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.

[RonDog]

Here is an UPDATE from Reuters:

U.S. Govt: N.Y. Power Outages Not Terrorism-Related
Thu August 14, 2003 05:14 PM ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. power regulators said on Thursday that a massive power outage that hit New York City and other cities in the eastern United States and Canada was not caused by a terror attack.

The outage was caused by an outage at a Manhattan power plant which destabilized the power grid as far as Canada, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) spokesman Bryan Lee said.

"We have no indication that there is any terrorism involved," Lee said.

A massive power outage left sections of New York City, Detroit and Cleveland without electricity, witnesses said. The outage also brought two major eastern Canadian cities -- Toronto and Ottawa -- to a standstill.

"The thinking is that a fire at a generating plant in Manhattan destabilized the grid, which cascaded up the grid and took a loop around the Great Lakes into Canada," Lee said.

[floriduh voter]

The way I see it, in a hugh instance where the world was really coming to an end, we'd all be here typing away instead of panicking or clinging to our loved ones. Am I right?

[FairOpinion]

They just said it's spread to Vermont now.

How does a "natural power outage" spread like that?

We've had outages,when a transformer goes down and the SMALL area it supplies is impacted, but not the rest of the city. How can this keep going?

They also said that terrorist attack has NOT been ruled out.

[San Jacinto]

Right....can never happen again.

One can never plan for every contingency. Much to my personal chagrin, we just learned that here in Milsap....BIG TIME.

[Mat_Helm]

ALL YOUR POWER GENERATORS IS BELONG TO US.....MAKE YOUR TIME NEW YORK......CALIFORNIA MOVE ALL ZIG.........

[aristeides]

WMAL: power sporadically up and down in Erie, PA.

[Rome2000]

100% not Terrorism

Mike Bloomberg, Electrical Engineer and psychic.

[Doctor Stochastic]

That's been done with berthed liners and once with a really big diesel powered "steamroller." (I guess even the diesel ones are called steamrollers.)

[pt17]

Here in Boston, we have full power

How are you Sam? We're still OK west of you but I've got the generator ready just in case.

[Petronski]

Regarding your philosophical question about what will happen after dark...I'm betting NY is still the same, profoundly changed place it was on 9-12-01 and it will be relatively quiet.

Detroit? I'm not so sure.

[Joe Hadenuf]

As always. What is it, another two hours to nightfall?

[Peach]

Who reported that a terrorist attack hasn't been ruled out?

[Old Sarge]

I can confirm that. Minimum 5 hour to restoraion.

Hang tough, FRiends, it'll be hectic for a bit longer...

[GRRRRR]

WGN Radio now reporting that AIR FLIGHTS to the east coast are being held up at O'Hare...

You can expect several days worth of flight issues now...flights from the east aren't going out either if the equipment isn't coming in...

Hmmmm, not terrorism, nothing to see here, move along...

GRRRRR

[Wordsmith]

Blinking on and off out in the Pioneer Valley. Partial drain every 5 minutes.

[Timesink]

If power is not restored right away, many people are going to have a hard time getting home tonight.

I'll be quite surprised if the power is back on tonight. Massive cascading failures like this are usually a Major Ass to fix. I'd speculate it'll be at least the middle of the night before it comes back up; it could even take a couple days.

[FairOpinion]

Officials are concerned about the cascading effect, they have never seen anything like this.

[BlessedByLiberty]

Here in CA we need power plants and to rid ourselves of the enviros who blocked them since the 70's. Davis swore to build more and then -we've seen on local news accounts -cancelled some of the leases after the story died down, the spotlight was off.

We should make certain that this topic becomes an issue in the recall campaign - tell me, Candidate __, are you for or against loosening restrictions and allowing more power plants being built?

[aristeides]

What makes them so sure that the fire at the power plant on Manhattan could not have been caused by terrorism?

[Petronski]

IIRC, last time they swiped a bunch of car batteries to fire up a university (educational) generator to get a 60 Hz signal to start the sync up process...

You're kidding.