scarier than most horror movies is that everything that happens in the special is very plausible. And since neither President Bush nor Obama have really done much to improve our electrical grid, a major blackout may not be a question of if but when, and you definitely will want to check out American Blackout to see what may be ahead.
American Blackout premieres this Sunday at 9:00 on National Geographic Channel.
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