One thing that our wonderful modern life in the United States does? It insulates us and isolates us from reality.

Sometimes that’s good – because ignorance truly is bliss and I’m sorry but every so often we all need ways to not burden (or unburden) our minds and hearts of stuff. But for the most part, ignorance and isolation isn’t promoted as a successful long-term life-strategy.

The US is being hit by a pretty major winter storm. Temperatures here in Austin are in the teens overnight not getting above freezing during the day. I know to a lot of my northern friends sitting at sub-zero (Fahrenheit) temperatures right now, but for this area of the country this is unusually harsh.

What makes it worse? State-wide in Texas they had rolling blackouts yesterday and are predicting more for today. Why?

Burst water pipes at two coal-fired power plants forced them to shut down, triggering rolling power cuts across the state, the lieutenant governor said Wednesday.

Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst said this is something that “should not happen.”

Dewhurst said he was told that water pipes at two plants, Oak Grove and Sand Hill, forced them to cut electricity production.

Natural gas power plants that should have provided backup had difficulty starting due to low pressure in the supply lines, also caused by the cold weather.

That’s right, it shouldn’t have happened. But it did. Why did it happen? Looks like some combination of accidents, technical reasons, and perhaps poor planning.

I’m not here to point fingers, but rather to point out. To point out just how fragile our modern system is. Look at the uprising in Egypt and how instantly all Internet access was cut off. I recall a couple of years ago I was teleconferencing with the home office in California when everything went down. Turns out that some vandals severed the network cables and took out entire towns of phone, Internet, you name it (except radio), all of those cables went through a single manhole and left cities without access to emergency services. Part of the design intent of the Internet is if something goes down it’ll continue to route around to find its destination, but we have too many single-point bottlenecks such that when they go down it is a major problem.

We take much for granted, because we’re blissfully ignorant and unaware of how everything works and is put together. How the very fabric of our society is that fragile and untenable. Redundancy and backup solutions are good, but even those can fail. In the end, we’re humans, living with human constructs… mistakes will be made, things will fail. Best we can do is be prepared not for if they will happen, but when they will happen.