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.

[Diddle E. Squat]

Vicki Lawrence is reporting that tonight the lights went out in Georgia...

[slimer]

MSNBC - Ashley Banfield looks like a character from a Dr. Suess book with that day-glo green blouse.

[lelio]

THREE car commercials in a row on MSNBC. What's up with that?

[mhking]

WNYW (Fox 5/NYC) says that parts of Long Island, New Jersey and the outer boroughs are up.

ConEd says most power will not be up by 1A ET (contrary to what the AP wires are reporting).

[Scott from the Left Coast]

Well, if it was a mess-up there's probably some extremely serious ass-covering (major league!) going on...with stories getting question-proofed. People will circle-the-wagons if they think heads might roll.

[Petronski]

The 1:00 am restoration of power claim is NOT TRUE. ConEd reports they have "no timetable" for restoration.

---Fox 5, NYC

[prairiebreeze]

Subliminal suggestion to get in your car and get the hell out of NY?

Prairie

[Mo1]

Would anyone be able to see it if it was? :)

The media wouldn't ;0)

Philly weather guy is saying that weather had NOTHING to do with it

They say the nearest lighting strike was hundreds of miles away

[PennsylvaniaMom]

But the stress she is under! No blow dryer for tomorrow...oh the horror, the humanity...

[ntnychik]

Great lightning map! You'd think the Prime Minister of (sunny) Canada would check his facts. Oh, but then he couldn't blame us.

[rwt60]

Hasn't there been speculation that a terrorist attack might involve a cyber attack against key infrastructure? Osama bin Laden might have taken down a few computers and shut down the grid. Totally plausible in my view given the ability of hackers to take down various businesses as evidenced by the Blaster worm in the past few days.

[Petronski]

YOU ARE FAST!

[cibco]

"Ashleigh Banfield...

Just a fool...

[hole_n_one]

[PennsylvaniaMom]

Is it the night that they are gonna hang an innocent man?

[Lijahsbubbe]

I know what you mean, we are so dependent. It's a good thing this didn't happen in January. All those people standing outside would be freezing right now. I'm thinking of turning our gas fireplace back to woodburning.

Our power went out just the other week, and our water shut off at the same time. That has never happened to us before. Gotta go, I'm running to the store to stock up on water!

[Joe Hadenuf]

First it was lightning, then it wasn't, then it is, then it is wasn't, now it's the lightning story again....

[Shermy]

Fox News:

"Serious Looting in Ottawa"

Chretien...what a jerk!

[mhking]

Philly weather guy is saying that weather had NOTHING to do with it

Cretien has shifted from lightning to a fire at Niagra to (now) a failure at a Pennsylvania nuclear plant. Needless to say, he needs to STFU until someone who knows what the hell they're talking about can come up with something.

[Windcatcher]

I'm watching Channel 6 and they were talking about the outage. Apparently a grid station in Valley Forge saw an enormous current draw to the north, and the computers immediately disconnected from the northern grid to keep PA and South Jersey up. They said they weren't quite fast enough to protect the northern fringe, i.e. Erie and North Jersey. They're saying that they expect Erie to be up by midnight and all of NJ to be up by 6 or 7AM. One question the supervisor at the grid station had was, why didn't the computers in Canada and NY stop the problem there?