The purpose of this report is to quantify the costs of such outages in terms of output foregone, physical damage, and other less-apparent dollar costs. The study is based on a survey of commercial establishments in Springfield, Illinois, following a particularly severe power failure. The results of that survey provide a general framework within which the costs of power-related business closings are analyzed. The methodology and the general thrust of the findings could apply to other service areas suffering long-lasting outages. The survey and its analysis cover both the short-run costs to business during the outage and the long-term effects after consumers had time to react to the restoration of business. The novelty in the methodology lies in the use of the Argonne Commercial Power Outage survey, which revealed a number of facts about the way in which prolonged and wide-spread outages affect employment, business output, and labor income. (ERA citation 04:013549)
展开▼
