Looking at reports this morning about delivery drivers showing up to work sick, I started to wonder how much tolerance various parts of our infrastructure have to fluctuations in the worker pool.<p>If we constrain the question to only consider the maintenance aspect of power plants, water systems, undersea cables, satellite control, etc... what level of tolerance is there to worker shortages? It seems unlikely that any one of these would have any sort of equivalent to a operational manual that a layman could use.
Not that complicated to keep things running. Lots of stuff is redundant, designed to be idiot proof and automated.<p>But more importantly, if you look at the way things are breaking down in different countries, the failures aren't happening all at once across every province/district/county simultaneously. So there is always going to be some crew from the neighboring town or city you can pull in.<p>When things breakdown over a large region at once eg 2003 Northeast blackout then expect a delay but even then you can see Hospitals and critical services kept running.