How long would such measures have to be in force before new habits are internalized? The Brazilian case shows the difficulty of translating short-term adjustments – even when a power shortage lasted ten months – into long-term energy-reducing habits. By the beginning of 2003, electricity demand had almost returned to the same level as on the eve of the crisis. How much energy savings have resulted from changed habits, and how much from energy efficiency measures? In California, it is estimated that 70–75 per cent of the 4200 MW customer load reductions in the summer of 2001 came from life-style change, such as watching less TV or switching off the air-conditioning, 25–30 per cent from more energy-efficient equipment, appliances and buildings. It is the latter that are expected to have a life-long effect. Whether the former can perpetuate themselves is more doubtful (Goldman et al. 2002).
So far we have focused on measures aimed at avoiding serious blackouts. But what and who exactly is disrupted when the lights go out? One of the earliest detailed accounts of people’s reactions comes from the blackout that spread across the eastern seaboard of the United States in the late afternoon of 9 November 1965, affecting 25 million people. Six days after the breakdown, the National Opinion Research Centre (NORC) began to interview 1,313 people, offering a nuanced picture of where people were and how they reacted to the blackout, analysing groups by class, gender and location (children were curiously neglected). Significantly, this study was framed by a general interest in public reactions to national crises, reflecting concerns about potential panic and a vacuum of authority in the wake of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 and the Kennedy assassination the following year; the report was commissioned by the Office of Civilian Defense (NORC 1966).
In fact, NORC researchers found that most people were not the least alarmed by the blackout. Two-thirds had experienced earlier power failures in their neighbourhood and initially thought it was an ‘ordinary’, localized event (NORC 1966: 10–11). People mainly learned of the seriousness of the event from neighbours, family and radio; most television stations were disabled throughout the blackout. There was no panic. ‘[W]ithout knowledge of its vast scope,’ the NORC concluded, ‘people could incorporate the blackout into their preformed conceptions of permissible permutations in their situations’ (NORC 1966: 13). Americans in 1965, in other words, did not expect ordinary life to be always running smoothly. They lived with an in-built degree of elasticity. Breakdowns were just part of normality.
What was the emotional response to the blackout? The majority reported that strangers were unusually helpful and friendly to each other. Only a small minority (3.6 per cent) felt that people were taking unfair advantage of each other. For a significant number, the blackout was an occasion to break with their normal routines and ‘make a holiday’ – 11.9 per cent total, rising to 26 per cent after 4 a.m. (NORC 1966: 24). Emotional responses diverged considerably, however. When interviewed, 31 per cent of men and 21 per cent of women said they ‘enjoyed it’. Interestingly, the rate of enjoyment went up the longer the blackout lasted. Interviewers noted the social dynamics of observed ‘mirth making’: joy was contagious. Fright, by contrast, was far less so. Only a quarter of women said they were frightened at some stage that others might ‘misbehave’. They were ‘so restless they couldn’t sit long in a chair’. But these feelings were short-lived and relatively ‘mild’. The dominant negative feeling was boredom and a sense of enforced passivity. Around one-fifth of people felt ‘bored’. Almost half the men and women interviewed were ‘annoyed’ that they could not do the things they wanted to (NORC 1966: 24, 50, 52–67).
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• Frank Trentmann