Northeast Blackout

[EdenMaster]

Bah.

As most of you have no doubt heard there's been a massive blackout in the northeastern United States, an area in which I just so happen to reside. New York City remains under a sheath of darkness, but fortunately, the outages here were short and sparse. Annoying mostly.

I consider myself lucky, and hope the best to all the towns without power tonight. New York City without power is just a looting magnet.

[Dark Jaguar]

News to me, but then again I haven't been paying attention to the news as of late. Is it really big news? As a child, I used to encounter black outs CONSTANTLY, some lasting several days. I myself actually find it odd that I haven't been in any sort of blackout for about 5 years now. Oh well, no power, they'll live.

[EdenMaster]

They're calling it the biggest blackout in the history of the United States.

You decide if it's "big news" ;)

[Great Rumbler]

Yeah, I would consider it big news: Million of people without power, the whole of New York City shutdown, people trapped in elevators and subways, and a mass exodus back to New Jersey.

[Undertow]

Heh, I'm not hit. :D

[Dark Jaguar]

I see. So... did some very large and very old power cable finally break, or did a power plant explode, or did a solar flare's discharged energy hit around that area like what with happened in Canada several years ago? I could understand some places without power, but it would seem all of everything in some place I've never been to is now without power. Well, so long as the hospital's generators are working, I suppose all is well.

[EdenMaster]

Jury's still out on it. Some say lightning, some say fire, no one knows for sure.

The lab I work at had a backup generator, so I didn't really feel the sting of the blackout till I drove home...without traffic lights. Ugh.

[Great Rumbler]

What happened was something caused a powerplant in New York City to go off line. Other powerplants on the grid had handle all the output that was lost because of the first powerplant going down. This in turn cause those powerplants to shutdown. Finally, after the grid stabalized a lot of big cities were without power.

[Dark Jaguar]

You'd think there would be a fail safe to prevent a system from outputing more than it is capable of doing safely, and pretty much shafting whatever it isn't able to power.

Then again, Tulsa's main airport, last I heard, has been using MAJORLY outdated computers which networked together still have less power than the average current day calculator, so maybe the accounting department of these power companies, who believe numbers don't represent reality, but rather DETERMINE reality, are to blame.

[Great Rumbler]

You'd think so, but obviously they didn't or else it wasn't enough to prevent this.

[OB1]

Yeah I heard about this earlier today. Sounds pretty frightening.

That leaves the northeast pretty vulnerable to terroists attacks, doesn't it?

[Dark Jaguar]

Um, well the baddies are ALSO without power, keep that in mind. How much less vulnerable would they be with power on to stuff like small pox or bombs anyway? I would certainly accept that RESPONSE to any attack is now cut down by a lot, but protection from said attack I doubt has decreased. I am willing to bet airports are all grounded there, meaning air terrorism is now ruled out as a means of attack, meaning in one way they are safer from it. No one's going to take advantage of metal detectors being down when there's no reason to get past those detectors in the first place now are they?

[Great Rumbler]

Well, it doesn't have to been airplanes. If some set off a bomb [God forbid] in New York City or one of the others without power, it would cause mass panic and it would take police and rescue units a long time to get to the site, creating a huge mess to say the least.

[Dark Jaguar]

Yes, as I said, I fully acknowledge that reaction TO terrorism would be reduced, but the attack itself is no more easy now than before, and likely harder due to the terrorist's lack of power. They might even die in a car crash before getting to the site of the attack in fact. I wonder how many killers on the way to kill someone have gotten in some horrible accident or been mauled by some animal before they could do said thing?

[Dark Lord Neo]

The power was out in part of Canada too, but it started coming back on before alot of the areas in the US started getting it back
On the CBC the main news anchor was on the roof of the Canadian Broadcasting Centre because the lights weren't on in the studio, it was also funny because he had just gotten back from his vacation and wasn't able to shave because the power was out, but on CTV the host was sitting in the regular news room, the only problem was that it was really dark.

[Darunia]

Jean Chretien officially blames it on a lightning bolt which struck a power plant on the US side of Niagara Falls.

[Dark Lord Neo]

I haven't heard that, but I have heard some officials say it definitly was a problem in the US, but I actualy haven't heard Chretien say anything.
Ontario was the only province affected by this and 50% of the power that went out it back on there.

[Dark Jaguar]

Are some of Canada's power lines coming from American power plants or something?

[OB1]

Did anyone watch Conan O'Brian last night? They started off the show in candle light because all of the power was off, so Conan just talked about how they can't do the show because there is no power and then they just re-aired an episode from earlier this year. I thought that was pretty funny.

[Dark Lord Neo]

Originally posted by Dark Jaguar
Are some of Canada's power lines coming from American power plants or something?

Yes, but the oposite is true as well
One way that they make energy cheaper is by allowing the free flow of energy across the borders, one of the reasons this failure was so massive was that when whatever happend the system attempted to compensate for the loss of power, and this didn't work. SOmthing like this could have happend at one of the plants in Ontario and potentially have the same results, or it could have happened in Detroit, Cleavland or any other city affected by this.

[Dark Lord Neo]

http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/powero...rning.html

Energy Warning Updates
June Chua, CBC News Online | August 14, 2003


BOULDER, COLORADO - Energy experts have been warning about large-scale blackouts in North America since the early eighties.

Bill Browning of the Rocky Mountain Institute in Colorado says a report for the U.S. Pentagon in 1982 cautioned the American government about the fragility of the power grid system in North America.

The blackout forced workers out of office towers in downtown Toronto.

The institute is an energy think tank. Browning runs the green development section.

"Everyone is pulling power and there's lots of big stations on the grid. All you need is one tenuous problem and it cascades throughout," Browning told CBC News Online.

Other experts agree.

"It's pretty close to peak demand," Gerry Angiovine of Navigant Consulting in Calgary, told CBC News Online.

"If suddenly you get one or two of the big suppliers going down…you may have a situation where you've got more being drawn than the system can supply…" he said.

Browning says a few years ago the same thing happened on the West Coast. Six states lost power all because a squirrel got burned on one of the transformers at a crucial time.

"Can you imagine? The entire power system breaks down because of a small rodent?" He says the solution would be to have something called "distributed generation" - a grid system supported by smaller producers, almost on a building by building scale. Browning says other energy sources such as fuel cells and micro-turbines should be used to shoulder the burden of energy distribution.

"At one time, the grid system seemed logical. If you have to do maintenance on one plant, then the grid connects everyone so the power keeps up. But that is also a fragility in the system."

Browning says energy experts such as himself are not surprised by the current blackout. He says it is bound to happen from time to time.

"The system, as we have designed it, is brittle. The only way we can make it resilient is to a mixture so that if portion of it goes down we can have islands of power still operating."

Browning says it often takes a major event to make authorities realize something needs to be done.

During the current blackout, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission said nine nuclear power plants in four states were knocked out.

Power transmission across the continent is controlled from a number of control centers where the flow of is monitored minute by minute. There are three major centers the Eastern Power Grid, the Western Power Grid and the Electric Reliability Council based in Texas.

I know the nuclear plants were shut down here because they were worried that if to much demands were put on them somthing could happen, the plants here don't have to worry about earning a profit though since they're all owned by a crown corporation

[Moiraine]

Let's just blame Canada and be done with it.

[A Black Falcon]

I was in Boston when it happened. The lights didn't go off there...