Lights out, whos home?

[Pradeep]

Well no power here in Upstate NY. Lappie is good for an hour or two.

 

[SteveC]

I just got home, and I have power here, but most of the rest of Jersey is without power. NYC, Toronto, Detroit, Cleveland are all affected. Supposedly the Niagara Mohawk power grid overloaded and caused this. I think it's going to be a long one.

 

[Pradeep]

Thank god for the chest freezer *starts moving beer down to the basement*

Worse thing was that I was in the middle of moving about 80GB of data when the lights went out, and the UPS only gave me about 15 mins when I needed an hour or so. Oh well, only a copy, can be redone later.

Glad to hear you're unaffected Steve.

 

[Buck]

CNN
Reuters

 

[SteveC]

Cell phones are overloaded as well. I can't get through to my sister, who was on her way home.

Glad to hear you're unaffected Steve.

Thanks. We had about a three hour outage last week, which was the longest we've had in years.

 

[zx]

Remember this thread ?

http://www.storageforum.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2489

I guess it happened jtr :wink: .

It seems there is no damage though. I see the images on CNN from NYC. It's very impressive seing all those people in the streets. So far, the emergency procedures are going pretty well. Let's hope it'll stay this way.

 

[Howell]

It's the 70s all over again. :eekers:

 

[Pradeep]

Well just had a nice dinner outside on the barbie, some pork chops and lamb burgers. Hopefully the juice comes back on before the basement floods. And of course no running water because we are on a well.

My Maid of the Mist frozen beer mug has suffered a catastrophic faliure *blubbers* All the freezy liquid stuff leaked out on to me lap.

Gin stocks are good for a day or two thank heavens.

Hopefully jtr was on his bike and not down in the subway.

I'm a bit worried that with nine nuclear power plants now off-line, it's going to take a couple of days to restart them. Wonder how they will manage the load with the hot weather ahead.

 

[SteveC]

Well just had a nice dinner outside on the barbie, some pork chops and lamb burgers.

Sounds good.

We just had an outage for about a half hour, and they flickered off a bunch of times before that; nothing major.

It seems there is no damage though. I see the images on CNN from NYC. It's very impressive seing all those people in the streets. So far, the emergency procedures are going pretty well. Let's hope it'll stay this way.

They've called in all NYPD officers, so my cousins will be working a long night. I doubt there'll be any crime problems.

 

[CityK]

Hello world!

 

[Pradeep]

Got the juice back at 3am, lost a bit of dairy in the fridge but otherwise no probs. Good to get the A/C back on, it's going to be a hot one.

 

[jtr1962]

Power went out here at 4:09PM. Just came back at 7:59AM. Almost 16 hours. Truth is the two main things that bothered me were not having AC and not having a computer(or any other means to occupy myself). It was actually nice to see the sky without the ever present light pollution. So many stars I've never seen before. I even took a bike ride for a couple of miles when it was dark. My little LED headlight actually made a difference whereas I hardly notice it under normal street lighting. It lit up stop signs from almost 200 feet away. The glare from the car headlights was obnoxious though. With normal night lighting it's not a problem but when your eyes get dark adjusted it's bothersome. BTW, no problem walking around last night. Star light is actually perfectly adequate to get around by(or maybe my eyes can adjust to dark better than most).

It looks like the stuff in the freezer will be OK. Not sure about everything in the fridge. I'll leave the AC off for a while to help the power company. A fan should do at least until it gets very hot.

 

[Buck]

JTR, the full moon helps a great deal with nighttime lighting. When we have a new moon, the night gets really dark, but, you can then see even more stars.

 

[zx]

It's surprising how emergency procedures are going so well.

Plus, there was no looting in NYC, so I guess that's also something to be happy about. It confirms how NYC has changed since the 70's .

 

[zx]

By the way, Québec has lots of electricity to offer to you poor americans. Notice how we were not affected by the power outage, nor did new england...Since you seem to have some problems with your power, we can always sell you electricity and a...ahem..."fair" price. :lol:

Just joking of course.

 

[CityK]

By the way, Québec has lots of electricity to offer to you poor americans. Notice how we were not affected by the power outage, nor did new england...

Which stands in stark contrast to what Bloomberg said this morning - in essence, he emphatically, no lets say adamantly, stated that the origination of the problem was in Canada, specifically Quebec.

I was pretty annoyed with his finger pointing ... rather early to get a definitive answer.

Second, his explanation made it sound like Quebec Hydro couldn't meet its own demands and a request for energy from NY was made. While I'm not going to rule this out as a possibility, it certainly strikes me odd given my knowledge that Quebec is a huge exporter of energy to NY state.

Third, there is all kinds of rumours about problems in Ohio, Penn etc.

Bloomberg should have been more cautius with his remarks.

 

[jtr1962]

Plus, there was no looting in NYC, so I guess that's also something to be happy about. It confirms how NYC has changed since the 70's .

Just some sporadic looting in some of the worse neighborhoods. Other than that people were civil. I saw many volunteers at intersections directing traffic. As I said earlier, the main downside was no A/C. If it was maybe 20°F cooler this blackout would have been nothing more than a minor annoyance. BTW, we really need to do something about light pollution. I didn't realize how much is hidden. Since the streetlights will probably be replaced within 10-15 years(at most) by LED-based ones we might as well make fixtures that direct all the light downwards where we want it. And all those office buildings should really shut down the lights at night. I heard many buildings dating from the 1950s and 60s don't even have switches for the lights. I believe this was because they were built at a time when we thought the country would be 100% nuclear power "too cheap to meter". That prediction was sure way off.

