Hannity station went dead for about 20 seconds. Said he had never seen anything like it.
Well I started on a Timex Sinclair ZX81 built from a kit. Added on a 64kb memory expansion too.
You seem to know a lot about computers, could you tell me how I could have lost one meg of ram??? My puter tells me I only have 63 now and I have done everything the help/support files tell me to do and nothing has changed.
It is my understanding that New Jersey Transit is not running anything close to their regular schedule. They are running shuttle service from the Port Authority Bus Terminal out to Giants Stadium, and running separate bus lines from there out to distant points in New Jersey.
I would not be surprised if there were some major changes in the bus/rail emergency service plans as a result of today.
It's easier said than done. The problem you face is that it is so hard to plan for emergencies because there is no way of predicting what combination of service will be out of commission.
New Jersey Transit actually has some pretty decent emergency plans in place, but they involve the use of services like the PATH trains that were also out of service today.
Just think about what you had here today, and realize that there's no way in hell to accommodate all the people trying to get out of the city to the west. You had New Jersey Transit and PATH trains out of service, as well as the Port Authority Bus Terminal shut down with no power. They operated bus service from the PABT as well as possible, but they couldn't even accommodate a "normal" volume of buses because all of the passengers had to board the buses on the street instead of inside the terminal.
What made today even worse is that it occurred during the evening rush hour instead of in the morning. If it had occurred in the morning, then a substantial number of people would have simply turned around and gone back home. They didn't have that option today.
They probably can do that now. But not earlier when there were immense traffic jams all over the city. Getting enough buses to Penn Station with fresh drivers might be a problem though. Just a few buses might make matters worse (fighting for available seats).
Yes, indeed it is.
LOL
Yes, but by now they should have been able to clear at least a single-track by using diesels to move those dead trains to sidings or a second mainline track. I used to be a freight conductor working out of Secaucus and Newark, so got the opportunity to learn a good bit about the rail infrastructure in the metro. However perhaps many of these stranded passengers are Amtrak riders, and Amtrak would have to borrow diesels from NJ Transit, the freight railroads, or bring them in from Philly and DC. Amtrak resources are stretched so thin that service interruptions are magnified for them.
Ohm my... I guess that's how it goes current-ly. I hope joule be ok...
I know --- but it's nice to see there is still a lot of traditional Americaness about this country that people will take something like this and start throwing "black-out" parties instead of rioting, looting, or panicking.
Well if they are using Giant Stadium, then that does sound like an emergency plan.
However they have to have an emergency plan for if PATH is out of service, since that is exactly what happened on 9/11.
My guess is that many of those passengers still stuck at Penn st. 7 hours later are Amtrak passengers.
WNBC back up on the net. Access through MSNBC.com. Talking about Grand Central terminal problems now.
Right, I was responding to reports that there were people still there 7 hours later. How much of that is reporter exaggeration, I do not know.
Even if they can't get fresh drivers, keep using the ones already on the job. Its an emergency, they can work until everyone is evacuated.
I finally found an artcle about what Philly News was talking about
http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/6535637.htm Posted on Thu, Aug. 14, 2003
Safety steps stopped spread of outage.
By Akweli Parker and Tom Avril
Inquirer Staff Writers
Technicians in Valley Forge saw the sudden power surge. Circuit breakers tripped. And within four minutes, the electricity grid that serves Pennsylvania and New Jersey had clamped off the spike that blacked out much of the Northeast today, shielding Philadelphia and points south from the disruption.
As a result, the Mid-Atlantic grid, operated by Valley Forge-based PJM Interconnection L.L.C., experienced only a few spillover blackouts in sections of northern Pennsylvania and northern New Jersey.
It was the kind of moment PJM's technicians practice for, company president Phillip G. Harris said: "Coordination is rehearsed and drilled several times a year."
Details on exactly what triggered the blackout were still sketchy today. Canadian officials blamed the blackout on a lightning strike at the Niagara power plant, and U.S. officials said they were looking at a power transmission problem from Canada as the most likely cause.
The outage affected a huge swath of the Northeast, stretching from New York to New England to Ohio.
PJM's quick action, coupled with ample power-generating capacity throughout the region, kept the incident from crippling Philadelphia, Harrisburg and Washington, Harris said.
Technicians fed reserve power into the grid to smooth out irregularities caused by the surge - keeping the region's lights on.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission reported that nine nuclear reactors at seven sites, including the Oyster Creek plant in Lacey Township, Ocean County, N.J., shut down automatically, as they are designed to, when they lost their off-site power supplies. It could take 24 hours or more to restart them.
PJM runs what it says is the largest wholesale electricity market in the world. It projects electricity demand for an area that is home to more than 25 million people, then accepts bids from electricity generators and wholesalers to supply the needed energy.
It also is responsible for making sure electricity is available reliably throughout its Mid-Atlantic grid, a system that supplies power to all or parts of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, Ohio, West Virginia and Washington, D.C. Among the companies that participate in the grid are Peco Energy Co. and Public Service Electric & Gas Co.
David Sanko, director of the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency, said at least parts of seven counties in the northwestern section of the state lost power: Erie, Crawford, Warren, Venango, Clarion, Forest and Bradford. A power outage reported in Adams County, west of Harrisburg, was unrelated.
Sanko said power was beginning to be restored by 6 p.m.
Hospitals and other emergency facilities in the affected counties continued to operate using backup generators, he said.
"The benefits of the system is the immediate isolation of [the problem] so the rest of the state was not affected," Sanko said.
PJM technicians saw electricity usage in the area under their control drop suddenly by about 5,200 megawatts shortly at 4 p.m. One megawatt is enough electricity to power 750 to 1,000 homes.
"The protective equipment did work . . . it operated exactly like it's supposed to," Harris said.
That said, no electric grid is bulletproof, said Chika Nwankpa, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Drexel University.
"During high-temperature conditions, all [regional power operators] are vulnerable," said Nwankpa, who has worked with PJM and several of the region's electric utilities on assorted projects.
Often, blackouts occur when the demand of electricity customers is greater than the amount of electricity being cranked out by power plants.
Likely a number of giant circuit breakers, typically located in a free-standing building at least 40 feet tall, automatically tripped so that dangerously high current did not flow into the Pennsylvania-New Jersey-Maryland region. Otherwise, according to Vijay Vittal, professor of electrical engineering at Iowa State University, there would have been problems over an even wider area.
"If such a large area was affected, it must be a very severe disturbance," said Vittal, member of a national industry-university research group that studies the reliability of the power system. "It could have spread to your area. . . . If nothing had been done, it could have probably extended out to Iowa and Nebraska."
Protective circuit breakers apparently did not activate quickly enough to protect the region containing Cleveland and Detroit, Vittal said.
"All this happens in fractions of seconds," Vittal said. "This is a very classical cascading outage."
Once the power comes back on, engineers will conduct a postmortem of the accident, relying on a real-time computer record of the current flows throughout the system, he said. Using the data, the engineers will run a computer simulation and try to re-create what happened, Vittal said.