Was anyplace outside of NYC without power?

The BBQ Pit
21

Funny. In New York (on the radio-- not to much TV watching going on here) the talk was all about how widespread the outtage was and also the fighting between the Canandian and New York power guys.

1010 WINS was one of the only radio stations with news. You would think our local radio news station would be one of the most NYCentric, but I think they were sort of reassuring us that we were not the only ones in the dark. Believe it or not most of the other radio stations that were still broadcasting were playing pre-canned music.

22

Nit: Cleveland doesn’t have subways.

Anyway, yeah, the coverage was NYC-centric. Nothing surprising about that.

It was annoying how they were trying to make it sound as if people in NYC not panicing and/or looting was purely miraculous - as if because they just went on with their lives and didn’t panic to death they were all heros who saved puppies from wells.

23

Actually (I don’t have cable) and while NBC and other stations pretty much stuck with the NYC story, they did some balanced reporting. Specifically NBC on tonight’s newscast. They covered it all.

The thing people need to remember is the shear (sp) numbers of people living in one population center which happens to be NYC.

The lifestyle there is dramatically different than it is in a majority of the country. Instead of beautiful nature made canyons, they have high rises upon high rises flanked by packed in suburbia, kinda. The mass of people alone makes it a focus to the impact.

In addition, the major news outlets have their headquarters in NYC, naturally they will focus on the impact as their resources are right there and with the power outage, their resources were much more limited.

Call me silly if you want but I saw nothing wrong with the reporting I have witnessed.

This coming from some chick in Colorado. Our highest building is about 20 stories in my city.

24

Well, you’d best not expect much from the BBC, as their website had graphics spelling “Ottawa” “Ottowa” for nearly all yesterday. I sent a mail, and the graphic changed, but I have no idea whatsoever if it was due to me.

25

I almost puked when I heard one reporter chick on ABC say, “Isn’t it great to see New Yorkers pulling together like this?”

Well, it’s no greater than the 3 or 4 other times a year the news tells us New Yorkers are “pulling together.” Alright, we get it. New Yorkers are great, blah, blah, blah…

NYC only represents about 15% of the 50 million people that lost power, but I guess it’s no big deal that the rest of 'em all “pulled together.”

Actually, I’m glad there wasn’t mass looting in NYC, but quite frankly–for personal reasons-- I’m even gladder there wasn’t any in metro Detroit.

Hurrah for us all.

Happy

26

During the 1977 blackout, there was a ton of crime and rioting in NYC (during the current blackout, NPR played an old clip of a correspondent interviewing a guy who had just looted a store). The amazement over the calm reaction this time 'round is a direct result of that precedent.

27

I’m surprised at how many maps showing the blackout areas don’t show anything in New Jersey. Passaic and my own Bergen Counties were without power cause we’re on the NYC grid.

28

Biggirl is correct. In NYC, the coverage spent a great deal of time on how widespread the blackout was. 880 had live reports from Albany, Detroit, Cleveland, Connecticut, New Jersey, and perhaps a few more I missed.

Blame your local affiliates – they’ve got New York envy.

29

Oh yeah, there was a report from Niagara Falls, USA as well. Seems the power authority people didn’t think the Canadian claim that they were struck by lightening was all that credible.

30

Whenever a big story hits, the news channels immediately put everything else on the back burner and focus most of their attention/resouces on The Big Story. At the same time, some or all of the networks and local channes drop regular programming in order to provide the very same type of coverage of The Big Story as the news channels.

They’re all sure that anyone who tunes in want to hear All About The Big Story. They’re all sure people will switch away if they find anything other than The Big Story being shown or mentioned.

But, often, there isn’t much to report. Or there isn’t enough to report to fill in all the time between the commercials. What to do, what to do!? Well, we’ve all seen what they don’t do. They don’t let the insufficiency of material stop them from giving us continual coverage of The Big Story. Results include (a) a lot of repetition, (b) a lot of news staff persons talking to each other about whatever’s going on and about what a Big Story it is, and © a lot of human interest coverage of people coping with whatever crisis is occuring. (You drove your grandfather to the hospital!? Wow! She drove her grandfather to the hospital! How about that!)

I doubt if it occurs to them to consider location much, esp. in regard to ©. It’s all grist for the mill. Anything, anywhere will do, so long as it’s related to The Big Story. As far as location goes, I suspect they tend to go with whatever’s convenient.

NY City is convenient. Even if they aren’t headquartered here, they all have plenty of staff here.

With the current story, another possible reason for focusing on NY City is the similarity to a fairly recent Really Really Big Story: 9/11. Not similarity of events (they’re not similar), but similarity of images. With both stories, you have images of crowds of people leaving the city on foot. To them, image is more important than content. They remember getting good ratings for their 9/11 coverage, so they jump at the chance to show similar images. Oh wow, they think, footage of crowds of people walking across the very same bridges! Let’s go with it.

Personally, I wish they would pay less attention to us. Their focusing more on us than other areas cirtainly doesn’t do us any good. As witness this thread. It just gives the rest of the US another reason to dislike/disaprove of New Yorkers.

31

I saw video of Cleveland on CNN. Sure, I’m in Australia, but I think we get the same CNN as you guys. It has your accents, anyway.

