Who is this fiasco being blamed on?And whose fault was it?

well i walked 50 blocks home and decided to go riverside park.It was a very pretty night and then walked down to the very dark timesquarewith a bunch of theatre folks on my block! Singer/songwriter/Jazz Trumpet player etc..Power got restored this morning , the only thing I am missing is myearthlink connection at home and this surprise of a long weekend.Some story i read that 9 months after the last blackout (July - 17 1977), they had a lot of babies . Anyone wants to confirm this Last blackout coma was billed at 1 bil$ anyone want to estimate this time?QuoteOriginally posted by: AaronI'm "working from home" today, it's beautiful weather. Lots of meteors last night and Mars has gotten awesome. Good luck to everyone still in the city.Bbg has declared a holiday and you have to listen to your mayor aaron...

Supply of and Demand for Electricity in New York

Power went off in our building then immediately backup kicked in and they kept announcing everything was ok, but providing very little information. There was obviously no local news coverage. I decided that I didn't trust the people making the announcements to actually know what was going on, or to tell us if they knew something really bad was happening, so at about quarter after 5 I decided to leave. I was sort of surprised that a large minority of people were still there and ostensibly doing work, although in retrospect I see that was probably a reasonable choice for anyone who lived outside the city.Anyway, the street were in total gridlock due to the mobs of people walking down the middle of the road the absence of any traffic signals. Other than that, however, it was much calmer and more relaxed than I had expected. People seemed to pretty calm. I ended up walking all the way home - probably 6-7 miles, which certainly was not as bad as some people I talked to on the walk who were headed to the Bronx. Hopefully they were able to get a bus at some point, although all the ones I saw looked like sardine cans on wheels.I bought a bottle of cheap wine to keep me company on the walk, and managed to make it home just before dark. There was enough light for me to fumble around my apartment and find a candle and some matches. I loaded my gun, then went out into the exceptionally dark night to find a store that was still open. Luckily for me, the bodega on the corner was open all night, manned by the family that owns it and lots of flashlights. I got a six pack and headed back to my stoop to hang out with my neighbors, where we socialized amid the not-unpleasant smell of grilling meat, Indo, the distant illumination from the hospital windows with emergency power, and the occasional lights from a police car or an ambulance.Just another day in the life.

Nothing maybe... but I've been told this... The National Grid.... uses.... (trumpets please)....OPCWhat the hell is that you ask yourself... simple... OPC stands for "OLE for Process Control"... those of us familiar with programming know that that is a COM/DCOM technology. Exactly the same technology targeted by the W32.Blaster worm that is crawling around the web at the moment. Wouldn't suprise me if some of those computers responsible for failover/grid isolation (which didn't work, apparently, else we wouldn't be having this conversation) actually hung themselves on the worm.In case you don't know what the worm does, not much, but a side effect (because of sloppy coding) it causes the machine to restart very frequently (apart from that, it also attempts to attack microsoft.com in a DoS attack, but that's beside the point).What do you think?

for conspiracy theorists...TGN, small canadian firm with interests in grid architecture/distributed power generation, trades on LSE, ADV 400k shares, trades 4mm and 8mm shares over last two days, up 48% yesterday and today ahead of marginal news. CHLD-LN is another funny mover. usual post-facto banter making rounds...

How did you guys do while power outage? any exiting things?

we survived ... barely

I thought certain things couldn't happen in the mighty US of A

Yeah, there's lots of things that can't happen in the USA... but major screw-ups are not among them... it's tradition, really.

I hope that heads roll off the chopping block on this one. I feel that I can appreciate how hard it is to keep a grid going. I imagine this huge discrete network with rules. For A, B, and C, if C shuts down A and B pick up slack, but if demand is X%, than shut down to protect generators..... etc. I know that is simple. So out of some huge network, I am sure that certain linear combinations spell disaster. So risk management, if there is any, says, "OK, the Omega combinations that we've id'd have probablity of 0.00000000003%. It would be a 10 sigma event, and boss, as we all know, those happen every 1000 years. No worries. Go back to eating your danish." And this is the image that I am left with. Everytime time I turn on the tv it is some fat white guy calling workers heroes and saying we shouldn't play the blame game. Then you'll have some moron reporter "Well, what if terorists strike. Think of the children!" Well, listen lady, if you can't get off the island of manhatten, and you husband is stuck in Boise, do you really think that some mujahadeen-jihad type is going to get to times square and start lighting cherry bombs off? This is common of all large orginizations though. Particularly my firm and America. They start handing out awards for f*&k-ups that they createed before the clean-up is done. I love my country, but that annoys me.What I don't get is if the probability of a nationwide blackout is 0.000000003%, and the fat white president of the power company's probablity of a heart attack is 76%, then why is he addressing me and giving awards out on a podium and saying "It's ok, the yanks are still playing". I should be running appliances like an American (all the time), and he should be in a well running fridge.

I have a new theory as to why the blackout happened.You see, Connor McCleod and his enemy were dualing on top of a power generation facility in upstate NY.Conner beheaded his foe and the "quickening" process began. Well, as anyone knows from the Highlander series there's a huge electrical discharge during the quickening. Bolts of lightening and sparks are usually produced andthese are what brought down the power grid, hence causing the Blackout of 2003.I think Bush would probably believe this story.Because in the end "there can be only one" [group to blame for this mess].