Editor,

After Hurricane Matthew has passed, the Southeast Coast will experience a huge secondary disaster, never seen across such a large area: extended power outage.

This will impede rescue efforts, slow or block traffic, discontinue clean water service, disrupt sewage treatment, keep the lights, air conditioning, telephone landlines and computers off; discontinue some mobile phone, text, and Internet service, and delay the return of evacuees to their homes. The outage will overwhelm the amassing army of 12,000 Florida Power & Light (FPL) workers who will be tasked with reconnecting the electrical grid system, line by line.

Once the power outages surpass a few days, a whole host of unforeseen problems could develop, including some, but hopefully not all of the following: standing floodwater due to non-working pumps, inability to deliver food and drinking water in amounts needed, subsequent food riots, inability to evacuate many in the outage areas, shortages of medications like insulin, medical oxygen, working ventilators and other vital healthcare; lack of heating when the weather turns, gasoline, chemical and electrical accidents; building and block fires, water borne diseases like cholera and the Zika virus, and nuclear power plant fuel storage meltdowns and subsequent radiation leaks.

Standard disaster response efforts of local, state and federal agencies and non-profit organizations will not be able to make up for the lack of vital supplies for so many people, in such a large four-state area, needing extra supplies and infrastructure support for such an extended period.

A similar region-wide outage could occur in Northern California, Portland, Seattle and the Vancouver, BC areas, all at the same time, after a 9.0 earthquake and tsunami off the coast of the Pacific Northwest.

America has never seen, nor imagined, the effects of such a large, extended power outage, and that is the huge secondary disaster that is coming to the Southeast Coast in the second week of October.

BOB LAYTON

Useless Bay