The Day the Lights went Out Series

Initially the workers at Phoenix Power assume the problem is a local one. The small group of power workers from Phoenix Power, the sole suppliers of power for the city of Phoenix work through the night. They are faced with a mystery, nothing is down or broken, in fact everything is as it should be. Phoenix is effectively plunged into chaos, there is no functioning communication. Paul Sanderson, the plant manager dispatches six technicians to investigate the situation further afield. Using the plants powerful BMW+ motorbikes he sends four of his men elsewhere in Arizona, New River, Apache Junction, Buckeye and Gilbert. This was the only means of knowing how widespread the power outage was. For good measure he dispatches a further two of his technicians further afield, one to El Paso, Texas and one to Pueblo, Colorado. The news that the technicians bring back is worrying. All four of the chosen towns within Arizona are without electricity and equally there is no physical or logical reason why this should be. Even more bizarrely they discover that vehicle lights will not function, even whilst vehicles fire up normally, completely illogical. It is decided that a small group of them should set off in convoy to investigate the mystery further afield. Girlfriends, ex girlfriends and a dog travel with them. Rapidly they give up the cause, something inexplicable has taken place. Realising that without power life within America was about to change dramatically, they change the nature of their mission. They head south to Florida with the intention of setting up a farm. They effectively become a group of survivalists. Unknown to them a small, but powerful group of military commanders to the south have declared martial law. They are increasing convinced that the power has been intentionally turned off! As they drive south and into the chaos, the situation deteriorates rapidly and they encounter increasing military road blocks. Out of the blue and in New Mexico, a young and extraordinarily gifted girl joins them, pairing up with their sole fellow traveler, Jeff. Eventually the group of power workers encounter an army road block and discover the untruth’s that the armed forces have been fed. A mutiny within the army begins that slowly spreads in the hills of New Mexico. One afternoon, after Paul and the Mitch, the young girl that recently joined them, take a break from helping the soldiers in mutiny, she tells Paul the nature of the problem. The plug has been pulled on Man kind’s folly, she tells him and it will not be put back in, ever! What had begun as a power failure becomes something more. A fight to survive and a fight for what is right.

The situation had become both difficult and dangerous; the power workers were effectively now traveling through a war zone. Unwittingly they had instigated a mutiny, a revolution, within the American army. Massive military convoys of huge destructive capability are pouring out of Texas and heading Corporal Phil’s way. Jeff, Jasmine and Mitch set off to try to warn him, a very dangerous mission. It had taken the power workers more than three weeks, but they were still barely halfway to their destination, Florida. Danger, or no, they must continue south. What were their plans once they arrived in Florida? They were essentially going to start over, start farming and become self sufficient. How they would achieve that was something they didn’t know. What they did know, was if they wished to survive the new reality they must either become self sufficient, or die trying.

Can you imagine a World, or life without electricity? Four AM on the twenty third of November, two thousand and sixteen was the day the lights went out. The evolution of the Human Race is something that has taken millenniums to develop and until relatively recent times, it was a slow and gradual process. Was it the astronomer, the late Carl Sagan that first created the 24 hour clock to measure the evolution of life upon planet earth and mankind’s emergence as the dominant species? Using this 24 hour clock to trace mankind’s history and evolution is to say the least, sobering. Mankind, the human race, as we now know it arrived at a little more than one minute before midnight. To give that some sense of scale Dinosaurs roamed the planet at around 22:56. Using that same 24 hour clock, the origins of life of earth began at around 4:00 AM. Mankind’s emergence from the primordial sludge began, using the 24 hour clock as a point of reference at 23:58:43. The shocking fact of human kind’s existence is that we are in every respect “The new kids on the block. How have we performed during our short time on planet earth? To be polite, could do better could be the answer, but in truth, inaccurate in the extreme. Mankind has not only imperiled all life on earth, but the very planet itself, why? The question of why mankind has evolved so is too vast a question to consider here, but to deny that fact is on a par with insisting that the World is flat. The history of the human race is on a universal scale, brief and his destructive nature has only become apparent within the twinkling of an eye. There are many contradictory theories as to why Mankind has evolved as it has, but perhaps the answer is not so difficult to find. Even now, despite the seemingly irrefutable evidence, there are many that refuse to accept that man is by far the most dangerous animal on planet earth. Whilst the mentality of man has barely changed over the millenniums, the affect of his actions have and dramatically. From the very beginning mankind has suffered a misguided sense of his own self importance, even relative to his fellow man. This state of being was for millenniums, undetectable on a universal scale, but that situation slowly changed. From the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt, to latter dictators there have been those for whom enough was an alien concept. Throughout history man has not only subjected nature and the planet to its sense of self importance, but his fellow man too. For millenniums mans barbarity was as a dripping tap. Yes the forests slowly disappeared and as a result species of wildlife, but did anyone notice, or even care? It was only in the latter part of the second millennium AD that mankind’s activities began to become increasingly apparent. Whilst the mentality behind the caveman’s bone and the nuclear weapon is much the same, the effects are not. Progressively the combinations of technological know how, coupled with the caveman’s fear of the unknown became ever more dangerous. During the latter part of the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century the process began to accelerate and at ever dizzying speed. Man learnt how to harness and control electricity. When did mankind first learn of the existence of electricity, arguably thousands of years before, but harnessing it’s power was relatively recent. Electricity presented Man with endless possibilities, both good and bad. Once again mankind’s misguided sense of its own self importance overruled all and he became even more detached from nature. Whilst mankind’s priorities had barely evolved, electricity presented him with an Aladdin’s lamp of potential. This huge and additional potential was unfortunately, disastrous. Mankind’s ability to now bend both nature and planet earth to its will took a giant leap forward...