1d ago

What are some of the impacts of a power outage that isn't that obvious / isn't talked about a lot? And What happens to restaurant bills? Do Buses still work? (since card payments wouldn't work)

Obviously this is about the power outage in Spain.

While normally, if a card declines, people would probably have to leave their IDs with the restaurant while they went to get a withdrawl from their bank; this is a power outage, withdrawls wouldn't work. It would be silly to arrest people because of a power outage. So I'm assuming people just have to give the restaurant owner/management their identity info with a promise to pay?

And power outages shouldn't affect buses, since they run on gasoline/diesel, but the payment system processing transit passes might not work. Do buses still get run during a power outage and they just let people on for free, or do they just shut down the bus lines?

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When I worked in a restaurant we still had paper bills in the office we could write up if our system was down. If you wanted to pay with card, we would offer to write down your card info and charge it later, or accept cash only. We'd always inform new customers of this before taking their order.
If someone already ordered and was unable to pay we'd just take the loss on good faith that they'd return to pay, no holding ID or anything like that. It's a relatively small loss for the restaurant to maintain a good reputation. Orders get comped all the time for more trivial reasons, and food cost is already a major part of a restaurant's overhead.
But if power is out, then that generally means the kitchen isn't functioning either unless the restaurant has generators
- we would offer to write down your card info and charge it later
  What
- Yeah, credit cards were originally similar to checks in how they were handled by stores and restaurants. I loved those old clunky sliding machines that you put the cards into and KACHUNKed it onto a carbon copy receipt!
  
  I've only seen those in movies, and I haven't even had an embossed card in years. but most people (rightfully so) would refuse having their card info written anywhere these days. Things have really changed
  
  The remarkable thing is that modern chip-and-pin cards do support that sort of "offline" transaction, although fortunately without the carbon copy paper. Specifically, a non-networked credit card terminal can present a transaction to the chip, the chip will cryptographically sign this transaction in a unique way, and the terminal will store it for later submittal to the credit card company, when an online connection is possible.
  For a typical "online" transaction when there are no connectivity issues, the third step would send the transaction immediately to the credit card company, so they can have the option of declining the charge. The cryptography is otherwise the same, and it's why offline transactions are possible.
  Some vendors, I think, like SNCF (the national rail operator) in France use offline transactions for their ticket vending machines at rural stations, where there's no guarantee of being within mobile phone service. The card issuer also usually programs some safeguards to prevent abuse, such as X number of offline and then an online transaction is mandatory, or a limit on the value of purchases (eg $50 max for offline). After all, there cannot be a check against one's credit limit when offline.
  In the USA, it is exceedingly rare for credit cards to be issued as chip-and-pin (but it can be found), and while offline transactions can be performed with chip-and-signature cards, it's rarely enabled since most/all terminals in the USA have been online since the introduction of electronic credit card processing.
  Contactless chip cards might have changed the calculus though, since there is no PIN at all for these transactions. So perhaps issuers might allow a few offline transactions when contactless.
  
  Last time I saw one of those and the only time I can recall having one used on my own card was during a power outage at a restaurant circa 2000 on a roadtrip.
  It seemed like a relic even at the time.
- If you wanted to pay with card, we would offer to write down your card info and charge it later, or accept cash only.
  That could be illegal in certain countries
  If someone already ordered and was unable to pay we'd just take the loss on good faith that they'd return to pay, no holding ID or anything like that. It's a relatively small loss for the restaurant to maintain a good reputation.
  I mean, the alternative is... holding them as prisioners?

This is one reason to keep some cash on hand.
- I feel like cashless societies would be in chaos.
  ahem China 👀
  I wonder if they would ever add an "offline mode" to the Wechat Pay thing. I mean atleast society can, sort of, function for a few hours running on powerbanks.

My bidet uses electricity. Terrifying if you plan on taking a shit during a blackout
- you shit in your bidet?
  
  In the u.s. a bidet refers to a type of toilet or an attachment for a toilet that shoots water at your asshole to clean it while your still on the toilet after you shit. The separate sink as a bidet is unheard of here.

Most cell towers have generators but only about 2-3 days of fuel. So you might have ways to charge your phone but it might not have a network to connect to
You don't need a cell signal to get a GPS location so having some offline maps like OrganicMaps or OSMand can still be useful
- Cell towers only have about half an hour of battery back up. Its the switched network (landline phones) that will last for a few days.
  
  This depends on where and why. I know that in some parts of the Carribbean, for example, most towers will only last a day or two, but there are some that can last weeks with satellite backhauls providing minimal service to large areas.
- Another point on this, in events like this the cell network is often under very significant stress as every single person tries to contact their family and friends at the same time to check if they are OK. The general advice is to avoid making phone calls if you can to keep capacity free for people who need to contact emergency services

Card payment terminals use the network for card authorization, but depending on the merchant agreement with its card processor, authorization (at least back in my day) was typically only needed for charges above say $50. Otherwise the bank would pay up and eat the loss if something went wrong.
If you're old enough to remember cards with raised numbers on them, those existed so the merchant could make an imprint of the card number on carbonless paper using a hand operated gizmo with rollers and carbonless forms. That used no electricity at all. You'd sign the piece of paper and the merchant would turn it in to the bank. That was simply how credit cards worked for quite a long time. Electronic terminals, and especially portable electronic terminals came along later.
- This still works. Most debit and credit cards can still be used to authorise offline payments up to a set limit, though it's kinda of moot if the PDQ's battery is dead.

