Power Outage Stories is an initiative to record, study, and learn more about the experiences of individuals, families, organizations, and businesses who have experienced electricity outages or live in the fear of outages due to natural disasters and man-made events.
You can help build this website by adding your memory, experiences, and informed opinions around electricity outages. With your permission we will transcribe your stories into a digital collection that can be viewed by others.
Electricity outages are often studied as a standalone technical problem. Along with the technical objectives, this study aims to capture the social and human factors that can help better understand the impact of outages on people due to outage related failures of critical infrastructure like health care, communication etc.
This initiative not only aims to capture past power outage stories, but also the impact of a potential power outage in the future.
Why study outages?
Energy Resilience and Health Care
Health care complications, including outage-related issues like medical device failure, accounted for almost one-third of the estimated 4,645 additional deaths in the three months following Hurricane Maria.
At Risk Electricity-Dependent Population
There are at least 2.5 million people reliant on in-home, electricity-dependent medical equipment, such as oxygen concentrators; many are over 65, and the senior population is expected to double by 2060
Increasing Outages and its Impact
Number of blackouts has gone up by 30% from 2009 to 2019 and the number of people affected by outages has gone up by 170% from 13.5 million to 37 million from 2009 to 2019.
Who Are We?
We are researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison working on energy resilience. Our current work focuses on assessing energy needs pre, during, and post a power outage.
We are interested in understanding the needs and experiences of individuals and families who use electricity-dependent critical medical devices.
Why participate?
- Share your story to give a voice to your problems and those of your friends and family
- Educate researchers and other local, state, and national agencies about the challenges in your communities
- Help be part of a solution that can better deal with power outages
Who are we looking for?
Whether you’ve experienced an outage or live in the fear or losing power to your critical devices (medical, communication etc.), we want to talk to you
- Experienced disaster and outages
- Experienced outages due to man-made events (maintenance , faults , unplanned/planned)
- You or someone in your family use electricity dependent medical equipment
- Volunteer in a disaster zone that lost electricity
- Individuals or organisations in the health care space that have experienced outages