August 14, 2003

[james_davis_nicoll]

On this day in 2003, shoddy American infrastructure caused a blackout across the Northeast. As Americans raced to perjure themselves blaming Canada for a calamity caused by the Americans themselves*, Canadians reacted as unruly mobs have through history when faced with a sudden and unexpected infrastructure collapse, which is to run out into the streets to direct traffic.


* See also the US custom of falsely blaming Canada for letting the 9/11 hijackers in the US. In defense of the people who claim this, many of them cannot tell truth from lies.

Comments

[awesomelies.livejournal.com]

The response here was an outbreak of smug back-patting about how it could never happen in a civilised country like Britain that maintains its infrastructure properly. Guess what happened two weeks later.

[mcbadger.livejournal.com]

I had just reached a Tube platform when that happened. Two minutes earlier and I'd have been one of the people stranded underground. As it was, I was just stranded in a pub. Not the planned night out, but not a blacked-out Northern line carriage, either.

[pauldormer.livejournal.com]

Ironically, I was in the UK during the first blackout and in Canada during the second, so I missed both.

And I was working for the National Grid at the time, the electricity transmission network in England and Wales, but as I was out of the country, you can't blame me for the blackout.

When I did get back to work and asked about the blackout, I was told that a couple of days later there was another blackout taking out half of Birmingham "and nobody noticed".

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

The 9/11 thing got perpetrated, perpetuated, by a head of Homeland Security. That's what you get for believing government.

[realinterrobang.livejournal.com]

Since the US almost inevitably blames Canada for shit we didn't do, explain to me why exactly we cleaned up the US' shit on 9/11 by landing 6000 people at Gander et al? (Without much in the way of thanks, I should also add...)

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

There was a heck of a lot of inviting neighbours and friends over for a Donner party chaos scenario steak barbecue and ice-cream as well. Don't forget that.

[doc-lemming.livejournal.com]

I recall that we had a barbecue but I can't recall what couples we had over.

And some careful culling of freezer items that weren't going to last, so we put them to their intended use early.

I don't recall any cannibalism, but I did have two beers that day, so I might have blacked out and forgotten.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

And sitting on the Toronto waterfront drinking beer and looking at the stars. That was amazing and I doubt I'll ever get another chance.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

Was there also Nightfall-style panic at all those lights that suddenly became visible in the night sky?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Do you know I know people in Ontario who have never seen the Northern Lights? That makes me sad.

[harvey-rrit.livejournal.com]

Well geez guys, you don't have Jane Fonda and Al Gore working for the Saudis up there, so why not build a couple more reactors instead of relying on a country you consider unreliable?

That being said, even if the murderers had come through Canada, and were wearing Islamic Genocide Jihadist official team jerseys, in what alternate history would it be Canada's job to stop them from leaving Canada? I mean, my God, look at the lowlifes America used to export northward. When they committed crimes in Canada-- which according to Canadians I had to listen to who discussed it with me in the 70s, was often-- the Canadian authorities dealt with them capably. The accusation that Canada "let them in" would be meaningless even if it had been true. It's just an excuse for the FBI not pulling up its own socks.

[keithmm.livejournal.com]

Really can't help yourself, can you? Pathetic.

[resonant.livejournal.com]

Canada exports electricity on a net basis; the issue is not reliance on imported power, nor domestic capacity, but with instability within the receiving system of the recipient. It is similar to a waiter being vomited on by a drunken customer.

[nojay.livejournal.com]

They did build a couple more reactors, or at least brought some existing mothballed reactors back into operation. Ontario now generates all of its baseload with nuclear (about 6GW) and hydro (variable between 4 and 6GW). They've got a couple of gas plants in case of shortages but they don't run on a regular basis and they're adding a biomass-burner option to one of them. The result is no coal generators anywhere and functionally zero-CO2 production of electricity, better even than France.

http://www.opg.com/power/

[florbigoo.livejournal.com]

I remember the air conditioners changing pitch as the voltage dropped through the floor, and all of the computer monitors winking out. Then, seven miles back up Queens Boulevard, through the savagery of volunteer traffic-direction, back to Rego Park, where I bought pudding, slapped the landlord's grandson away from the suddenly igniterless gas stove, and watched the full moon glinting on the slate roofs, under the fulsome Milky Way.

