Few if any people would die right away. But the loss of power would have a cascading effect on all aspects of U.S. society. Communication would be largely impossible. Lack of refrigeration would leave food rotting in warehouses, exacerbated by a lack of transportation as those vehicles still working simply ran out of gas (which is pumped with electricity). The inability to sanitize and distribute water would quickly threaten public health, not to mention the safety of anyone in the path of the inevitable fires, which would rage unchecked. And as we have seen in areas of natural and other disasters, such circumstances often result in a fairly rapid breakdown of social order.
Quotes about cascading (6 Quotes)
It seems clear that a person's illness or death can have health consequences for others in his or her social network. This means that efforts to reduce disease, disability, and death can be self-reinforcing, since a decrease in the burden of these events in one person can have a cascading benefit for others. The training and assistance of caregivers can lower costs and also improve the health of patients and caregivers alike.
There is a kind of a cascading chain, ... If one can't sell, then that business doesn't buy and that means the next business doesn't sell, and the previous business doesn't sell, and so on.
Normally, browsers impose strong restrictions for cross-domain interaction through the Web browser. A certain Web page can make a user browse to a different domain. However, it may not read the content of the retrieved page.... In IE these restrictions ... are broken when it comes to CSS cascading style sheet imports. I call this attack CSSXSS or Cascading Style Sheets Cross Site Scripting.
The trucking companies are going to demand higher contract prices. They had a bump in October, clearly not enough. They're coming back for more. That head of lettuce is going to be up another five cents, clothing on the clothing racks will be up another couple of dollars. And you'll just see these prices cascading.
I got this rather cross letter, something like, 'Your infernal noisemaking is robbing me and my family of our sanity,' ... It's not as pleasant as some people fantasize, all this wonderful music cascading next door.