It has a lot with Human nature too. Most are now dependent upon that quick supply of everything. They don't have a week or so supply of anything on hand. Big cities are the worst as they start looting as soon as they can for no reason other than just doing it.
Here in the Southeast US I learned to be prepared for electrical power outages by having a good stock of non perishables on hand. Most times the electricity is only out a few hours; unless, a storm has done major damage. There have been a few over the years that my electrical service had been for a week or longer. mainly because I am out near the end the service. It is also nice that all of us have learned that is going to happen and behave ourselves.
Several years ago [around 10+] I did stay without electricity for five weeks. This was because of a tornado outbreak that took our three main feeder lines out along major to the rest of the system too. Of course this not just three cable but is was three line of towers that supplied 3 phase via 300-500Kv lines. They only took less than a week to tie into another main feeder grid, basically mile long jumpers which supplied limited electrical power as long as everyone did their part on conserving so the lines wasn't loaded and burned out. Considering the amount of main feeder towers and lines that were destroyed I was surprised that they were to get things back to somewhat normal in this time. The largest city affect only had at the time 300K of residents but are affect has pop of over 1 million combined. It did take over an year to make permanent repairs.
Just like with anything there will be equipment failures but these are very rare due redundancy built into the system. It is the storms that causes most of our problems. Even though the systems are built to withstand normal storms they are getting more powerful as climate change changes the energy available to them so they do more damage.
Now places like New York, Chicago, and Salk City among others it would be different just because of the dependency on electricity. This one the major differences between urban and rural cities and communities.
