"...some reports suggest a forest fire may have shut down one of the main high-voltage lines in the country, setting off a chain reaction that brought down the entire network."

What is truly scary, for those of us living in the United States anyway, is the fact that this kind of grid failure could easily happen here...The DHS (or DoD, I don't quite remember as it was a while ago) said there were something like 10-11 key substations in the U.S. that if taken down could plunge us into a cascading blackout that would last a long time...