I survived the Great Power Outage

[pjnow]

Strikes me as either a spring loaded attitude of "it's all the Yanks' fault" or, and I'd like to think more likely, someone feeling badgered by the reporters' questions and giving an answer without thinking, or fact checking. Stuff like this coming from "The Head Shed" is one of many ways that unfounded rumors spread.

The Canadian PM didn't say anything, a press spokesman from his office stated that they had been told that the problem originated at a ConEd plant in Manahttan.

He should have kept his mouth shut and said "it's under investigation", and that should have been the approach of all politicians until such time as there is valid information ( everybody in public service should get a copy of "Rumsfelds Rules" and commit them to memory )

I did note that President Bush said,in effect, "We don't know what caused it, but we'll find out and fix it, and while we're at it we'd better fix the root cause of the problem as well - the antiquated power system in North America" not a direct quote but that's the gist of his comments - the only politician who hasn't said something stupid - good for him.

Politicians feel a need to blame someone outside of their electorate. I did notice that NY City Mayor Michael Bloomberg was pretty quick to blame the problem on Canada, as was NY Governor Pataki.

The Premier ( the equivalent of Governor ) of Ontario and Mayor of Toronto were blaming the problem on an event in Niagara Falls NY. For those of you not familiar with Ontario politics - this incident will cost the premier his job in the upcoming election - electricty supply is a very sensitive issue in Ontario, we used to export power to New York but the shortsighted policies (cough< mothballing Nuclear plants>cough ) of the current government have reversed that and now we are an importer. But it's even dumber than that - we are single sourced in our imports , we only import from New York State, when we could be importing from our energy rich Canadian neighboring provinces Quebec and Manitoba. The premier is toast.

Here in Ottawa I was at work, in the middle of updating resource forecasts for my project when the lights went off, the VPN dropped and the network dropped. I tried to stay at work for a while longer to complete some reports that I could work on ( laptop battery was fully charged ) until they told us that we had to leave the building.

Power came back on in my apartment at 14:30 this afternoon but we've been told to expect rotating blackouts until things stabilize.