20th Anniversary of the Great Northeast Blackout of 2003

[Michchamp]

Link to wikipedia article. We now know it was caused by Ohio... they had lousy software and didn't monitor their shit well.

Anyone else live through this? I remember being at work (it was my last day before starting law school that fall), and the lights blinking a couple times before going out for good. The UPS guy came into the office and I asked him if power was out down the street, and he said "Power is out for the whole east of the country!"

I thought he was joking. My boss said we'd postpone going away drinks for me for a day or two (we never had them). When I left, traffic was a mess. One lucky break was that I had filled up my gas tank at lunch, and so had the means to get around. We eventually went to stay with family in East Lansing (they never lost power). First time in my life I felt like a refugee...

 

[Spartanmack]

I was working on the floor of the NYSE, the blackout hit about 10 mins after the close just as we were wrapping up our end of day work and everything went down.

I went to Ulysses' in lower manhattan with other people who were stranded by the blackout - no subways running, impossible to get a cab. By 11 or so they were out of cold beer and all the ice was consumed or melted.

I paid $150 for a car to take me to my apartment on the upper west side - probably would have cost less than $25 for a cab under normal circumstances. I walked up 11 flights of stairs to my apartment and slept for a couple hours. The next morning I woke up to no hot water, took a cold shower and jumped in a cab ~6:30 back to the NYSE - still no subways but the exchange had power. We didn't miss a minute of trading. It was a bit weird driving in the City with no traffic lights - cab drivers are bad enough when traffic signals are working.

I think I got power back that night or the next day.

 

[tinselwolverine]

Wow.

Nobody in Southern California seems to remember this happening.

Are you guys sure this is really true?

Anyone can publish any made up story that they want to on Wikipedia.

Remember back when we went through that whole ?southern strategy? ?debate? from a Wikipedia article a little while back?

EDIT: This really has nothing to do with the topic, but I took a half day off and I?m binge watching Riverdale on Netflix and man?those Riverside students stayed in High School a LONG time.

And I think they may have traveled through time, also.

 

[kalinecountry]

I remember this blackout in the Northeast part of the country and Canada.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North...blackout of 1965,Vermont in the United States.
Northeast blackout of 1965.

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/the-great-northeast-blackout
The Great Northeast Blackout.

 

[byco42]

About 4:30 in the afternoon at work, the lights went out, came right back, and then went out again. I can't explain the foreboding I felt and quickly learned the scope of the blackout on the radio. We were without power for three days.

I immediately assumed it was bad actors like MC attempting to undermine our nation's ability to fight the War on Terror.

 

[Michchamp]

About 4:30 in the afternoon at work, the lights went out, came right back, and then went out again. I can't explain the foreboding I felt and quickly learned the scope of the blackout on the radio. We were without power for three days.

I immediately assumed it was bad actors like MC attempting to undermine our nation's ability to fight the War on Terror.

Ha. I remember the news mentioning that in NYC some people were panicked that it was TERRORISM! And the authorities almost sardonically rolling their eyes at the mere thought, pretending they hadn't just been shrieking about it nonstop for the last 2 years.

I also remember Bush giving a speech about how our nation's grid needed to be updated. Even back then (this was only 6 months after the Iraq war started and we were still searching for "WMD") I figured he was just sticking a pin in the issue so he could funnel money to some campaign contributor in Texas to "make the grid real better"

We never did get that grid upgraded... I guess Halliburton decided they had enough $$$ rolling in from looting Iraq & our own treasury.

 

[Michchamp]

But yeah, I remember a brief outage, and then the lights coming back for a bit before going out permanently. I guess I wasn't as brainwashed as some, because the idea it might be terrorism didn't occur to me; we had summer brownouts and blackouts occasionally on hot days in SE Michigan for years.

The wikipedia article has a detailed timeline of the stages of the outage. some of the most dramatic steps took place in miliseconds, like the massive power surge around the grid surrounding Lake Erie, and then everything cascading.

 

[Michchamp]

I remember this blackout in the Northeast part of the country and Canada.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North...blackout of 1965,Vermont in the United States.
Northeast blackout of 1965.

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/the-great-northeast-blackout
The Great Northeast Blackout.

It's somewhat impressive (though maybe it shouldn't be... I'm not an electrician) this sort of thing doesn't happen more often.