I'm writing a novel and have questions about how the phone and electricity work.?

Question

If everyone suddenly died, how long would it take to lose phone and hydro, and how would it happen?

Obviously, I was unclear...at least for some. I didn't literally mean "everyone", I meant how long can phones and electricity work unmanned. Could someone place a call a month, a day, ect... let's say if the stations were abandoned. If you don't know these answers, don't answer please. Thanks.

Answer 1

If everyone suddenly died, phones would no longer work because there would be no one to do the talking and no one to talk to. Electricity would also not work because there would be no one to say that it was working.

If a tree falls in the forest when no one is around, does it make a sound?

Answer 2

I disagree about the hydro power lasting for weeks.

Power is produced based on customer demand, and this is updated at least twice daily. Flows into turbines are cut down, generally at night, and increased during the day when demand is higher. Demand is anticipated for the following day, with weekdays usually different than weekends.

There are actual operators on stations at dams and power plants to make these adjustments. If there were no operators present, and all of a sudden demand became static (because everyone else died and left the lights on, so-to-speak), only automatic systems would change the demand for power.

Let's say it is in the middle of summer, and everyone dies at night. Airconditioners (both home and industrial) would be off, in general. The hydro station is set for low output. Come daytime, AC units will start to kick on and power demand would go up, overloading the hydro station. Little instabilities like this would reak havoc on the whole grid, and it would fail sometime that day.


The phone system is much more highly automated, and could conceivably run for several days on battery power, but after than it would be dead.

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Answer 3

Assuming you mean "everybody else", then hydro electric would run until bearings started failing or if it occurred at a time of high power draw followed by a drought, when the water ran low. One factor would be how the automatic systems handled the failure of the coal, oil, and gas fired power plants. As these ran out of fuel, the automatic systems would try to draw power from systems that were still up which might cause an overload (depending on what machinery was still running and the time of year.) which would either shut down the interconnect or take down the grid, as the failure in Ohio took down the whole northeast a few years back.
The central phone office would probably run until the electric power failed or lack of maintenance took out a critical phone line.

Answer 4

Most electric power plants are highly automated. Assuming nothing went wrong mechanically (such as a surge that requires an engineer to flip a switch to redirect the flow), you could expect power plants to continue working for weeks if not longer unmanned.

Answer 5

well after a while no one from the phone service would be available and no one would be talking and answering. if God was watching he would find that since no one would be using the phones it would go out of business and if He was watching to see, it would go off in around 2 months depending who much money the phone company has.

Answer 6

If everyone died, who would be around to notice?

Answer 7

No one would be here to care