Understanding the Ripple Effect: How Power Outages Affect Local Infrastructure and Equipment

Every outage has consequences—even a small flicker can cause disasters for individuals, neighborhoods, and the local community. Learn more about the potential implications of power outages on local infrastructure and everyone who relies on it.

Impact on Public Services

Power outages can disrupt critical public service operations. Healthcare centers rely on continuous, uninterrupted power for life-saving machines, instantaneous access to patient records, and monitoring systems that allow medical staff to move fast. Outages can lead to missed readings and even cause machinery to reboot. 

Water and wastewater systems are also sensitive to outages. If the electricity goes down, wastewater facilities can't continue filtration and management. While most facilities have automatic lockdowns that engage if they lose power, it takes time to return to normal operations, especially if outages happen during floods or bad weather. 

Outages also impact traffic. Stoplights go from efficient traffic management sequences to flashing red or off completely, tremendously slowing down traffic and likely leading to delays and collisions.

Impact on Homes and Businesses

Individual residences and business properties suffer from outages. Whether the outage is resolved quickly and just powers down equipment or extends for hours, some of the consequences are:

• Downed refrigeration, which may lead to expensive food waste and potential food poisoning
  
• Downed servers, IT failures, and data loss
  
• Limited communication, even for critical public entities
  
• Security system failures that can put any home or business at risk
  

Environmental Impacts

Some of these impacts have downstream implications. If water and wastewater management facilities go without power for too long, there could be spillage or backflow that damages homes, floods local park systems, and puts the local wildlife at risk. 

Everyone can contribute to making the power grid more resilient by learning about community impacts, managing consumption, and installing critter blocks and solutions. Explore Critter Guard's wildlife control solutions for keeping wildlife away from powerlines and potentially causing outages, or contact our team to see what actions are the best fit for your property.