UK Planning For A “Black Sky” Event

Is this what all that yammering was about having a few days of food and water the other week?

What happens if all the lights go out? This is the plan for a ‘Black Sky’ event

It was a Saturday night in early December when Roger Kemp realised something was very wrong.

“I was halfway through a Scandi crime drama when everything went off,” the professor at Lancaster University told the BBC. “Streetlights were off. The sodium glow that we can see over the horizon from Morecambe was off.”

The next day he went for a walk.

“[It was] almost like a zombie movie,” he said. “People trying to find phone reception, wondering where things were, and there was a huge queue at the one working telephone box.”

At 22:45 on 5 December 2015, the River Lune – which flows directly through Lancaster – had flooded, and the electricity supply to 61,500 people in the city went.

So, obviously this is Your Fault for driving a fossil fueled vehicle

For Kemp and others in the field of civil contingency, Lancaster was a warning. When a town loses power for several days, our connected world falls apart. This kind of disruption has been given a name: a Black Sky event.

At a recent summit on UK resilience, the conversation focused on the need for the UK to be able to withstand a Black Sky event for a minimum of 72 hours.

Bruh, we deal with this all the time in the US. Hurricanes and ice storms here in the US. I’ve been through this many a time. Sometimes those last longer.

In a major emergency, we are being told to hunker down and turn on an FM radio, as thousands did in Lancaster. This is why the BBC has its own Black Sky plan.

Only a small number of staff know the full details, but from what I have gleaned, about 100 people in the BBC will run a special emergency radio studio.

Why so secretive?

This emergency service will broadcast pre-arranged government messaging. The scripts have already been published online.

They include instructions on how much people should be drinking each day and how to dispose of toilet waste without flushing the toilet.

Other information will be broadcast via satellite vehicles from a select number of journalists at emergency centres around the UK, which will carry on as long as the diesel lasts.

Why is this giving me the heebie jeebies in a post-COVID world, especially with a soft authoritarian government like the UK? Being ready is a good damned idea, I do have stuff so I don’t have to run to the store, including a propane cook stove. Why are so many governments pushing this now? Is it a nothingburger or do they Know Something?