Electricity was out for 45 mins in my entire neighborhood

Electricity isn't a thing that just always works perfectly all the time. It's a utility that requires an enormous amount of effort to keep working. The electrical grid is the largest machine on Earth. Sometimes things break down. When they do, outages happen. We had an EF5 tornado hit our town and parts of it (including my neighborhood) was without electricity or clean potable running water for about 2 weeks. You'd be surprised how quickly you adapt to not having electricity in your home. In fact, it wasn't until 1925 that 50% of United States households even had any electricity service at all. So really, widespread electrification isn't even 100 years old yet.

/r/teenagers Thread