On August 14, 2003, the largest power blackout in North American history affected eight U.S.States and the Province of Ontario, leaving up to 50 million people with no electricity.
In a 2004 Natural Resources Canada report some of the major causes leading to the blackout, include inadequate tree-trimming near transmission lines and inadequate training of operators to recognize and cope with emergency conditions.
This was a complete cop out by the Province to blame the workers, considering the diagnostic tools provided to them to monitor the system, where outdated and inaccurate. This is almost as funny as the report on the cause of the outage that came out days after the event, that laid the blame on a rodent of some sort, which apparently had chewed through a major transformer cable.
The Final Report of the Task Force, released on April 5, 2004, presented 46 recommendations for action. To date only a third of these recommendations have been implemented to any degree, of those most are minor changes.
The result is that two years later, Ontario residents are still being threatened with the potential of another major blackout occurring.
Now the fun part, where were you during the blackout? I had the fortunate pleasure of being in Toronto on an exterior shoot for the production "Dawn of the Dead". I remember the night quite vividly. I was one of a couple hundred "zombies" sitting around holding down on Cherry Street near Front waiting for a shot to be set up, when suddenly the power went out.
At the time, many of us where standing around outside the the tent set up, thinking "oh well another brown out, this won't take long". That was about 8:00pm or so, then I saw the lights in the banking towers slowly disappear floor by floor down from the top. Within fifteen minutes the entire city was covered in a sea of blackness.
For the next thirty minutes it was a bit chaotic, as AD's, and crew ran around phoning, trying to get reports to what was happening. At around eight thirty the word came down that the black out was much bigger than we thought. All of southern Ontario was dark, and police forces where immobilizing preparing for the worst, which thank god never happened.
What I found most fascinating, this had to be the first time since the dawn of the industrial age that actually could see stars in the Toronto sky.
I was finally cleaned up and wrapped by 9:30pm and on my way home, not sure if the next day was still a go. Fortunately the big black out was over by morning and the show went on, oh and thank god for battery operated pagers or I would have never gotten up.
Click on the title link to read the reports.
Kenaz,
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