Everybody heard about the giant blackout that covers mots of the US and parts of Canada? This is crazy! They say it's not terrorists...but what if it is?
I left work early from Detroit (4:30PM - RUSH HOUR!). Couldn't do any work without electricity to run my computer and instrumentation in the laboratory. Of course, I work close to the freeway so getting on to it wasn't a problem, but there was a lot of traffic backed up where there were nonfunctioning traffic lights. Toledo, OH was a mess, stopped by a friend's house for traffic to dissipate before continuing home, which did have electricity.
Well, we had a power outage a couple weeks ago that reset all the clocks in our house, but besides that I haven't seen any "epidemic" outages... the worst of this was the planned rolling blackouts a couple years ago when Enron and the other energy companies were assraping California.
After the power outage (upstate NY), my .mac email account had 270 emails last night and around the same this morning. All the emails were failure to deliver messages! Don't know what happen, anyone else has this problem?
On a serious <G> note, sources now say that the problem was the computer system at an Ohio plant. Guess what OS they use......
Ok, just a disclaimer...that was and entirely fictional statement. Though, it would make sense to me. Maybe one of the larger stations had a massive control system failure due to computer problems, and when it went down safety systems kicked in...shutting down that grid, which had a domino effect on the noreastern grids. Last I heard they still have no clue what was the cause, thinking it now may have originated in Ohio of all places.
I walked from uptown Manhattan over the Brooklyn Bridge to southern Brooklyn, a great 10 mile walk. Everyone was greeted by Marty Markowitz, the funny and animated Brooklyn borough president. No traffic lights, no subways (I feel bad for the people stuck down there!). That was some walk.
Well, we remain unaffected here in the Central Valley, CA. Maybe it was a case of the Lovesan virus shutting down the computers controlling the power distribution nodes.