 

[Buck]

How about we just keep all of the city lights off at night, and everyone is given one of these. If you need more light then the universe can produce, switch your candlestick on.

 

[jtr1962]

Cool. Only drawback for me is the nonrechargeable lithium cell. I hate making the battery companies rich. BTW, I was walking around last night with one of my bike headlights doubling as a flashlight. The light was from an underdriven Luxeon star but I could still light up a tree pretty decently. Imagine in a few years when these things are 5 to 10 times as efficient as now?

 

[blakerwry]

anybody here have a human powered flashlight?

I have one you shake up for a few minutes and the light lasts for as long as I've ever had to use it... not very bright, but it works for power outages.

 

[e_dawg]

Power at last, power at last. Praise be to god, power at last!

-e_dawg

 

[Buck]

Jtr, here are some more links for that mini LED light:

Comparison

Dan's Data

 

[e_dawg]

Toronto rocks. SARS, SARS-Stock, West Nile, Mad Cow, now the Massive Blackout... We've handled everything that's been thrown at us and we've done it with grace. All I can say is BRING IT ON, cruel world! Nothing can faze us.

 

[SteveC]

By the way, Québec has lots of electricity to offer to you poor americans. Notice how we were not affected by the power outage, nor did new england...

Which stands in stark contrast to what Bloomberg said this morning - in essence, he emphatically, no lets say adamantly, stated that the origination of the problem was in Canada, specifically Quebec.

I was pretty annoyed with his finger pointing ... rather early to get a definitive answer.

Second, his explanation made it sound like Quebec Hydro couldn't meet its own demands and a request for energy from NY was made. While I'm not going to rule this out as a possibility, it certainly strikes me odd given my knowledge that Quebec is a huge exporter of energy to NY state.

Third, there is all kinds of rumours about problems in Ohio, Penn etc.

Bloomberg should have been more cautius with his remarks.

Chretien's office was actually first to start the finger pointing yesterday, saying it was lightning on the U.S. side, even though there wasn't any lightning for hundreds of miles. It's what all politicians do: point blame at others.

 

[Howell]

anybody here have a human powered flashlight?

I looked for some and saved the links but haven't purchased yet. Do you have a favorite.

 

[GIANT]

Toronto rocks. SARS, SARS-Stock, West Nile, Mad Cow, now the Massive Blackout... We've handled everything that's been thrown at us and we've done it with grace. All I can say is BRING IT ON, cruel world! Nothing can faze us.

Of these, there has only been West Nile here in Houston.

As far as blackouts of the type observed yesterday in the northeast US, the power grid around here is quite well built, so there's basically no chance of an overload -- or brownouts. Typical mains voltage is 115 ~ 118 VAC (I have monitors and chart recorders at work, so I know). By the way, Houston consumes more electricity than any other city in the world.

 

[CityK]

Chretien's office was actually first to start the finger pointing yesterday, saying it was lightning on the U.S. side, even though there wasn't any lightning for hundreds of miles. It's what all politicians do: point blame at others

This does indeed seem to be case. What a bunch of f@$#3n tools. I think they got their information from a pair of hamsters. I can't wait till that egotistical idiot Chretien and his bumbling bunch of supporters are out - Canada will be a much better place.

Power at last, power at last. Praise be to god, power at last!

I'm willing to bet e_dawg has lost power again - There have been rolling blackouts across Toronto this afternoon apparently. Fortunately, I've been unaffected and my power has been up and running fine since being restored at 5:52 this morning.

 

[Stereodude]

We got power back at 2:15pm today. 22 hours after. Unfortunately we still don't have any water. Good thing it rained and we caught about 150+ gallons of water to manually flush the toilets with. We have a bit of drinking water in pots and pans too.

 

[e_dawg]

Fortunately, I've been unaffected and my power has been up and running fine since being restored at 5:52 this morning.

Same here, CityK. When the power came back on, I immediately grabbed my watch, set my clock/radio to the proper time, set the alarm for 9 AM, and went back to sleep. When I woke up, I didn't really remember how I did that! ... I then listened to the radio for any news. Upon hearing that Premier Earnie Eves declared a state of emergency and asked all non-essential/non-emergency workers to stay at home and do not go to work, I turned off the radio and went back to sleep.

 

[Clocker]

We got our power back Friday evening. Not sure exacly when because we got home after mid-night but we didn't turn much of anything on just to spare some strain on the system. Well, I did plug in the sump-pump and the refridgerator but didn't use much else.

All seems to be well here now. We turned on the air at about 10PM just to make it easier to sleep. Thursday night wasn't bad, actually, as we just slept in the basement since it was nice and cool down there and I recently finished it so it is nice a comfortable down there...

Glad to see you guys are back online (powerwise). I won't be turning on my other machines until later in the week I think...

C

 

[e_dawg]

Yup. Running the laptop ONLY, and not cruching any WU's either, which would increase the power consumption of the CPU. Did anyone dare fire up all their PC's and start crunching away while our power grids were strained to the max?

I must confess, however, that I have had the A/C on since our power was restored. Everything else, however, has been off, except for absolutely minimal lighting and the frigo, of course.