Warning of widespread blackouts

By Soren Haberlandt

Cities chief’s hammer warning. Germany is threatened with widespread power cuts in the coming winter!

The head of the German Association of Towns and Municipalities, Gerd Landsberg, told the “Welt am Sonntag”: “There is a risk of a blackout”. He emphasized: “We cannot rule out widespread power failures”.

An overload of the power grid, “e.g. when the 650,000 fan heaters sold this year” “go on the grid” in the event of a gas supply failure, or even hostile hacker attacks are just “realistic scenarios”.

And Landsberg warns urgently: Both the federal government and the population are doing too little, are not prepared for a blackout scenario.

► Germany is insufficiently equipped for the widespread failure of the power grid. Although the traffic light government has recognized the situation, it is doing too little. Landsberg’s warning: “The preparation for real crisis situations must be dealt with much more intensively”. Germany must “expand civil disaster control much more intensively”.

► But there is also an urgent need for the population to catch up: “Every citizen must be aware of what happens when there is no electricity,” said Landsberg. The horror blackout scenario: “Then there’s no water, you can’t fill up, after two days you can’t charge your cell phone”.

That’s why he advocates that every citizen take the recommendation of the Federal Office for Disaster Control seriously – that means: have water and food in the house for 14 days. Landsberg: Unfortunately, “hardly anyone follows this recommendation”.

The catastrophe is not a pipe dream: “A blackout is currently one of the greatest risks for our country,” warned Wolfram Geier, risk expert at the Federal Office for Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance (BBK), in an analysis for the insurance association GDV.

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