Important Note:

Opinions are fun. My friends tell me I am someone with lots of opinions and that's fine since I don't get mad at others when they disagree with me. In this same spirit I am interested in hearing yours views as long as you are able to share your views without boiling over. I look forward to hearing from you. I tend to write in the form of short essays most of the time, but contributions do not need to be in this same format or size. Some of the content here will date itself pretty quickly, other content may be virtually timeless, this is for the reader to judge.

Displaying 1 - 1 of 1

How was your Power Outage?                                                                                    

Posted at: Sep/09/2011 : Posted by: mel

Related Category: Perspectives,

At 3:37 p.m. on Thursday the 8th, I was sitting at my computer pounding out code. With a sudden little popping noise the lights, my computer, and my last 20 minutes of work all went dark.

Power outages are not new to me; we seem to have one once a year at work that lasts for 20 minutes to an hour. These outages are generally an excuse to gather in someone’s window office and look at the cars snarled at the local intersections.

This being the age of instant information, it took only moments for us to start comparing cell phone messages and texts indicating this was a countywide event. Realizing the scale of things, some of my peers decided to leave work “now” while there was still a chance of making it to the freeway.

I decided to hang around the office optimistically waiting for the lights to turn on and traffic lights to start functioning.

From a ninth-floor window, I was able to monitor the deluge of traffic. The volume of cars and trucks that rapidly took to streets completely overwhelmed the local surface streets. I monitored a couple of distinctive vehicles from my vantage point and determined that they were moving at about 1.5 to 2 miles per hour (the average person walks at 3 -3.5 MPH); it just didn’t seem like a good time to try heading home.

As a credit to my fellow citizens I should point out that I did not hear a single horn and everyone seemed to be courteously treating intersections as four-way stops.

For those of us who hung around at work, the view in Mission Valley was of things just getting more and more congested. Our view of the local freeways showed that they were moving at a modest pace, but the obvious challenge would be covering that short 1-2 mile distance to an onramp.

Traffic in my part of Mission Valley is dictated by the flow at the set of intersections where Friars Road crosses highway 163, long considered one of the worst intersections in San Diego. By 5:00 p.m. I could see police in the middle of key intersections and the mess was beginning to flow at a modest pace.

I left work at 5:50 p.m. and found getting to the freeway and eventually home relatively easy. The drive home also gave me a chance to listen to the car radio whose news reports gave me a clearer picture of the scale of our blackout.

Kids are resilient; upon arriving I found my youngest son out front shooting hoops and my older son sound asleep in his room (I bet there is a lesson here). I was glad to learn that my family had been checking in on the neighbor across the street; she is widow in her late seventies and does not get around as easily as she used to.

Hearing the sound of a mower from a few houses over, I was inspired and chose to use the last hour of daylight to get the back yard mowed; my normal after-work action of catching up on emails seemed out of the question for the time being.

My kids learned that you can still cook on the grill or the gas stove; you just need a match to get things started. Our house was well stocked with food, water, candles, batteries and a supply of flashlights so our basic needs were easily satisfied.

Our household is centered on soccer during daylight and electronics after dark. With no power, I introduced my youngest to a hand-crank powered radio I had and found he rapidly adapted to another medium. Between playing cards by candlelight and books by flashlight, we all adjusted without complaint.

I understand from my oldest son that the power came back on around 2:30 a.m. I don’t actually know as I was asleep. We’ll throw out a little milk and cottage cheese, but the overall impact for us was more like an adventure.

There are important questions that ultimately need to be asked. Why should the actions of one worker at a transmission sub-station lead to a regional blackout bringing down an entire grid for 1.4 million households? All things considered, this blackout was trivial. With whole towns destroyed by tornados this spring, hurricanes’ beating up the southeast, flooding in Pennsylvania, New York & Virginia along with a wild fire in Texas; this only counts as an inconvenience. For most of us, we will be back to our normal routine within mere hours and this will be a “where were you when” moment.

How was your day?

Comments (0)                                                                                                                                                    [Add Comment]