The Great Sandy Eggo Blackout of 2011
- That Red Cross solar/crank radio we just bought last week? It works!
- 1.4 million customers offline is a good excuse for missing a deadline.
- Contrary to reputation, zombies are pussies.
- Hey, you know what makes water run uphill? Electricity!
- We don’t remember the last time we were in an elevator, but being rescued with a crowbar would have been a good story.
- A fully charged MacBook Pro is handy for recharging an iPhone.
- A car adapter is also handy for recharging an iPhone, or would be, if we had one.
- Digital clocks aren’t chillingly stuck on the minute the power went off.
- Did you know there are stars in the night sky? News to us!
- Earthquakes last sixty seconds. Power outages are fucking forever.
The night sky thingy is why I actually like it here when the power goes out.
@Benedick:
The night sky up north in Canada City makes dealing with the bugs almost worth it… almost.
Melty ice cream is good, up to a certain point.
@Dodgerblue: Don’t say that at the corner gelato shop.
@nojo: Everything back to normal?
@blogenfreude: They are here, around the airport. Haven’t heard any news about elsewhere.
It was, in computer terms, a hard crash — not even the power company saw it coming. (Electricity use was well below capacity yesterday afternoon.) And as everybody quickly learned, you don’t just reboot the system — power plants have to be restarted, substations activated, connections checked.
So, neighborhoods were lit up one by one last night, starting near the incoming power lines in Orange County, and working south to downtown. I’m on the east side of the airport, and the hills on the west side remained dark for a good hour after civilization returned here.
I’ll presume that Sandy Eggo Metro is back to normal. That leaves the huge rural east county, all the way to Arizona. Whether they’re back online yet, dunno — the power company was cautioning last night that it might take until Saturday to juice everybody up.
Also: I was driving back from the Remote Office when the traffic lights went out. This isn’t unusual — my neighborhood had a few hours-long blackouts when I first moved here — but then I noticed that the downtown radio station was also suddenly off the air. From there it was just a matter of drawing mental concentric circles until the scope became clear.
@Tommmcatt Be Fat, And That Be That: I loved “Twilight Zone.”
Apparently the Arizona utility is blaming a substation worker for the whole thing. I’m surprised they didn’t use the “Monsters On Maple Street” technique of blaming some illegal alien for trying to steal copper wire.
@Dodgerblue: Me too, and they’ve never quite been able to match it since.
Totally unrelated, but too weird not to share:
Woman dies from hot beef injection
Not THAT kind of “hot beef injection”, mind you… ;)
Latest update on “we don’t know shit”: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2011/09/blackout-san-diego-arizona.html
@Dodgerblue: Thank god it’s a private company, or we’d be hearing a shitstorm about “public utilities”.
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