I’ve decided that in a Hollywood-esque scene, at the last minute a terrorist plan to blow up the Niagara Power Station was averted by a security guard and a rogue local cop, who had a shoot out with the terrorists killing them, but one grenade (or whatever) damaged one power station, sending a ripple effect over the area.
The rest of the power grids were shut down as a precautionary measure, and because of the heat wave, left other ones grasping to keep up, so a massive brown out occurred.
A former (now banned) SDMB Doper from the New York area did it. They figured they could bring down the SDMB in retribution for being banned.
However, the SDMB server in Chicago was unaffected.
Probably the brain-eating zombies from a previous thread. And flying monkeys. And crazed reform school girls in leather underwear driven mad with lesbian lust. And two depressed teenaged boys on Paxil.
I’m guessing someone was testing a brand-new 1920’s style Death Ray and it kind of got loose on them.
That the late night talk show hosts in New York (Conan, Jon Stewart) conspired together for a night off.
Conan should have just bit the bullet and done improv for an entire show in the dark. There was no audience and no guests, but you’re on at 11:30 (central) for a reason, Conan! Go ahead and do fun stuff. Maybe they could have pulled people off the street for guests; show some creativity here people! This is the stuff that makes legends, and all he could manage was a brief intro. (Better than nothing I guess.)
At first I thought Richard Kessel (LIPA chairman) tripped over a wire and would soon complain about the high price of gas and lack of a wider connection to CT.
As far as NYC goes - there’s gonna be an investigation. After the 1977 blackout which was mostly confined to CON EDISON, it was determined that cascading failures like the 1965 blackout and the 1977 would never happen again.
The 1965 Conspiracy theory was all about UFO’s. Wasn’t that used in X-Files? This event kinda shows that the electric grids are neanderfucked.
Yet Another Microsoft Windows Virus™.
Well I happen to know that two of the Illuminati[sup]TM[/sup] were talking about the Asimov short story Spell My Name with and ‘S’ and decided to make a practical test. One of them wagered that she could produce a class 10 result from a class 1 input.
Thus, two 1800 watt blow dryers were turned on in a non-descript New Rochelle sub-division and voilá, the lights go out.
Of course, the bet was for $1.00
It’s the Cooler. In the backyard.
Bush saw that his popularity was slipping, and so needed a convenient crisis to handle. But, this time, he decided that there shouldn’t be so many dead people, otherwise that might contribute to the decline of his popularity. Something conveniently inconvenient, but also conveniently non-lethal.
Vi-ola.
This was just a test by the Office of Homeland Security that got a little out of hand. They wanted to test emergency readiness over a large area.
Knocking out power in Canada was just a fortunate side-effect.
Why do you think that the government was on TV broadcasting assurances that “this is not terrorist activity?”
See, they knew i was driving back to Detroit to have a garage sale this weekend, and they decided that couldn’t happen. Anything on a smaller scale would have been to obvious that they were after me and my garage sale.
It was an effort to:
A) Have Americans get more exercise
B) Have Americans get to meet their neighbors.
c) Help the electrical workers of America get about 1000 hours of overtime per paycheck to help them in their financial crunch times.
D) Show our weakspots to the globe.
E) To help raise the birth levels for May 2004 thus ensuring our countries status as a world power in some form that is not precisely clear at this time.
F) Show people the importance of actually living where you work rather than commuting.
G) Giving the unaffected states a chance to go *neener, neener * at them Big City folk.
H) This power outage was sponsored in part by The Amish Farmers of America ™.
I think it was O.J.
I think it was a nefarious plot to keep innocent Dopers in New Jersey (like myself, of course) from watching Amazing Race.
All I could get last night on TV was news. News, news news. It usually went something like this:
“Well, let’s go to Bob out in the streets of the city … How’s it going down there, Bob?”
“Well, Chuck … it’s still dark.”
And who were they doing the news FOR?? Giving out emergency advice to stranded New Yorkers … who obviously weren’t watching the news because they had no power!!
Of course, I had power all night, so maybe I’m just bitter about not having a perfectly good excuse to eat everything in my fridge before it went bad.
It was the Democrats in California who thought Arnold was getting too much press coverage.
hmmm… global warmng ?
Maybe someone wants the Nuclear Power Plants shutdown for good and start running Thermo Plants ? 
Jeez, people. Remove the scales from your eyes. Do I have to spell it out for you? The blackout was obviously to facilitate a heist so huge that we don’t yet appreciate how huge it was - so huge that we probably never will. It was caused initially by a guy with a fake cockney accent, and it was intended only to knock out the power to Atlantic City. Unfortunately, the “pinch” used was a factor of ten times too strong. This was because the Russian mafioso misread the encrypted email and added an extra zero; he therefore bought the wrong kind of pinch from an Al Qaeda operative in Niger using laundered Iran/Contra money. Nevertheless, it was brought from Syria via Albania on a Panama-registered Liberian cargo ship that was meant to be bringing AK-47s to the Cayman Islands, when it was hijacked by a Triad/Freemason member of the PLO. This was, of course, a cover, and the coastguard ship that intercepted it was of course a fake (the real one had been made invisible with the Philadelphia Experiment technique), which had been sponsored by the Illuminati and the Bilderberg group, funnelling Castro’s secret billions, which currently reside in the form of Nazi gold in Argentina. Anyway, the vaults of the casinos are in fact emptied out now, and the money is on its way to the undersea city as we speak, where Princess Di, Nixon, Elvis, and Jim Morrisson are going to use it to buy a secret Caribbean island that isn’t marked on any maps. I mean, duh, how could you not have worked that out yourselves?
I think this one is my favorite…
I believe the rest of the story is that the local cop has a nice catch phrase like “You won’t…be back” after killing each terrorist, and ends up running for governor in California.
It was a couple of middle school boys, pulling a prank to see what would happen if they urinated on a gadget at the local alley power sub.