Major power surge in NY? (Blackout is in NYC, Detroit, Ottawa and Toronto, per Fox News)

8-14-03 | Joe Hadenuf

[Joe Hadenuf]

Hannity station went dead for about 20 seconds. Said he had never seen anything like it.

[Miss Marple]

Freeper Molly Pitcher just called from Akron. No power and no real explanation yet. She called me to see what I knew.

Columbus and Cincinnati have power, according to Fox.

If these are cascading, we might not be done with this yet. (Keeping my fingers crossed because it is 89 degrees here in Indy.)

[aristeides]

If they riot and loot, this time they will be rioting and looting during wartime.

[Kadric]

I use to work doing maintainace on substations. Once the power company failed to take the Breaker we were working on off their controls grid. During one of the Trip tests we took down half of Mississippi before they stopped the cascade.

[Joe Hadenuf]

Reporting Toledo is completely down.

Night fall approaching..

[Aggressive Calvinist]

Pray for the frightened captives in the underground subways, without power, and it gets hot.

[rdb3]

Well, the New York Slimes site is still up.

[biblewonk]

"Most people who think they've seen a flying saucer are really looking at VENUS!" Jessie the bodie on x files.

[i are a cowboy]

I wonder if Gray out Davis was in the nieghborhood.

[lainie]

Have you seen the pics from NYC? What a NIGHTMARE. People on foot have taken over the interstates. Good LORD.

[Dog]

Anyone reporting any alien ships overhead??

:-)

[r9etb]

Good insights. Thanks.

[Focault's Pendulum]

And they've insisted this couldn't happen again as they've put in safeguards to prevent another "Great Blackout of 65".

Right....can never happen again.

[meyer]

WMAL: Niagara Mohawk power grid may be overloaded. ""So Con Ed in Manhattan blows up?""

Actually, it could be the other way around. Con-ed is running on the edge, loses a key component of its system. This causes power to route itself through Niagra Mohawk's grid to other lines leading into NYC. Those lines trip, causing a cascading outage in the city.

Once the city loses power, the system's generation overspeeds due to the loss of load, causing generators to trip off line through their protective relaying. Generators trip in the most inopportune places, possibly including Cleveland, Detroit, Ottowa, and Toronto. The loss of generators causes more overloads and those overloaded lines in turn trip causing more loss of load.

The gyrations continue for a few minutes until everything interconnected is dead, or the load/supply equation achieves something close to equallibrium. That appears to be what happened, as although we saw frequency disturbances in the south, there are no major outages in this part of the country and we in Tennessee are rather tightly connected to the rest of the eastern grid.

[MEG33]

Detroit,parts of Conn.,Albany.I can hardly bear to look at NY traffic.It's hot.I'm in Texas and life would be bad if we had no electricity...It's 95 in NYC.

[Charlie OK]

I have always said that that was Al Quadas fatal mistake. Just one plane and the Gubbmt would have told us that it was an accident.

[Kozak]

I would hate to be an obstetrician in 9 months....

[GWB00]

The mighty Hoover Dam is powering us here in Las Vegas fine, as of 2:00 PM Pacific or so!

FPL here in Florida was just on the local news and said we have nothing to worry about down here.

I guess we can't vote, but at least we can generate power

[Joe Hadenuf]

Can't imagine being on a packed subway car with the temp rising in some dark tunnel.....Sheesh.....

[Naspino]

Where are the FREEPers who were making jokes about France and their power problems? Where are they at now?

As far as I can tell the socialists still caused this one!

[Peach]

Mid 90's in SC - let's hope we all keep our power.