// BBC UK NEWS — CRONACA
What happens if all the lights go out? This is the plan for a 'Black Sky' event
The governments "Be Ready" campaign warns that severe weather and cyber-attacks could disrupt essential services
It was a Saturday night in early December when Roger Kemp realised something was very wrong.
"I was halfway through a Scandi crime drama when everything went off," the professor at Lancaster University told the BBC. "Streetlights were off. The sodium glow that we can see over the horizon from Morecambe was off."
"[It was] almost like a zombie movie," he said. "People trying to find phone reception, wondering where things were, and there was a huge queue at the one working telephone box."
At 22:45 on 5 December 2015, the River Lune - which flows directly through Lancaster - had flooded, and the electricity supply to 61,500 people in the city went.
Households lost light and heat, some water supplies also began to fail because they relied on electric pumps. The railway station closed. So too petrol stations and shops. Most cash machines didn't work. Traffic lights failed.
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The two communication systems that survived were copper wire landline telephones and FM radio. The local commercial radio station The Bay had an emergency generator and one landline and a reporter was sent outside the affected area to ring in with information.
Three months later, Kemp, a professor of engineering with a specialism in safety and electrical systems, gathered people together to look at everything that had gone wrong.
"It is perhaps ironic that, in a society with huge commitment to digital infrastructure, the most reliable source of news was a commercial station using technology that would have been familiar to the engineers on the 1960s Radio Caroline pirate radio ship," the subsequent report concluded.