Segacs's World I Know

Posts Tagged ‘blackout’

… and I see that Loto-Hydro is one of them.

I can’t help but think that life before electricity must have been so much simpler.

Earlier today, I had to break into my own car when my car alarm inexplicably stopped working. At first, I thought the battery was dead on the clicker. But after trying the spare, I realized it was a problem with the alarm itself. Unlocking the car with the key did not set the alarm off, as it was supposed to, but the car wouldn’t start because there’s an ignition kill switch. In the end I had to disconnect the battery to reset the alarm. And all this for what? Car alarms don’t actually deter theft; they just provide a discount on insurance rates.

Then I got home to see a fire truck outside my apartment building. Minor panic gave way to relief when the firemen told me that the fire was outside on an electric pole and not inside, and that it was perfectly safe to enter. But the power was out for a while. It’s amazing how much an hour-long power outage wreaks havoc with life. The temperature in here is easily over 30 degrees, and without electricity of course my fan doesn’t work. Heating up dinner wasn’t possible, and I was worried that the food in the freezer would defrost and ruin. Just home from the gym I was craving a shower, but of course there was no hot water.

But there’s a flip side. With the power out, nobody could do much of anything, so people from my building and the one across the street just stood out on their balconies or fire escapes and chatted. There was actual evidence of human contact for, oh, about 15 minutes. Then the power came back on and we all went back inside to get back to our daily lives – or, in my case, to blog about it.

So now the car alarm’s working, the power’s on, the food’s in the oven and the fan is cooling down my apartment. And maybe I’ll meet some more neighbours during the next power failure.

Whoever else was inconvenienced by the big blackout, Jean Chretien was making damn sure that Shimon Peres made it home for his birthday celebrations:

Former Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres made it home to celebrate his 80th birthday despite the huge power cuts in North America after Canadian premier Jean Chretien sent his personal jet to rescue him, reports said.

I wonder if Chretien would have been so quick to send his private jet to rescue, say, Ariel Sharon or Benjamin Netanyahu?

Well, the South Park song was wrong: it’s Blame Ohio.

This was the last thing on earth that embattled Air Canada needed to happen right now.

The power outage that has shut down New York, Toronto, Ottawa, Detroit, Cleveland, and virtually everywhere in between somehow managed to escape us in Quebec, for once. Maybe the gods of power figured we paid our dues with Ice Storm 98?

Like a lot of people I’m sure, my initial reaction was to ask whether it was terrorism. But now it seems pretty clear that it wasn’t. CTV News is reporting that the cause was a fire at a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania, although they still seem to be trying to sort that out.

The impact is absolutely staggering. To me, it says a lot about how dependant we are on electricity. Literally nothing works without it – the lights are the least of the problem. Transportation, business, the stock market, ventilation, even drinking water . . . it’s like mankind existed happily for thousands of years without electricity, but as soon as it was discovered, we moved ahead in a lit-up world so quickly that we can’t survive without it anymore. I remember having these conversations during the Ice Storm, and hearing the panic again in 1999 as we approached the millennium with trepidation that everything would simply shut down. That didn’t happen, of course, but the fear that it would just underscores this point.

I hope everyone in the affected areas makes it home safely and gets their power back soon.