[OT] Major Power Outages in NE USA and Canada

[Queenie]

We got our power back sometimes around 9am this morning.

It was so weird reading a book by candlelight. It really makes you think.

Having lived through Hurricane Gloria in 1986, with no power for 2 weeks, this wasn't too bad. The fact that it got up to 90 degrees inside my house was the worse part.

My brother, who is 21, was VERY miserable. "What are we gonna do?" I told him to grab a spot on the couch with my Dad and sit and actually TALK to us for a while. Now that would be punishment!

 

[BrooklynKnight]

GWAAAAAR!!!

This is reporter ArthurQ coming to you live from NYC!

At the current time most of upstate NY has power back online with occasional rolling brownouts as the power grid is tenativly back up.

Most portions of Queens and Almost all of Staten Island have power. Aprrox 25% of the city also has power.

A few portions of Brooklyn are under power though most of it is still down.

I am reporting from a cousin's house. She lives in a complex which has its own generator system thus we are under power.

Let me tell you folks this has been one of the most harrowing experiences of my life. This is the US of A not some dinky place in Europe, or Asia, or Africa. Things like this should not happen.

To be quite literrally in a dead city for hours on end. No light...no anything...

Unlike many years ago people dont carry shortwave radios around anymore. People dont store candles in the closets the way they used too. NYC...dark....a sight I never in my life I would have expected to witness. Police and ambulence sirens blaring.

The second time in my life I felt like I was living in a movie. Shortly after the blackout, (which occured roughly at 4:15 or 4:20pm) I started to direct traffic at an intersection by my apartment in order to releive conjestion by our street.

This was the second day in a row I was without net and airconditioning cause the day before my building's fuses blew and i had to go to my parents house.

This has been ArthurQ giving you a live update from NYC.

 

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

I actually enjoyed the blackout. After a brief session of GameBoy, I busted out my lantern and some candles. Nothing like reading Lovecraft and Gaiman by candlelight.

 

[BrooklynKnight]

the thing that freaked me out most was seeing dark trains sitting over bridges unmoving....just sitting there...dead.

*Shiver*

 

[armac]

Ottawa notes

Sure. "Blame Canada!"

LOL. On the very crowded bus on the way home from
work yesterday, a few of us were commenting on this,
and I started singing it. Everyone laughed.

Mayor Bloomberg blames Canada; our provincial government
is telling us that it happened on the NY side of Niagara
Falls. Should be interesting to hear exactly where it
happened.

The downtown core was pretty crazy. I was glad that I
didn't have my car yesterday, although I think I would have
left it at work if I did. The buses were crowded, but they
got me home quickly once they got on their private
Transitway (a bus only road going through the city).
Emergency vehicles were using the Transitway too.

Some of the drivers I saw downtown were just plain
stupid. I saw a police car trying to respond to a hit
pedestrian. Cars were trying to clear the middle lane
of the one way street that they were on. One lady saw
the middle lane open up, and sure enough, pulled into it
ahead of the police car. The police car stopped, parked,
and ran to the accident site a block away.

At uncontrolled intersections, it was fun to see how
drivers felt that it was their right to move. There was
room for about five cars to go through an intersection
North/South, but after one car went, the East/West
drivers felt that it was obviously their turn to go...and
then found themselves stopped in the middle of the
intersection. But it was their turn to go!

I called my FLGS, and found out he was staying open,
so I went for the HeroClix tournament that was to run
that night. We pulled tables outside onto the sidewalk
and played while we had light. It was fun.

The pizza place next to him was open (gas fuelled ovens),
and was selling a lot of pizza. They were worried about
losing thousands of dollars of cheese and toppings because
their freezer was out. They were desperately calling friends
that might have working freezers to see if they could borrow
storage space.

The Dollar Store on the other side of the FLGS closed as soon
as the power went out, and while we were playing HeroClix,
we saw lots of people coming to see if they could buy candles
and batteries from the Dollar Store. They lost a lot of sales
that they could have manually tracked.

My FLGS had a rack of Energizer batteries that he offered
at a lower price than he normally sells for, but very few people
took him up on the offer. They wanted the cheap Dollar
Store batteries, and didn't want to spend for the name
brands.

