Blackout Quick Hitter
Most of you are probably aware that power went out over much of the Northeast U.S. and Southern Ontario Thursday afternoon into the evening.
CNN.com is getting hammered. I’m consulting the Washington Post and watching Fox News for updates.
If you’re curious about a specific location, though, I have a suggestion: try college and university sites. Most of them are hosted onsite at their school, and while many schools do have their own power plants, their connections out probably aren’t heavily redundant. Here are a few I’m using:
- Columbia University: NYC
- University of Toronto
- University at Buffalo (NY)
- University of Michigan: Ann Arbor (suburban Detroit)
- Cornell University: Ithaca, NY
- University at Albany (NY)
- Yale University (New Haven, CT)
- University of Dayton (OH)
- Case Western Reserve University: Cleveland, OH
- Mercyhurst College: Erie, PA
- University of Ottawa (Ontario, Canada)
Note that these sites will probably take a little while to get back online once local power is restored, because boxen will need to be restarted, requiring people to go back into the office, etc. But if they’re up, that’s a reasonably good indicator that the lights are back on locally.
Meanwhile, for historical perspective, check George Mason University’s Blackout Project, centered on the 1965 Great Northeast Blackout.
UPDATE 19:35: Fox News reports from Reuters: Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien is claiming that a lightning strike at a power station in Niagara, New York caused the outage.
UPDATE 20:35: Some parts of NYC are lighting back up. Niagara Power officials are denying the above report, and Canadian officials are now saying there was a fire at a Con Ed plant in NY.
UPDATE 00:30 Friday: Power is gradually being restored across the affected area. The Canadians seem awfully desperate to blame this on something on the American side of the border. Since my previous update their blame point has shifted twice, first to a supposed fire at an unspecified Pennsylvania nuclear plant, and now to a non-lightning-related fire at a Niagara Falls, NY plant. Apparently the deterioration of the power grid was expected to be a major issue in Ontario’s upcoming provincial elections anyway. There won’t be much doubt about that now, it seems.
One interesting note: 95% of Ontario’s population lost power, including the national capital in Ottawa. Ottawa sits on the Ottawa River, on the northern side of Ontario’s southeastern peninsula, facing its suburbs of Hull-Gatineau, Quebec. Lights in Hull-Gatineau and across the province of Quebec stayed on throughout, despite most of southwestern Quebec being on the edge of affected regions (Montreal actually receives American TV network afflilate stations from Plattsburgh, NY, which lost power like the rest of the state). Perhaps it’s just a quirk of the grid, but Ontario appears to be better integrated with the USA than it is with the Frenchies next door who are supposed to be part of the same country.
14 August 2003 / 0 Comments / Tags: life, tech, canada