It’s called a cascade effect. It appears (at this time) that the NYC power grid overloaded, automatic and manual switching tries to get power from the area grid (neighboring utilities). As this is happening power generators on the local grid are overloading and automatic replays pull the generators off the grid or take it off-line, dropping the output on the local grid., as the local grid is going down it pulls more and more power from the area grid which expands the problem until you have this kind of outage.
I am not an expert in this field so I may be in error in some of the details. I do work for the Washington, DC power company and this is the way it was explained to me. (this is not my field)
The news said that there were outages in Montreal, but I was on the metro when this thing supposedly happened, and nothing went on. I have power at home and James didn’t notice anything amiss. So fret not for the Doperealers. Nevertheless I’m ventilating my house and making sure I know where my candles are. (The best person to be stuck with during a blackout is a Wiccan.)
All, and I mean all, of Toronto is down. We’re on emergency generators here at work. Gas stations are down, good thing I’m 3/4 full. Gonna be an interesting night…
parts of west. pa and south nj are slowly getting power back.
mayor bloomberg said that they will be rerouting power from the south and west. i figure the closer you are to the south and west the sooner you will have power.
the niagara mohawk grid is huge. one of the reason that quite a bit of new england didn’t go down are nuclear power plant. many places that formally got power from niagara mohawk now have power from nuclear power plants.
cell phones are having major problems.
themis00, cnn did have the worm/virus as one of the speculation causes they are looking into.
My folks in Buffalo, on NiMo, say that they have power, but apparently their situation seems to be unusual. All my other relatives back there are dark.
gov pataki announced a bit more that half of new york state is without power. he also stated that the grid going down should not have happened, that the safeguards did not go the way they should.
gov. of new jersey stated that 500 buses are being routed to ferry landings to help commuters get home from the areas that are blacked out.
There is no functioning nuclear plant in Québec. The only nuke plant we have (Gentilly) is being phased out and used for research in the meantime. The James Bay complex is made of hydroelectric plants.
On preview I see that matt_mcl has already answered part of the question.
There’s a huge power outage on the East coast.
I live in Oceanside New York. Our power has been back on since about 6pm. I fell asleep at 3pm. The power was still working. When I woke up at 4:30pm it was out.
Thankfully, I took a vacation day off from work today. I can imagine what a nightmare NYC’s subways are. Actually my Mom is trapped on her job in lower Manhattan. Last I saw on TV NYC Transit was evacuating passengers off subway trains caught between stations. I know how burning hot NYC’s underground subways get so I pity the poor souls trapped between stations on trains with no power- and therefore air conditioning-down there. Hopefully there won’t be any medical emergencies.