32

Cleveland was without for about 16 hours. It was eerie at night, we were scared, me and my son. Foprtunately we had flkashlights to sleep with.
Then, in our suburb they shut the power off from noon to 6 yesterday!
Tops was open though and had quite a sales day.

33

Well, I guess it’s notable - but the coverage seemed to indicate new yorkers were great people because of this, rather than just not bad people.

34

We apparently had a ‘water crisis’ here in Cleveland too because all the pumps were shut down - wonder why they weren’t on generators, anyway.

35

Yeah, that’s what they were saying Thursday and Friday. We lucked out though, pretty much all of Detroit had power this morning. Surprising since DTE is by far the worst utility company in the country.

36

The news outlets are out of NY, barely able to operate on emergency power. Transportation systems were not opperating and communication systems were also down and very unreligable.

Now as one of the news outlets, lets see, should they broadcast with the limited services/personel available which means giving news that is local to the news outlet (NYC), of shoud they give equal covrage to other areas that they have no flippin idea what is happning there and no way to find out.

WFAIR emergency report:

Well we have a big blackout, Lets start in Chicago, I haven’t been able to hear anything about it there. But in the interest of fairness, we will stay with the blackout in Chicago, even if they arn’t having it. I really don’t know but this is the report for Chicago. They, that is the people of Chicago, may or may not be having a blackout, in Chicago…(another 5 minutes)

Lets go to NYC, Yes I can confirm that NYC is having a major power failure. Cell phone system is failing and overloaded, and the …
… Also the Subway system is down and beign evacuated. The LIRR is,… wait a second, we are out of time for NYC, we will. continue coverage on NYC once we get to all other cities first.

Lets move on to Albany, I havn’t heard anything from Albany, they may have a blackout or not, we really don’t know. The …

37

Due to 6 refineries being down, gas prices have soared over the last few days. To tell you the truth, I’m not even sure what the source of the power outage was, it obviously happened in the States somewhere, and I think that any notion to pin it on Canada is not only logical, but absurd. There have been numerous reports of problems with powerplants throughout the area that the outage took place. Actually, I had even heard of a nuclear powerplant that apparently burned in PA, but the reporter apparently had to contradict himself (go figure, but that’s another story). It also seems that throughout this forum, you people believe that Canada was also affected by the power outage. Well, you are right, however it was only Ontario that was affected, and it would also have hit Quebec have they not their own source of power. P.S. I hope New York is feeling better about their brief power failure, maybe someone should look into the 10+ deaths in Paris due to dehydration :slight_smile:

38

I was kinda hoping it was a lightning strike in Niagara Falls, NY, because I’ve been to the visitors center (the ‘Power Vista’) there several times, and it would have been interesting if I’d been to the place where It happened. I grew up about 30 miles from there (on the Canadian side); my parents still live there. They dismissed the lightning-strike theory well before the experts did; see, there were no thunderstorms in the area, and it wasn’t even very cloudy.

I’m in Toronto now. Toronto is a city of 2.5 million people, but the American news always feels the need to call it “Toronto, Canada”, in case you think it’s a really big city in Idaho that had somehow escaped your attention. We lost power here too; it was 14 hours for me. We even had people trapped in the subway and in elevators, just like New York. (Similiarity to NYC is a thing of great pride for some Torontonians, and a thing of great profit for those in the film industry.)

Now, while the American news seemed to portray NYC as the only place to lose power, Canadian TV acted like it was just Toronto – the news coverage was pretty much the same. The radio was a bit different; they had callers from everywhere.

The portrayal of the blackout on the Canadian side, at least on CNN, was rather annoying to me. I don’t mind the fact that Americans were blaming Canadians for the blackout (and vice versa); it’s a problem with the system, and the full facts will be revealed in time. But two things really pissed me off:

  1. They really liked to emphasize that while there had been no major increase in crime in NYC, there had been looting and two deaths in Ottawa. The looting was actually in a suburb of Ottawa, and the deaths could have happened anywhere. Ottawa is not a dangerous city, and it’s not the fault of people living there that anything went wrong.

  2. They said that there were rolling blackouts here, with customers receiving power for two hours at a time. They liked to play up that Ontario was going to have rolling blackouts, while NY’s power was secure. In fact, our premier has been warning us for days that there might be rolling blackouts that would last up to two hours, and that the power might fail again if we don’t conserve it. There have not been extensive rolling blackouts.
    What’s actually happening is that we have a somewhat unpopular premier who’s facing an election soon, and he’s trying to cover his ass in case people lose power again.

Another thing I noticed: right from the beginning, the Canadian officials were talking about how it’s important to get the power back on as soon as possible, and the American ones were all talking about finding out who was responsible for the blackout.

39

I understand that elmwood is a bit annoyed about the amount of coverage NY got in the blackout, i was as well and i live in England, but i must say that to mention the 9/11 incident was a bit uncalled for, we all know there were events at the pentagon and the plane crash they were covered, but neither of those events killed around 3,000 people, neither of those events featured 2 national landmarks collapsing in a cloud of dust and debris onto the streets of one of the busiest cities in the world. so i think elmwood should think before he opens his trap next time.