Giant power Outages? (1 Viewer)

Power outages reported in Northeast, including New York City, and other cities including Cleveland, Ohio, and Detroit, Michigan. Details soon.

CNN has no details- my whole area is a buzz with people talking about large scale outages.

I read on my local (Hartford, CT) paper's website that CNN is reporting a fire at a Con-Ed plant in NYC.

Our power blinked around 10 minutes but our company has a UPS back-up.

Power went out briefly here in central Michigan.

Seems odd one station would affect all of NYC, Cleveland, Detroit and into Canada.

Computer networks flooded, slow, and cell phone towers clustered as well. Pain in the butt.

-V

It took the rest of the country a whole year to follow California!
Been there, Done that!
(Kidding aside, be careful when it comes back on; my neighbors lost a bunch of appliances)

It has happened before.. sometime in 1965, one point of failure caused massive blackouts all over the north east. When the failure occurred it caused increased load on the other lines as other stations tried make up the difference which in turn caused more failures... there was a massive cascading effect. Maybe that is what is happening now.

http://www.ceet.niu.edu/faculty/vanmeer/outage.htm

Go to cnn.com for a wild shot of the expressways.

Niagra-mohawk powergrid failure they are saying...

Power's been out in all of Ontario for about 45 minutes now.

Thankfully, my iBook's battery was fully charged, and since I can't do any work or go home (the subway is out), I am going to kill a lot of time here on HTF. Or four hours, really, and then my battery will die.

Then I'll really be screwed.

With the way power is sold among various utilities, I don't find it terribly hard to believe that you could have outages on this scale if a critical link was affected.

Doesn't help that it's really hot in the greater Toronto area today: everybody's AC is (or was) cranked.

I was working on a really, really important file when the power cacked -- thankfully, something had given me the strange urge to back it up only minutes before the outage, so I won't have lost any significant work.

Bad news: they were hoping to pick the print up tomorrow morning.

At least it was after the markets closed.

Make that two years, Grant! And (heh, heh) Los Angeles itself never endured those rolling blackouts, what with us being on our own grid. (Kidding aside, though, it's a bummer. Imagine that muggier northeastern summer heat and no A/C!)

I remembered the 1965 blackout and since I was just a kid I thought it was a lot fun at that time.

Cleveland was out, but now I just heard that Toledo has no power. Weird stuff.

So where are the UFOs?

Or maybe it's Termitator 3: Rise of the Power Plants.

The CBC says that the fire was not the cause, but simply an effect of the automatic cascading shutdown, caused by a big ol' overload.

My dad just called to tell me stories about what he was doing in '65 during the blackout while he was at University. He had fond memories of it, too.

And all I'm thinking is "I was going to watch a movie tonight."

Ah- so maybe THAT'S why work is so slow today and I've had more time than usual to look at HTF!
I was running the projection booth at a 16-screen theater during the last big California blackout- it was a weekday afternoon so not too many customers were pissed off but I had to manually unthread several movies to re-start them after the power finally came back on. There was a big blackout a few summers ago on a Saturday, and I was working in a theater then too (thankfully not downstairs!)

CNN says FEMA said that it started in Ottawa and spread to other areas.

Also CNN is reporting that it could have been because of that Blaster/Lovesan worm that is spreading over the internet right now.

I also don't think that this is a terrorist attack.

These images that are on CNN are just crazy!