I glanced over the screens, everything was inside normal limits.

The alert started sounding, less than 5 seconds later.

“What the hell!” Alex shouted from behind me. I scanned the screens again. Several bars nad lines on graphs had suddenly dropped very close to red zones, some where already there.

“Power output dropping in 3 zones” I said as I reached for the emergency procedures book.

“2 more zones”. Someone said to my left.

“There all going.” Alex’s words where a stunned shout.

More alerts and warnings started sounding. Other stations where calling out, but their messages where lost in the noise. I silenced the alarms coming from my zones, but it didn’t make much difference. By now no power plant in my zones was producing anything more the hot stand by power levels.

Then lights when out. More shouts from the operators in the room.

I looked up, all around I saw faces lit by the cool blue and flashing red lights from our displays.

The emergency lights came on.

“Silence all alarms! All alarms!” Alex shouted to get him self heard. One by one the alarms shut off and some sort of calm returned to the control room. It didn’t last long.

“Everyone report…” Alex was saying as one of my screens died. It just shut off.

I opened my mouth to report this, when the second display when blank. I heard other operators start to speak around me ,but I didn’t hear there words.

I had 3 working screens left. One flashed up a message, that I couldn’t read fully before it to shutdown. Something about system services being unavailable.

The other 2 screens were still displaying data, but I could see they weren’t being updated, unnatural straight lines showed on history plots.

All around other operators reported the same thing, some with obvious panic, it was louder than the alarms.

The room was getting suddenly warm I noticed as my last display died. The air circulation had stopped, everything had stopped.

I didn’t have my displays but I knew what would be happening right now across this city of over 100 Million, without power and with no cooling or filtering of the air, all of those panicked breaths would be quickly using the supply of fresh air.

The city would suffocate.