I keep reading here and there over the years, stories about, in particular, the growing problem of the lack of scalability and resilience in the US electricity grid. 
It is a very difficult problem to resolve, and if you live in a large city, where the majority of people barely even have candles and a surplus of canned food, if the power went completely out for a week... it would be absolute mayhem, and being prepared for it might even be a liability if your neighbours made no plans for such an event, if you cannot defend yourself, and even if you want to share with them, it's more than a little unjust that your forward thinking could end up with you making very little benefit and buying only a couple of days in the event of a sustained power outage.
It's one of the upsides of the upsurge in solar power and heating system deployment... But it's not enough. It should not be possible to have a whole city shut down, with only water supply remaining in the pressure towers and up-hill reservoirs, with an indefinite period of time before resolution.
So what can you personally do about this?
Well, obviously, first step is get out of the big city. Smaller places naturally will not descend into quite the level of mayhem that you would get in a city over a million inhabitants and very little resilient infrastructure. Nobody could work, shops can't run their inventory management systems, they probably can't even call their suppliers and the suppliers nearby are probably also unable to work, and even, employees who have to take long commutes cannot get into work anyway.
There is an increasing trend towards more types of business equipping themselves with insurance against power loss. In fact, as power systems age, and politics interferes more with the energy industry, trying to turn it more centralised and even, a means of surveillance, the number of stories you read about people being punished by county and city councils for going off grid, catching their own water, stockpiling food and fuel and having things like generators...
And people really are not enjoying the simplicities of living off grid, when I grew up, it was called 'camping'. They practically have banned camping in some countries, or so heavily restricted it that it's not something you can do on a budget anymore, like, for example, the Netherlands, where it makes being homeless doubly difficult.
I already like the fact that I have a network connection and a computer that can get me through about 4 hours of power outage, but it's really not enough. I do want to escalate this further, and it also gives me ideas for some solutions. The events that are long in duration are rare, but they are very economically destructive. I think there is good arguments for the development of a field of insurance involving insuring against losses from this particular problem, but being such a regulated market, the innovations are thin on the ground, and I think this is one area that is ripe for exploitation by blockchain systems.
Unregulated, Borderless Blockchain Insurance - Is the time for this here?
I first started thinking about the idea of running an insurance system using a blockchain about 4 years ago. It is a natural application, and there is ZERO applications in this area. A blockchain database is a perfect place for registering both premium payments and claims and reputations (rates of claims) as well as certifications that enable discounts on premiums. In this case this would mean a third party visiting your house or business location, and verifying you have supplies and protocols to withstand extended power outages and things like natural disasters that disrupt economic activity broadly. With multiple confirmations of your preparedness, your cost to insure yourself drops.
Obviously this will take a little while to take off, and will start small. But, it can be started with simpler things, smaller activities, where reliability and availability are important. My own personal idea about this had to do with monetising the relaying of traffic. Ostensibly, and initially, for counterintelligence purposes, but it has an immediate and direct application to network access in general, because if a means of directly paying for connectivity could be negotiated directly on the connection with a special type of server, you also have the issue, in both scenarios, for having paid for service previous to attempting to access it, and the provider being offline.
It is not the same as insurance against a power outage, but it basically is the same, but on a smaller scale. It is an environment in which a blockchain insurance system can be developed, perfected, and field tested, without the level of stake and infrequency of electricity and other utilities going offline. However, it naturally will scale up to more damaging, more frequent incidents of the same type of nature.
I discuss this topic at some length, within the context of an oppressive environment, the use of blockchain technology and insurance here. But does it substantially make any difference whether the enemy is God, incompetent bureaucrats, badly built and maintained utilities services, or an illegitimate ban on some kind of peaceful trade?
The article linked above, was based on previous ideas I had, but I had not had the concept of a blockchain/decentralised corporate compartmental infrastructure like this, before I watched Steem with its Steem Power and Steem Dollars, real, effective working smart contract systems that form the basis of this. Steem shows you that you can use these systems to automatically allocate and distribute funds by rule based systems, one immediate application for this is funding an insurance pool, and it is just one more layer on top to add actuarial tables and 'credit scores'.
This is something that could be gradually introduced, first starting with direct network connectivity payment systems for wireless hotspots, but also monetised much larger in a Tor type network, the creation of decentralised corporate money management systems, and yes, Steem is the big inspiration here, although I had the vague concept some years before.
This is why I am working hard now to get a blockchain specialist small data centre up and running. I want to build a surplus capital base to invest into developing these kinds of organisational, accounting, insurance and security systems.
Let's start building resilient networked communities now, before something as stupid as World War Three breaks out. If it was trouble from half an hour into a long blackout in a big city, imagine how much worse it is in war. In fact, you might even say that this is a remedy against warfare, a system of trade, money, insurance and communication that focuses on resilience and does not require trusted third parties.
People who are preparing in this way are working towards making communities that can withstand disaster.
Disaster comes, like it or not. But we now have technologies that can massively mitigate against it.
Update
It makes me think of a new tag, actually, #disastercapitalism - how to profit from Doomsday. There is so many systems that are wide open to absolute, horrible disaster, and a lot of people are starting to get squirmy about it. So I am adding this tag and I am going to use it along with disaster and insurance whenever I post about ways to profit from extreme, black swan changes.
We can't stop here! This is Whale country!