(I also, meanly, snarfed all of the hot water remaining in the tank to rinse off the road grime and sweat from the walk back from Long Island City. And I hustled to find a phone that worked so I could call my girlfriend (who is now my wife), and forever after fell in desperate love with POTS, because dammit, backup systems. Pudding, moon, burbling radio powered off the UPS - what could be better? [AC, the answer is AC])

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

The only extended blackout I've been in was in the Rochester, NY area a couple of decades ago, after a very severe ice storm. I recall waking up in the wee hours of the morning, all the power out, listening to tree branches exploding outside.

The night sky was SO BEAUTIFUL for the next few days, without all the light pollution. We got our power back about four days later.

I understand there was a nastier ice storm up in Canada sometime after that, that collapsed high voltage transmission towers. Took a while to clean up after that one.

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

I remember trying to find C-cell batteries for the only radio I had at the time, then buying a souvlaki from a street vendor when I reasoned that I wouldn't be able to prepare a supper on my electric stove/oven when I got home. Everything was well-mannered and all, stereotypically Canadian in fact.

On arriving back at my apartment, somewhat delayed by the extra 4-way stops due to traffic signal outage, suddenly struck by the realisation that I had several-teen floors of stairs between me and my unit... only to find that the building's generator allowed one elevator to work on a limited basis, so I didn't have to give myself a cardiac stress test that evening.

(And the radio didn't work, after all that effort.)

The next day we had off work because the power wasn't reliable and it wasn't worth calling people in. My most vivid memory was heading to the local Burger King for lunch and finding that their range hood breakers hadn't reset with the rest, so the smoke from the charcoal broilers was forcing everyone out to dine in the parking lot.

-- Steve also remembers using the POTS at the office the afternoon of the outage to contact his folks, who weren't aware how widespread the outage was.

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

And in an interesting coincidence, three minutes after posting that the power in the office blinked.

-- Steve hates it when life tries to be ironic, the blasted poseur...

[peter-erwin.livejournal.com]

As Americans raced to perjure themselves blaming Canada ...

I note with some amusement that the Wikipedia article lists a couple of Canadian officials who blamed random US states (New York, Pennsylvania) which weren't actually the source of the problem...

[harvey-rrit.livejournal.com]

Sounds like they're trying to get everybody else blaming each other.

Let's blame Wikipedia! :D

[goljerp]

I was in New York City, about 40 blocks (about 3.2 km) from my home, at a job interview. Walked uptown near Central Park (with the savage spontaneous direction of traffic), and then realized that the stair wells in my building were all interior, and unlit. As were the halls. I walked up and found my way into my apartment somehow (I think someone on the hall had their door open, which let a bit of daylight in?), and then savagely got some matches, small candles, and aluminum foil, and went back down to the front of my building. There I distributed small candles to folks, of course mentioning that I lived there too and would appreciate their not burning down the place with the candles. Some other people savagely lent flashlights and hung out. I think I met up with some friends who lived a little ways away and had ice cream and other perishables with them, and in the evening called my girlfriend (now wife) on my POTS line. (She was living, too far away for me to walk over to her place, even if I did have a good flashlight (which I didn't).

Good times, good times.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The Boston area was essentially spared by the blackout, and I can't even find anything from me online that mentions it (though I had started obsessively LJ-ing at the time).

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

As a Bostonian, I was basically unaware of the whole thing. We in New England had finally managed to upgrade some switching to keep power surges from taking down our grid, and obviously none of my Canadian or New Yorker friends were posting about what was happening, so I didn't even find out about it until it was over.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

We are also doing a lot of bridge-rebuilding around here. (But I can't be too terribly smug about it, because there are so many more to go.)

[raycun.livejournal.com]

I was recently a steward at a running race that had a lot of US entrants. They were (very slow but) extremely polite. I find it hard to wrap my head around the idea that there are people USians mock for being polite.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

US citizens who actually think about the external world tend to take it for granted that we're considered the worst assholes on the planet. But we may be conflating attitudes toward individual behavior and national policy. I've slowly come to realize that we are probably not the horriblest tourists, at the very least.

What is true is that when we travel abroad, people trying to guess nationality from language and accent carefully deploy the opening assumption that we are Canadian, because Canadians are touchy about being mistaken for USians but the reverse is not true.

[realinterrobang.livejournal.com]

I was in the middle ages (okay, at Pennsic) at the time, and I didn't even notice until I went to get some Gator Squish and the pop machines weren't functioning. I have to say, if you've got to be stuck in a catastrophic blackout, the best possible place to be is luxury camping. Other than that the Coopers had to start up their jenny to keep the ice frozen, most of us were like, "Blackout? What blackout? Eh..."