Refrigerated goods would be an issue soon.
I would assume a restaurant couldn't function at all, they'd close shop. It would be easier to forgive the cost of a few meals than try to track things down afterward.
- I like to have something with some thermal mass to it in the freezer at all times. (Currently it's a lot of frozen spinach.)
  It takes a couple days to thaw out when the power goes down, usually long enough to find a source of ice blocks.

In wet areas or areas during a snow melt, sump pumps are a big factor. Many people have emergency generators or battery back up pumps if their sump pit has a lot of flow.
Also rural people will often lose power to their water pumps and disinfection equipment for drinking water.

Off the top of my head in no particular order:
sewerage pumps
fresh water pumps
telecommunications systems
refrigeration equipment in homes, restaurants, hotels, factories
transport infrastructure like street lights, traffic lights, railway crossing lights
trains, consider for example control of signalling and switching, let alone electric trains
fuel distribution like petrol pumps
hospitals
broadcasting like TV and radio
aviation
Essentially society as we know it stops, at least for a while. Generators are used, but are often of limited use, since getting fuel to them is non-trivial and many are scaled for short outages.
Without knowing what happened in Spain, I can say that events like this can and do happen around the world. It's likely that this will increase.
Given how interconnected the electricity grid is, I'm surprised that this didn't cascade across Europe.
- Switched telephone networks run on lead-acid batteries, they will last for a few days without power.
  Hospitals, airports and tower blocks have back up generators, although in the case of hosiptals, people on respirators can sometimes die as the generator takes a while to build up voltage.
  
  I'm not familiar with how many telephones in Spain are landlines, but looking at Australia, where I am, the majority of connections don't have an SLA battery, made even more power dependent because we have been rolling out fibre optic cable everywhere and the copper wire in the ground has been disconnected, preventing telephone exchanges from powering much of anything anymore.
  The idea that generators will keep the essentials running is incomplete if not outright incorrect. Most of these systems have never been actually tested with an actual outage, look at Heathrow airport for a recent example.
  At best a generator will run for up to 12 hours, and only if you have multiple generators and the fuel to run them will you have much in the way of energy security.
  Of course if you're already running on a generator then the picture is different, but even then, in the case of a country wide power outage, getting fuel for longer periods of time is going to be a challenge.

Anywhere that there is a massive power/internet outage for whatever reason (natural disaster, trunk cut by some idiot, technical failure) most businesses will put sales on hold or switch over to cash only and maybe take checks or write down credit card manual receipts to take care of later. Nobody is going to be prosecuted for the power going out during a meal and a restaurant and being unable to use their card for example. A grocery store will most likely take down information from anyone who was in the middle of shopping and square it up later, but keep new people from coming in to keep from being overwhelmed with too much manual tracking.
For restaurants, they will most likely choose not to charge anyone who had not paid yet for consistency so people with cash don't feel like they were punished for having cash on hand. If the business knows the outage will last very long, they might offer free food if it is going to spoil anyway as a gesture of goodwill, especially for any regulars that were just hanging around to wait for the power to come back before they headed out.
Some tech based stuff that relies on processing payments might choose different approaches depending on the circumstances. Riders with cards that can't be processed will most likely be allowed to just ride for free if the buses continue to run.

When the power was out for over a week a couple years ago, after getting over the initial difficulties the next thing I missed was laundry.

(I haven’t been paying attention to news.)
But if power is out I could see some traffic lights eventually failing to work, at which point I might guess the driver/organization sees it as a liability to continue the routes. So, I don’t know if the payment system would be the limitation.
- Around here the traffic lights stop working right away if the power is out. If you're in the city traffic will suck for a while, but then it will drop to very little and the buses will be fine.

For buses in particular, bear in mind that liquid fuels typically require pumping, which usually uses electricity. So gasoline or diesel pumps might not be available, even if the underground storage tank has fuel. Here in California, a lot of public buses are fueled with Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) which in theory could have already been compressed at the depot, but this would only last so long, since it takes energy to run the compressor, assuming the natural gas pipeline is unaffected.
Obviously, battery-electric buses and trolleybuses need electricity. So at this point, perhaps the only bus that would be totally immune is an omnibus, that 19th century people-mover that was drawn by horses. But consider the "emissions" from a horse though...
In all seriousness, the contingency plans for a transit agency will vary depending on where you are in the world. For American transit agencies, most don't even offer service on Sunday or holidays (very strange in the land of hyper religiousness; no bus to church??) and any labor strikes usually result in every service being closed, sometimes including essential ADA operations. So likely a prolonged outage would affect the buses quickly.
- no bus to church??
  In the US, many (most?) churches offer their own transportation. It's common enough that the term 'church bus' is a thing, although it's usually more like a large van. For those that don't, the parishioners will often offer transportation to those that need it.
  
  TIL

On buses the card payment system is (usually) not real time. The card info is processed overnight. This assuming the network connection between the bus and the processing system is up. Mobile networks towers do have batteries, but only for few hours. Only in remote areas they have generators (I'd expect a few in cities but mostly not).

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