service interruption
Sounds of the big blackout, likely soon to be forgetten: the explosive silence I heard at 8 Friday morning when a loud generator, the only one in the neighborhood, suddenly cut out and died; and the rolling cheers of unseen voices all around as the juice came back on at 9:03 last night. Laughter and the sound of guitars, during our backyard cookouts the last two nights.
I was in midtown at work when the electrical failure hit us Thursday afternoon around 4:15. We had a few stressed-out folks stop in to get some shade and water, but the crowds of commuters started their long walks home within a half hour, as if people just knew what to do, even with cell-phone networks down. We put stuff into fridges, locked up, hit the streets.
It's the third time I've been in huge crowds of New Yorkers in the past two years (9/11, February's chilly antiwar march, this) and people are used to getting on with things. Pedestrian traffic shared the streets with cars, with surprisingly little fractiousness or impatience despite the lack of traffic lights. On the walk home in the East Village, car radios were on, providing the only source of information on the scale of the failure. Autonomous power systems mounted on rubber tires -- how clever!
The vibe was even warmer on Clinton -- LES residents really know how to hang out on the street. Everyone was happy not to be stuck underground or in a high-rise elevator. Some kid had a monster sound system blasting merengue from the back of his trike.
Yesterday MB drove Theo out to Long Island (she's going on a camping trip with her cousins Derek and Deedee) so I went along for the ride, a fix of air-conditioning (!) and to hear some radio news. There wasn't much to hear -- the causes are still obscure, but it wasn't triggered by excess demand. No solutions were being suggested, but the grid was being brought back slowly online.
However if this outage does lead to improvements in the supply network, it does seem ironic that this most anti-big-government of Presidents would oversee a project requiring massive public spending and even energy price re-regulation.
As others have noted, it would be good practice to have one of these power outages once in a while. I found it useful:- --to be reminded of the need for unmediated human contact and conversation;
- --to see how much we depend upon the electric grid (and just how little I know about the way it works);
- --to show me how little I really need some other things: TV, cell phones, DVDs, devices that require more than four batteries...
- --to be reminded that some problems are quite unrelated to the endless War on Terror.
We now resume regularly scheduled programming...
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Sounds of the big blackout, likely soon to be forgetten: the explosive silence I heard at 8 Friday morning when a loud generator, the only one in the neighborhood, suddenly cut out and died; and the rolling cheers of unseen voices all around as the juice came back on at 9:03 last night. Laughter and the sound of guitars, during our backyard cookouts the last two nights.
I was in midtown at work when the electrical failure hit us Thursday afternoon around 4:15. We had a few stressed-out folks stop in to get some shade and water, but the crowds of commuters started their long walks home within a half hour, as if people just knew what to do, even with cell-phone networks down. We put stuff into fridges, locked up, hit the streets.
It's the third time I've been in huge crowds of New Yorkers in the past two years (9/11, February's chilly antiwar march, this) and people are used to getting on with things. Pedestrian traffic shared the streets with cars, with surprisingly little fractiousness or impatience despite the lack of traffic lights. On the walk home in the East Village, car radios were on, providing the only source of information on the scale of the failure. Autonomous power systems mounted on rubber tires -- how clever!
The vibe was even warmer on Clinton -- LES residents really know how to hang out on the street. Everyone was happy not to be stuck underground or in a high-rise elevator. Some kid had a monster sound system blasting merengue from the back of his trike.
Yesterday MB drove Theo out to Long Island (she's going on a camping trip with her cousins Derek and Deedee) so I went along for the ride, a fix of air-conditioning (!) and to hear some radio news. There wasn't much to hear -- the causes are still obscure, but it wasn't triggered by excess demand. No solutions were being suggested, but the grid was being brought back slowly online.
However if this outage does lead to improvements in the supply network, it does seem ironic that this most anti-big-government of Presidents would oversee a project requiring massive public spending and even energy price re-regulation.
As others have noted, it would be good practice to have one of these power outages once in a while. I found it useful:
We now resume regularly scheduled programming...
- bruno 8-16-2003 7:54 pm