Blackout

cut one line. lose a continent.

a humming power grid — one cut cascades; redundancy absorbs it

When one line fails here, its load does not spread evenly to every neighboring line — it piles onto whichever single line at each end was already carrying the most, which is what turns one cut into a spreading cascade instead of a shrug. That concentrating feedback loop is the same mechanism behind real cascading blackouts, including the 2003 Northeast outage this is built around: running a grid efficiently, with little spare capacity, is the same choice as leaving it fragile to exactly this kind of pileup.

Concepts: networks, resilience.

An interactive you play with one thumb, on Wundr.