It depends on if you believe the following (from the article):
Regions with high percentages of at-risk
capacity could experience long-duration
outages extending for several years.
If that happens, then I agree with you when you say "we would see looting, famine (and huge starvation), violence, etc".
Take a big city like NYC. Without electricity there is no water, no sewage treatment. Within a few days, at-risk people start dying. By the thousands.
And let's say that power can't be restored for years (see quote above). Then what exactly do you do with those people? They can't live in NYC without electricity. Period.
So do you try to move them to refugee camps in the country? Really? Eight million plus people? How do you feed them? How do they get water? And if the problem is happening in NYC it's probably happening all over the country, so it's not like all of the USA's resources can be devoted to just the NYC metro area.
There are farms and houses in the country that have outhouses and have water wells that can be pumped by hand. They have stored food. But that's such a small portion of the country. 90% of the country would have a hard time surviving an extended period without electricity.
Fortunately this is truly a first world problem. There are so many people in other countries that live a day-to-day subsistence life, without electricity. They grow their own food (or trade locally for it), they don't depend on it being delivered every few days to within a few miles of them. Those people will be fine.
If the power was going to be out for months, and no chance of access to water or a working sewage system, then yes you'd want to evacuate NYC, perhaps not all of those 8 million people, but anyone without alternative means of disposing of their human waste.
As for how to get water to people, you could use trucks to deliver water tanks. You could also have small scale electricity production through solar and wind and mobile electricity generators.
It'd require considerable effort to pull off, but we would have options.
A lot of basic infrastructure (such as water) will have diesel generators that would hopefully keep things going. Presumably food production (such as freezers, fridges, baking) could have generators brought in. At that point the key factor in survival is making sure the refineries are kept on-line and are protected against solar storms.
It depends on if you believe the following (from the article):
If that happens, then I agree with you when you say "we would see looting, famine (and huge starvation), violence, etc".Take a big city like NYC. Without electricity there is no water, no sewage treatment. Within a few days, at-risk people start dying. By the thousands.
And let's say that power can't be restored for years (see quote above). Then what exactly do you do with those people? They can't live in NYC without electricity. Period.
So do you try to move them to refugee camps in the country? Really? Eight million plus people? How do you feed them? How do they get water? And if the problem is happening in NYC it's probably happening all over the country, so it's not like all of the USA's resources can be devoted to just the NYC metro area.
There are farms and houses in the country that have outhouses and have water wells that can be pumped by hand. They have stored food. But that's such a small portion of the country. 90% of the country would have a hard time surviving an extended period without electricity.
Fortunately this is truly a first world problem. There are so many people in other countries that live a day-to-day subsistence life, without electricity. They grow their own food (or trade locally for it), they don't depend on it being delivered every few days to within a few miles of them. Those people will be fine.