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 had to get gas every day for my generator during the outages. Only one gas station in down was in an area that still had power. If you don’t live in so cal and have to deal with public safety power shutoffs, quit talking out of your ass. Our power grid is so unreliable here that they really need to make the gas infrastructure more resilient.

When shit goes down, people need to be able to get fuel. The populace at large is never going to be prepared enough to deal with every gas station in the area going down. Raise the cost of gas by 10 cents to cover the costs. If every station is mandated to do so then they won’t have any issues with the margins as they will simply all raise prices in concert.

I don't live in SoCal. I live in rural Canada where I get several power outages per year due to inclement weather downing lines.

It sounds like there wasn't really a problem with gas availability, in your case. You were able to get enough gas to comfortably power a generator with no preparation during one of the biggest emergencies the city has ever seen. During the LA fires, the power cuts were to small enough areas that you could have just driven to a different area of the city. That sounds inconvenient, but hardly worth the effort of building independent power generation sources for the 10k+ gas stations in your state.

A far better solution is to do what we do in my part of Canada: a competently run power company that doesn't arbitrarily shut off power due to failing infrastructure setting billions of dollars worth of city on fire. We don't have PSPS's despite living in a very fire prone place with extreme weather because our infrastructure is maintained much better.

Instead of forcing everyone to subsidize individual power plants for gas stations to do long tail risk mitigation, California should maybe invest in a grid that doesn't regularly cause billion dollar fires.