I survived the Great Power Outage

[DeeBye]

Like a bunch of people across the northeastern US and Canada, I was without power for a chunk of the day.

CNN link for the story

I live in London, Ontario. It's a city of about 300,000 people, about an hour's drive west of Toronto. Power went out at about 4:15 pm eastern time.

I didn't realise the extent of the power outage until I turned on my car's radio. At first, I figured it was just a local occurance. I was getting into my car because I was getting bored and thought I'd go to the local mall. After hearing that a huge chunk of North America was in a blackout, I changed my plans.

Power came back on at 11:45 pm eastern time, and I think I'm one of the lucky ones. I am hearing reports that power may not be restored to some communities for days.

Damn, I guess I gotta go to work tomorrow.

I hope I can finish this post quickly, just in case the power goes out agai

[Ignatz]

Of course, I live in California. Where, naturally, we don't have silly energy problems. :lol:

[BobThePumpkin]

Blackouts? Must be an east coast thing...

[Obi2Kenobi]

You do have silly governor problems. :rolleyes:

[Chaerophon]

My parents lived in London for over 10 years. They were glad to leave, but they weren't into the whole "city life" thing. From what I've heard, it's not a bad place to live at all!

[Archon_Wing]

Of course, I live in California. Where, naturally, we don't have silly energy problems.  :lol:

Yep, what energy problems? :lol:

[Wapptor]

Bah I live in Rhode Island!!!

























And we were spared! :P

-Wapptor

[DralaFi]

I live in Richmond Hill part of the GTA (Greater Toronto Area) and I actually slept through the beginning of the blackout.

I was working the night shift these last two weeks and so I came home thursday morning went to sleep, woke up and was surprised by my family telling me the whole eastern sea board is in a blackout. And the power has been out since 4pm.

I had to work last night as well, or atleast I thought I did. The phones were so busy that I couldn't even get through to work. So I got there and they told me production is canceled, go home.

Power just came back on at around 6:30am on Friday. Hopefully it will stay on.

The great thing about the blackout last night, was seeing the night sky. Some people in T.O. even managed to see the Meteor shower. But the stars were out and with no light polution they looked great.

[Dark Luke]

i live in toronto (north york area), power went back up during the night when i woke up, i saw a streetlight on outside my window, but i look at the clock as i was half asleep still

[Destroy-Titus]

:blink: I remember back when I lived in hell--err, I mean the mainland US, when I worried about, things, now all I have to ever even worry about, is if that first of the month tsunami test is indeed a test, or the real thing :lol:, wait a minute :blink:

[goldfish]

I had the day off, so I was home when it hit.

Which was nice. Because otherwise I would have had to have gone down 40 flights of stairs (after being freed from a stuck elevator, most likely), and then gotten from 50th street up to 225th street without subway service, with taxis reportedly moving at a rate of 2-3 blocks per hour.

This with the cash in my pocket (about $15), since ATMs were dead, and with most stores closing, on a nice, balmy 90 degree day.

On the one hand, I sort of wasted a day or two of vacation, because I would have had a lot of time off anyway. On the other hand, it would have been a lot less fun.

Oh, one other thing, the blackout had one upside. We took the kids outside and looked at Mars in the sky. We could see all sorts of stars, too. Not the usual night sky for New Yawk City, where you're lucky to be able to see the moon. ;)

Edit: Added about Mars.

[[wcip]Angel]

I didn't experience any blackout..


I feel so left out. :(

[Occhidiangela]

Down here in Tejas. Bright side? NO probs. Down Side? If ours gets screwed, I suspect we have less "depth" to draw from, given its fairly small size in comparison to the other two electrical power grids.

I read with interest the discussion in this morning's paper of how the three major power grids in the US are put together, with the Northern-Eastern tied in with Canada. ( I suspect that is a result of some NATO considerations in the 1960s' when it was refined ) It strikes me that DARPnet and the World Wide Web, with their multinode and multipath structure probably borrowed the idea from a resiliant power grid concept. Maybe not.

I also read with interest the reports of early finger pointing between the Canadian power folks and the US power folks in the Northeast. Seems that one assessment was a lightning strike in the Niagra area created the first casualty, while other reports suggest no such thing took place.

Is more capacity needed? Not in my opinion. More intelligent use, and non wastage of, electrical power would probably go a long way toward preventing cascading brownouts and blackouts.

