Pushkin.

Maybe you remember it, August 2003.

Everything went dark.

A couple of trees on the East Lake transmission line outside of Cleveland grew a little bit too tall,

and the electrical line at that precise point, perhaps because of the summer heat,

sagged a little bit more than usual, and touched the trees.

Contact causes short.

The short caused the power that used to run along that line to be rerouted along another line,

which overloaded that line, causing an even bigger electrical surge to be rerouted to another

line, and on and on, leading to a series of failures that rippled across the entire

northeastern grid, leaving 50 million people without electricity.

The great northeastern blackout is what's called a failure cascade.

One small mishap leads to a second bigger problem and a third even bigger problem,

and finally at the end of the chain, catastrophe.

I want to tell you a story about a moral failure cascade.

It began with what looked like a robbery gone wrong.

A woman murdered in her home in an area of northwestern Alabama known as the Shoals.

But that crime would soon attract the crowd, a host of others who would get caught up in

the cascade as it picked up momentum.

Onlookers, participants, people trying to stop the unfolding catastrophe.

For 30 years, people wittingly or unwittingly feeding it until it consumed them too.

Music Was he a good preacher?

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