You’re supposed to be planning a wedding. You have the venue, the guest list is taking shape, and you’re on the phone with your sister-in-law, debating the perfect size for the flower girl dresses. This is the stuff of life—the joyful, chaotic, beautiful minutiae of building a future. For Jennifer Brewington, this was her reality on a stormy Friday night in Florissant, Missouri.
Then, in an instant, that reality was replaced by another. A future erased. A wedding plan replaced by a funeral plan.
Her mother, Adrena, heard an electrical “buzz” from the backyard. After the storms that had twice sent them to the basement for shelter, after seeing small fires “popping up” from the strained grid, something was wrong. She pinged her daughter’s phone. The sound led her to a corner of the yard, where she found Jennifer. She was still breathing. But the first responders, the very people whose job it is to race toward danger, couldn’t reach her. The power line that had fallen, the one that had delivered the fatal charge, was still live. A perimeter of invisible, lethal energy separated a dying daughter from any hope of rescue.
“Now I have to plan a funeral instead of a wedding,” Adrena Brewington said, a sentence so heavy with loss it feels impossible to write, let alone speak. Jennifer’s fiancé, Ethan Foss, echoed the sentiment. Instead of mailing “save the dates,” he is collecting addresses for a memorial service.
This is the kind of story that stops you cold. It’s a tragedy of such profound and random cruelty that it defies easy explanation. We call it a freak accident. An act of God. A terrible misfortune.
I call it a system failure. A catastrophic, unacceptable failure of imagination.
When I first read about the first responders being unable to approach Jennifer, I honestly felt a surge of profound frustration. We live in an age of breathtaking intelligence. The device in your pocket can communicate with a satellite 22,000 miles away, calculate the optimal route through traffic you haven’t even hit yet, and translate a language in real time. We have built a digital world of near-instantaneous awareness. Yet the power grid that snakes through our backyards, the very backbone of our modern lives, is a ghost. It’s a dumb, blind, unfeeling brute.
That downed wire in Jennifer’s yard had no idea it was no longer connected to a transformer. It had no idea it was lying in wet grass, turning a family’s sanctuary into a death trap. It had no idea a human being was dying in its lethal embrace. It just continued to do the one thing it was designed to do: carry a powerful current, blindly and without question.
This is the technological equivalent of a nervous system with no pain receptors. It’s a body that can be grievously wounded and not even know it, continuing to function until it bleeds out. We wouldn’t accept this in biology, so why do we accept it in the foundational infrastructure that powers our civilization?
We talk about smart homes, smart cars, and smartphones. But what about smart infrastructure? What about a grid that possesses the most basic level of self-awareness? This is what we call a smart grid—and in simpler terms, it’s about giving our infrastructure the ability to sense and respond to the real world in real time, turning it from a passive conduit of power into an active, intelligent network.
Imagine a world where the moment that line snaps in the storm, the entire system knows, it isolates the fault, alerts crews to the exact GPS coordinate, and renders the downed cable inert all in less than a second—it’s not a fantasy from a science fiction movie, it’s a tangible future that turns our passive, dangerous infrastructure into a protective digital ecosystem. This isn’t about convenience. This is about preventing a mother from having to choose between a wedding dress and a casket.
Some will say the cost is too high, the overhaul too massive. It’s the same argument that was made a century ago about electrifying the country in the first place. It reminds me of the dawn of refrigeration. Before the cold chain, we simply accepted that a huge percentage of our food would spoil in transit. It was an unavoidable cost of doing business. Today, the idea of shipping milk from a farm to a city without a refrigerated truck seems utterly primitive. We solved the problem. We built the system. We must now view these infrastructure failures with the same lens. They are not inevitable tragedies. They are solvable engineering challenges.
The real cost is not in the upgrade. The real cost is Jennifer. The real cost is a fiancé like Ethan, whose last memory of his partner’s humor is a “World’s Tallest Leprechaun” t-shirt she bought him as a joke. These are the moments, the people, the futures our technology is ultimately meant to protect. If our smartest minds are focused only on optimizing ad clicks and building virtual worlds while the real world’s nervous system is left to decay, we have failed.
What does it say about our priorities when we can build an algorithm that knows you want to buy a new pair of shoes before you do, but we can’t build a power line that knows it’s killing someone?
This is the kind of breakthrough that reminds me why I got into this field in the first place. It’s not about the gadgets. It’s about this. It’s about building a world that is fundamentally safer, more resilient, and more humane. A world that doesn’t allow for a Friday night discussion about flower girls to be the last conversation a daughter ever has with her mother.
We have created pockets of staggering genius in our digital lives, while leaving the physical world to run on century-old, brute-force logic. The lag between what we are capable of and what we have implemented is no longer just an inconvenience; it is a moral failing. The next great human project is not to escape into a metaverse, but to infuse our real, tangible world—our grids, our bridges, our water systems—with the awareness it so desperately needs. We must build a world that is smart enough to protect its Jennifers. It’s the only future worth building.
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