What would happen if the government was so broke that it couldn't even afford to maintain the basics – including keeping the electricity on?

That's essentially what's happened in debt-ridden and poorly-managed Puerto Rico, where a fire took hold at a power plant, and left more than 3 million people without power.

There are many SHTF situations, and many of them center around societal or governmental collapse, but few people in the United States know what that looks like.

But it happens regularly enough that there are examples in the Commonwealth protectorate of Puerto Rico, and in Venezuela, just to name a couple of examples.