Free Republic

(04-09) 16:37 PDT SAN JOSE -- Vandals cut fiber-optic cable lines belonging to AT&T at two locations early today, knocking out phones and access to 911 emergency services to thousands of residential customers and businesses in southern Santa Clara County, in Santa Cruz and San Benito counties and along the Peninsula, authorities said. Four AT&T fiber-optic cables in an underground vault were severed shortly before 1:30 a.m. along Monterey Highway north of Blossom Hill Road in south San Jose, police Sgt. Ronnie Lopez said. Four more underground cables, at least two of which belong to AT&T, were cut about two...

“Get ready for the New England power shortage,” reads the headline in The Spectator. “Governors are already meeting in emergency session.” “In a hell-bent campaign to rid itself of any form of dirty, messy “non-renewable” energy, New England has been closing down coal and oil plants for the last decade,” the article warns. “In 2000, 18 percent of New England’s electricity came from coal and 22 percent from oil. Today it’s 3 percent coal and 1 percent oil. Meanwhile, natural gas — the fuel that everybody loves until you have to drill for it — has risen from 15 percent...

<p>A powerful thunderstorm blasted through Las Vegas and nearby communities Friday evening, flooding streets, toppling trees and trapping tourists inside casinos.</p> <p>Torrential rains and 70-mph winds also knocked out power in more than a dozen locations, including Primm, the town that sits on Interstate 15 at the California-Nevada border.</p>

The seemingly endless expansion of wind power production in the United States has pushed large parts of the nation’s electric grid to the limits of its abilities. Now, in the Pacific Northwest, the power grid is pushing back. Wind power producers in Oregon and Washington State are likely to be the first casualties claimed in the impending morass triggered by calls for reverse rolling power outages at wind farms to keep the regional transmission system operating smoothly. Needless to say, wind investors are pissssssssed.

Can't access data on PDA Phone, and "all circuits are busy" when I dial my cell provider's cutomer service lines (all of them). Local stations are inaccessible on DishTV. I know there was a major line out of Dallas down on Monday that mucked up air traffic at DFW, among other things, but yesterday everything worked fine for me. I've searched Google News but can find nothing regarding what's going on today.

SACRAMENTO Triple digit temperatures smashed records across California Saturday, straining thermometers and air conditioners and prompting dozens of scattered electricity outages that left residents sizzling. A major Northern California power plant tripped off line as temperatures climbed, trimming electricity reserves below acceptable levels and prompting the state's grid manager to declare a "stage one emergency" while calling for conservation. No relief was expected until at least midweek from a weather front that sent temperatures soaring even along the normally cool California coast and brought Midwest-style humidity steaming into the usually arid Central Valley. Heat records were set throughout the San...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. (NNS) -- Viewers and listeners of the American Forces Network (AFN) may experience brief programming interruptions from Feb. 28 through March 12 as the spring "sun outage" period occurs. These seasonal outages, which take place each spring and fall, affect all satellite communications, including the AFN radio and television services distributed by the AFN Broadcast Center from the Defense Media Center (DMC) at Riverside, Calif. Sun outage-related programming interruptions are characterized by a complete loss of signal for as much as several minutes. The interruptions occur when the sun's position aligns with broadcast satellites and Earth-station receivers. The...

HARARE, Zimbabwe - Widespread power outages struck Zimbabwe on Tuesday, blacking out much of President Robert Mugabe's state of the nation address in which he promised to address the country's chronic electricity shortages. Downtown Harare was hit by the outage minutes before state-run radio and television were scheduled to broadcast Mugabe's speech live from Parliament. The television station ran cartoons until power was restored about a half-hour into the traditionally hourlong speech. Mugabe promised to reinvigorate a program aimed at identifying new energy sources, including extracting oil from coal deposits and the biological production of fuels. Zimbabwe imports more than...

NEW YORK -(Dow Jones)- U.S. refinery outages continued Friday, fanning the flames of a record-breaking rally in the retail fuel, energy futures and spot markets. In the most recent incident, a power outage shut Premcor Inc.'s (PCO) 190,000-barrel-a-day refinery in Memphis at about midnight Thursday. In addition, processing units taken down at other refineries that were due to restart encountered delays. Thursday and Friday ConocoPhillips (COP) was restarting its refinery in Roxana, Ill., downed by a power outage Wednesday, with the exception of one key gasoline-processing unit, an environmental official said. Thursday and Saturday, Sunoco Corp.'s (SUN) restart of a...

Major power outages are reported in major U.S. and Canadian cities, including New York City, New Jersey, Toronto and Detroit.

<p>FOLSOM, Calif. (AP) - California's electricity supplies were stretched Monday by three plant outages and a transmission glitch that occurred when a logging truck drove under a high-voltage power line.</p> <p>About 1,500 megawatts of power was lost Sunday night when two Northern California power plants tripped off-line, said Stephanie McCorkle, spokeswoman for the Independent System Operator, the manager of the state's electricity grid.</p>

<p>PG&E lineman Pat Corpus re-connects a fallen power line Tuesday on Black Road in the Santa Cruz Mountains.</p> <p>Storms battering the Bay Area are causing some of the worst power outages in a decade, triggering griping about PG&E and exposing serious faults in the way the state monitors the utility's customer service.</p>

RALEIGH -- Former President Clinton voiced support Friday for President Bush's campaign against Iraq as he sought to lift the spirits of Democrats and even found a kind word for his old nemesis, Sen. Jesse Helms. Although he appeared in Raleigh to back church efforts to replace housing destroyed during Hurricane Floyd, Clinton also appeared at a fund-raiser in which he said his successor was taking the right approach in pressuring a regime change should Saddam Hussein not give up his weapons of mass destruction. "I hope the Democrats will support the position the administration now has in Iraq, which...