Altered States is my technothriller Shadowrun campaign, still in development. Altered States is an alt-history SR campaign, it doesn't follow the usual timeline. But it does begin with an alt-VITAS, first discussed here.

VITAS caused a great deal of problems, including vaporizing the economy and medical services, as discussed here. This post follows on from that discussion, and covers the problems caused in national infrastructure. The next post (forthcoming) will discuss Civil Order and the military's involvement in Reclamation.

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Infrastructure

The Collapse had a devastating effect on national infrastructure—electrical grids, sewage, water, natural gas, phone service, and the Internet. Though none collapsed as thoroughly as the banking system, all became overtaxed and very unreliable, failing completely in many areas.

Responsibility for most such services was held by local monopolies or municipal corporations. And like all other industries, they suffered from deaths and worker absenteeism. More, they all depended on intricate machinery and computer monitoring systems, which (if damaged) required spare parts, stocks of which were running low due to the international travel embargo, and specially trained engineers to repair the equipment and restore service.

The electrical grids proved the most vulnerable. Problems in the integrated grid were difficult to diagnose and repair, and electrical surges or loss of power was common. Such surges or brown-/blackouts affected industries, domiciles, and a wide range of other services.

> The power system is the jugular vein of a modern industrial society. Cut it, and no matter how healthy everything else is, it all dies. (Which is why the first facilities Reclaimed were power plants. The second were oil refineries.)

Let me demonstrate:

In August 2003, a powerline in northern Ohio brushed against some trees. This single incident set in motion a series of events culminating in a blackout that affected 6 states (New York, including all of New York City, New Jersey, Vermont, Connecticut, Ohio, Pennsylvania) and the Canadian Province of Ontario. 10 million Canadians and 45 million Americans were without power for up to 16 hours. That one single accident knocked out power to 15% of the US.

Let’s tally the damage: power went down. Given. Cellular towers went down (despite backup power sources). Water pumps went down, leaving water running but allowing contaminants (such as sewage) into water mains. “Boil or die.” (Plus shutting down beaches. Imagine a day at the beach, complete with wading through sewage-infested pools. It’s called “cholera”.) Trains stopped in their tracks. Airports shut down. Cable television off-lined. Factories shut down. (The auto industry didn’t return to full production until a week after power was restored.) Gas stations shut down. Worse, East Coast refineries went offline, meaning supplies of gasoline became constrained. The outage killed 11 people and cost $6 billion.

All of this from a single blackout, caused by a single power-line and a single tree.

(The one thing that didn’t happen was a crime wave. NYPD reported 100 fewer arrests than usual during the blackout. Sometimes people surprise you.)

Everybody involved—two national governments, many giant corporations, and several state agencies—pinky swore to fix the problems. They established committees and made regulations and everything.

A report issued a few years after the Blackout concluded that, big surprise, the power system was just as vulnerable as in 2003.
- Global Anarchist

> To be fair, the above is a archetypal black swan event. Bugs in software caused monitors to go offline, wires hitting trees caused a surge, which knocked out the NE grid. Everything’s vulnerable in ways we cannot anticipate or prevent, and they cause long chains of unpredictable responses.

Like the 1990 AT&T telephone outage in Manhattan that eventually prompted the Secret Service to raid the offices of a game company in Austin Texas. The world isn’t a linear place, and we can’t predict or prevent the majority of what eventually comes to pass. Surely the Awakening should have proved that.
- PoliSci Perpetrator

Internet: The power problems caused Internet access to become unreliable. Many local ISP’s experienced outages (or simply ceased to exist as companies). And many hosting services or cloud services went down as power surges damaged critical equipment. Of the 13 global root domain serves in the world, 7 are in the US. During the Collapse, 2 of the 3 West Coast servers went down completely (NASA’s survived), and all 4 East Coast servers experienced intermittent outages. This slowed Internet traffic across the Western Hemisphere. Some pieces of the Internet effectively disappeared entirely, as no domain name lookup for their IP could be resolved.

(Eventually, several ISP’s established a protocol to sync their own cached DNS lookups, essentially creating an 8th unofficial, if incomplete, root server.)

Similar problems plagued the other infrastructure services. No single utility collapsed completely, and none stayed down permanently. But all experienced severe problems, and were kept in operation by skeleton crews of employees, many working 18- or 20-hour shifts.

> During Reclamation, a lot of grunts griped about having to “clean up after civilian p******”. Fraggin’ idiots. We didn’t land until a month after the Red Days began, and weren’t on the ground in force for another two weeks. That’s six weeks of outages and chaos, and the only reason anything survived to be Reclaimed was because 5%-10% of the local workforce ignored a clear and present danger to their lives and came to work anyway.

My platoon was assigned to oil duty on the East Coast, prepping refineries for oil shipments from the NSPR. An abandoned oil refinery is a massive explosion and wildfire waiting to happen. When we got there, the refineries were offline, but they hadn’t just been abandoned. Their crews had shut them down with maximal attention to safety, so whoever came after could get the up and running with a minimum of fuss. (Compare that to the fires that tore through Corpus Christi.) They didn’t panic, they just did their jobs and probably saved some ungrateful sorry-ass grunts their worthless lives.

I never knew who manned those refineries, but if I met ‘em I’d buy ‘em a round or ten. They deserve it.
- El-Tee Cougar Six

Infrastructure was one of the two chief focuses of the first phase of Reclamation. While some units secured materiel—food, fuel, and spare parts—others took command of power stations, sewage plants, and heating oil/natural gas facilities. Workers for these industries were some of the first “hired” by Reclamation Command, under the auspices of the EMSAP (Emergency Military Supplies Acquisition Program). The last group of soldiers, and in the beginning not the largest, focused on restoring civil order.

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