Sad to say there were 20 reported cases of looting in the
Ottawa area, and 2 fatalities.

People in my neighbourhood were good, and cheered when
the power came on around 23:00. Funny thing, it came on
in the nearby buildings about 5 minutes earlier, and the
people in the buildings cheered, while those in the houses
jeered. The cheers came 5 minutes later.

It stayed on for about an hour, and then went off again for
around another hour. After that it came on until about 08:00.

Since I'm not an "essential" worker, I got a day off out of this.
Can't complain, although I did call my boss at 08:45 to make
sure that he didn't expect me at work. He didn't. Oh, what's
unusual about that? Well, I was expecting to get his cell
phone's answering service, and have him call me back later.
He is in Saskatchewan, and it was 06:45 there. I hope I
didn't wake him.

The power has gone on and off a couple of times today, but
we were told brownouts would happen all day.

Hope everyone is well.

Angus

 

[Dakkareth]

NE USA? Now they admit it themselves


And it was very strange to to see the pictures and reports here on the other side of the ocean.

Politicians and experts here tell us, that our system is ten times better than in the USA and that such a thing couldn't happen here. And for once I (exception!) believe them. Mainly because I did some research into the system a few years back.

 

[Seule]

Last I heard the Canadian and American governments are blaming each other, while people who actually work in Hydro are saying nothing. The Niagra region seems to have been the only area that didn't lose power. My friend in that region who's due with her first child in a month DIDN'T lose power, for which we are all glad.
I was out power for 23 1/4 hours, approximately, and may well still lose it again.
Last night while sitting outside, we saw one woman walk up to a house and ring the doorbell. Getting no response, she tried again after a couple of minutes, and then again. After about 5 minutes one of us went over and suggested that she try knocking, as the entire city was blacked out. Stupidity in action, for certain.
Currently, my city (Guelph, Ontario) is predicting that the system will be stable by the end of the weekend, but that there could be blackouts for a week. Wish me luck.
Tomorrow, if things seem stable, we may actually turn the air conditioner back on! At least we have fans now, last night was.... unpleasant.

--Seule

 

[MaxKaladin]

Seems a bit strange to me that one of the most developed countries in the world suffers under major power loss every decade.
What's going on over there in the new world ?

BYE

This seems to be pretty much a Northeastern thing. The west only seems to have rolling blackouts due to a lack of generating capacity. Here in Texas, we maintain our own power grid seperate from the rest of the nation and I can't remember ever having an event near this scale (knock on wood). If we lose power its generally over an area no bigger than several neighborhoods and its back on in a few hours at most and its pretty rare. That usually only happens when you get a lightning strike that damages a substation.

 

[BluWolf]

I think we are all missing something important here.

Doesn't anyone think its odd that at the exact moment Morris tries to up grade the message board software a large portion of the North American continent looses power?

So Morris, what do you have to say for your self???

 

[Edena_of_Neith]

Well, I'm back.
Nothing like being a part of history, no?
50 million people without power, running water, or clean water of any sort.

And yeah, we sweated through the hot night last night.
Yeah, we lost all our food.
Yeah, we discovered the new truth: lanterns and candles were suddenly the latest in high technology.

We also took the Spook Drive.
And it is spooky, when you drive through vast commercial areas and regions where hundreds of thousands live, and there is nothing.
Just nothing.
Downtowns are ghosttowns, dead, silent, and utterly dark.
You cannot see anything outside of downtowns. The silouettes of trees, homes, and buildings rise black against the hazy moon, but elsewhere there is only a deep darkness.
The stars shine down brilliantly from overhead. For the sky is dark - it is nearly totally dark, for the first time ever.
You try to walk down your block, but it is so dark you cannot see the sidewalk, much less the houses on either side of the street.

And there is no light, anywhere.
The moon shines down ferociously, uncontested.
It is like being deep in a wilderness forest, in some remote place (northern Ontario, Yellowstone, northern Nevada, and in this case in the middle of a city of 5 million people) in the middle of the night.
The only sound are insects.
There is no movement to be seen (not even any clouds in the sky.)
There is only the profound darkness, where once our civilization was.

That was (and still is, in some areas) the effect of the blackout, at least here in metropolitan Detroit.