Where does blackout collide?

In electric power engineering, a blackout is a large-scale loss of supply across a grid, often produced when the failure of one element overloads others and the disturbance cascades through the network until a whole region loses power. Dobson, Carreras, Lynch, and Newman’s 2007 analysis models a series of blackouts as a complex system poised near a critical point, with blackout sizes following a power-law distribution. The referent is a cascading failure of an infrastructure network, measured in lost load and customers affected, unrelated to a stage cue or an amnesia episode.[1]

Unit

The load shed and the number of customers losing power

Recovery means

Restoration proceeds by black-start and staged reconnection until load is fully served again

Measured by

Quantified by megawatts of load lost, customers affected, and outage duration

In clinical research on alcohol, a blackout is a period of amnesia for events that occurred during heavy drinking even though the person stayed conscious and active at the time, caused by alcohol disrupting the hippocampus’s ability to form new long-term memories. Wetherill and Fromme’s 2016 review distinguishes fragmentary from en-bloc blackouts and summarises their risk factors and consequences. The referent is a failure of memory encoding during intoxication (a construct about the brain and behaviour), not a lighting cue or a grid failure.[2]

Unit

The span of events for which memory cannot later be recalled

Recovery means

Memories lost to an en-bloc blackout are not recoverable; encoding resumes as blood-alcohol falls

Measured by

Assessed by self-report and by gaps in recall despite evidence of activity during the episode