For perspective: there was a power outage that took place across the Iberian peninsula (affecting mainly Portugal and parts of both Spain & France back in 2025), at least people there didn’t resort to looting immediately the moment everything was in disaray (transit networks were down, internet & phone connections were offline, contactless payments were disrupted and people were made to leave public venues). At least, the federal governments of their countries managed to act fast the moment this occurred nationwide.
In the US, the power grid is split in 3: East, West, and Texas. For all three to go down would probably mean terrorism or war, so the military response would be relatively quick. If we ignore that and restrict response to mean relief for citizens, we have a recent record of federal response times for a Texas crisis: 4 days. It took two days for Texas to declare an emergency and two more days for the federal government to declare one on the federal level and send additional help. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis
They only need to get two then, Texas will take care of itself.
yeah but thats texas. if its a state that votes democrat then trump will tell them not to authorize a national emergency. So like if the west grid goes it will be declared a national emergency for some states but not for california.