EDIT ADD: What was this about?

A spokesman for the Canadian prime minister's office said the cause was a fire at a Con Edison power plant in New York.

The black smoke that came from that plant was the normal emissions from shutting down the boilers. Why would someone from the PM's office launch an early rumor without checking the facts first? 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.

*Pssst, I hear that Ah_nold wears a truss*

[Nicodemus Phaulkon]

Oh, one other thing, the blackout had one upside. We took the kids outside and looked at Mars in the sky. We could see all sorts of stars, too. Not the usual night sky for New Yawk City, where you're lucky to be able to see the moon.

Sometimes, I very much take for granted the benefits of a rural existence in a small village. When I step out my back door, any "light pollution" obstructing my view of the Milky Way is usually attributed to a sky full with the Aurora Borealis.

The last "power outage" we experienced didn't cause gridlock or frustration. You have to appreciate that "rush hour" where I live is when there's more than 2 vehicles you don't recognize at the same time on main street. As the old saying goes: No one around here uses a turn signal; everyone knows where they're going anyway. And stuck walking? No one walks for exercise around here... a vehicle stops every half block and offers you a ride.

With the refrigerators offline, we made lemonade out of our lemons. Everyone tossed their perishables into coolers and looked out into their backyards to see who had started their fire-pit first, that evening (happened to be me, this particular time). Everyone trundled over with their coolers, deck chairs and two extra BBQs. End result: 3 propane BBQs cooking up steaks, hamburgers, hotdogs, potatoes, carrots, etc etc while the coolers were drained of their contents over the period of the evening... with 25-30 people gathered in/around or commuting to/from my back yard.

Fun night, really.

The "city" is a nice place to visit, but couldn't pay me enough to live there again.

*tips helm*

[TaMeOlta]

Why would someone from the PM's office launch an early rumor without checking the facts first?  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.

:o Why would a baseball team perform such a heinous act ??? :blink:

(( ;) ))

[Occhidiangela]

The the perfidy of George Steinbrenner. Hey, he stole David Wells back from Toronto, he won't stop at anything to win the East!

[NiteFox]

Yeah, I survived the massive outage.

Well, I was one of the lucky ones living on an entirely different continent :P

But hey, we still had all the fun and thrills in good ol' Blighty. With the overly-melodramatic news coverage of the spectacular fantastique you would have thought that we, instead of the US, had suffered the black out (Hell, we might have done. I was sleeping through it all...) And with every news agency with their m4d computer graphics displaying what would happen if the same happened here, with their humble self-opiniated views that the Government should... Nay, MUST act now or face the dire consequences of a massive unprecidented nationwide blackout, one can't help but get the impression that should the lights flicker off we should all save the bother and dance the hemp fandango from the defunct streetlamps. *Sigh* It's quite depressing when you think about it.

Still, in a weird twist, we sold about 1400% more candles in our store than we would normally because of little old dears fretting about the fact that it could happen here. Considering the candles are decorative, this seems odd, but hey... Profits are up today.

[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.

[kandrathe]

Yeah, Rummy would have said something like;

"We know there is a problem, and we know we are working on it. It might take hours, or it might takes days. We only know what we know at this point. In the future, however, we will know more, and then you will know more as well."

Reminds me of his great poem on Happenings...

Happenings
You're going to be told lots of things.
You get told things every day that don't happen.

It doesn't seem to bother people, they don't—
It's printed in the press.
The world thinks all these things happen.
They never happened.

Everyone's so eager to get the story
Before in fact the story's there
That the world is constantly being fed
Things that haven't happened.

All I can tell you is,
It hasn't happened.
It's going to happen.
—Feb. 28, 2003, Department of Defense briefing

[kandrathe]

Where I live we have outages all the time, and I fear we always will. The weather in the central plains of the US is the most volitile and active in the world. The day can start out a balmy 90 degrees F, with blue skies and a light breeze, and 2 hours later a storm will erupt dropping the temperature by 30 degrees, dropping 10 inches of rain, and wiping the wind up towards 50 or 60 mph. So, when you set out in the morning, you just never know what it will be like at lunch time, or then again what it would be like when you go home. So the consequence is that I am thankful to have power, phone lines, and cable TV, when it works, which is most of the time.