I just had a ten hour hospital shift from hell, apologies if my writing is lacking. I can't think of a better way to try to measure the scope of the damage caused by this.
Just completed a standing 24 due to this outage. My B-Shift brothers and sisters had to monitor the radios all night for their units to be called for emergencies. I heard every dispatch that went out.
We were back in the 1960's with paper and pen for everything, no updates on nature of call, no address information, nothing... find out when you show up and hope the scene is secure. It was wild as it was coupled to a relatively intense Monsoon storm.
Starting with an ER story kind of set up the expectation that you'll be "measuring the scope of the damage" in lives lost, not dollars. Though I guess at large enough scale, they're convertible.
Regardless, thanks for your report; seeing it was very sobering. I hope you can get some rest, and that things will soon return to normalcy.
A tiny bit of thought about your situation IMO should lead anyone to conclude that you just first-hand experienced the fallout of today's nightmare, and then took a step back and realized you were likely one of millions if not billions of other people experiencing the same, and relayed that thought in terms of immediately understandable loss. Someone else might see "wrong" but I saw empathy.
