Start your own Internet Resiliency Club

> One of my nightmares is waking up one morning and discovering that the power is out, the internet is down, my cell phone doesn’t work

I dunno.... as I get older, this sounds more and more idyllic

I see the sarcasm but you're likely not simulating this hard enough. This is what happened in most of Spain and Portugal during the recent power outage and it wasn't pretty.

The power grid went down in a large area of the US about 20 years ago. The biggest issue I saw was the gas pumps didn't work. Cars were lined up, many abandoned, just waiting for the power to come on some they could get gas. I was in college at the time, but home for a few days. I heard rumors that the power was on west of us (where my school was), so I just started driving west, hoping I found where the power was on before I ran out of gas. Thankfully, that worked out.

But if the power, and the gas stations, don't work anywhere. It won't take long before we start running out of food and other utilities start to fail.

It’s absurd that we don’t require gas stations to have generators on-site. They have all the fuel they need to power them right there!!!

Now nobody else can get more fuel for their generators when the gas stations don’t have power either.

This was a big issue during the power shutoffs during LA fires this year.

Gas stations are private businesses, and they typically make almost nothing on gas, most of their margin is in the c-store.

Requiring every single one of them to invest in a 5-6 figure power backup solution with hundreds or thousands in yearly maintenance costs, so they can sell their lowest margin product to accommodate those who can't plan ahead during a disaster that happens maybe once in a decade event is pretty absurd.

I guess a government/population that cared about resilience would require them to add a few pennies/gallon onto the price to pay for backup generators. Maybe also bigger storage tanks.