200,000 is still a lot of people…

Early Friday, less than 200,000 customers in Texas were still without power, but millions were under boil water advisories.

…but it seems to be par for just about any weather (or earthquake) related event. Snow, rain, flooding, wind…a couple of hundred thousand people wind up with no electricity.

It’s in the design of things. No large system I know of is desinged for infallibility. If everyone in your town decides to make a phone call at the exact same time, your phone exchange will crash. If everybody decides to take a shower at the exact same time, the water pressure will drop. No internet server I’ve ever heard of guarantees 100% uptime. In the extreme, everything breaks.  

The important thing is not how well we prevent failure—that’s a failing strategy—but how well we respond to it when it occurs. That needs work.

And rushing to politicize the failure is not helpful.