I recently watched “The Crumbling of America” on the history channel. I’ll give you the basic gist: America’s infrastructure was built to last about 50 - 75 years and it’s getting to the end of it’s lifespan. The government has not allocated enough money to maintain it properly and we don’t have the money to fix it.
Update: They have it on youtube now. I can’t get it to embed, so here is the link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBSPcIGGcIc
The discussion of “solar Katrina” in the war thread reminded me that America’s power grid is already outdated and overloaded. Something like this could very well push us over the edge.