Some have worried that the power outages were a cyberattack, but it is only ongoing incompetence allow infrastructure to become old (over 50 years old and sometimes over 100 years old) and fragile rather than an evil attack.

In the movies, disaster requires an evil and smart opponent but reality has plenty of incompetence and negligence to cause disasters.

The infrastructure is aging and terrible despite over $800 billion being spent on shovel ready projects. It is terrible despite decades of warnings about the problems. It is going to stay bad for a long time because the most recent incidents will only cause minimal patches and maintenance. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 had $831 billion between 2009 and 2019. $105.3 billion went to infrastructure.

In 2005, a 5-year, $305-billion bill to address the nation's aging and congested transportation systems was signed into law by President Barack Obama, who said it would put Americans to work and provide states with the federal help they need to commit to long-term projects.