At about 4:10 in the afternoon on August 14, 2003, a power line in Ohio sagged into an overgrown tree, and fifty million people lost electricity.
It wasn't a storm or an attack on the grid. A branch just brushed a line, an alarm that should've caught it didn't go off, and the failure jumped from one part of the grid to the next faster than anyone could stop it. In three minutes, twenty-one power plants shut down. New York, Cleveland, Detroit, Toronto—all dark, in ninety-degree heat.
People found out really quickly how much of normal life is plugged in.
The subways stopped with people inside them. Traffic lights died and the intersections locked up. Cell towers quit. The gas stations couldn't pump gas because the pumps run on electricity. The stores that stayed open were selling by flashlight and adding up totals on paper. People turned on their kitchen sink and found that there was no pressure to push water into the tap. Thousands of people walked home across the bridges because there was no other way.
It got so dark in Manhattan that night that people looked up and saw the Milky Way for the first time.
Most of it came back in a day, but one of the most advanced places on earth got a reminder of just how thin the line is between a normal Tuesday and no power, no water pressure, no gas, no way to buy food, and no way to get out.
All it took was one branch.
They say it only takes three days without electricity for civilization to begin to crumble.
Are we teaching our kids to be prepared for things like that?
One of the main focuses of our books has always been self-reliance, but we generally talk about it in more of a stoic way: Is your character one that is steady and remains strong independent of what is going on around you? But there’s another kind of self-reliance that’s equally important. Sure, food storage and flashlights are good, but how many parents are teaching their kids about what happens when all of the framework that keeps society polite suddenly falls apart?
We wrote a book about it.
The Tuttle Twins and the Days of Darkness follows teenage Ethan and Emily (and their neighbor Fred, like you’ve never seen him before) as they navigate the breakdown of polite society after a major blackout.
Sure, it might be a little dramatized, but it’s exciting, and teens crave real stakes. These books have been a huge hit with teen readers because they put the reader in the roles of the main characters in a way other books can’t.
With dozens of possible outcomes based on the decisions they make as they read, they can spend days in this series and never read the same plot twice.
The whole set is $59 through the end of today (it’s normally $99.95). Tonight, the price goes back up.
If it's been sitting in your cart, now is the time.
Grab it before midnight, when the sale goes dark.
“Dark.” Ha.
— Connor
