The Blackout Blog
Friday, August 15th, 2003Good afternoon everyone. I hope you and yours made it through the ‘worst blackout in American History’ okay. Rumor has it 80% of Cleveland and NE Ohio have power back, but the bigger issue right now is water, or the lack of it here.
It is my belief that everything started in Ohio. Yes, folks, you heard it here first, It all Started in Cleveland!
Here’s where my belief stems from:
Timeline of events yesterday:
20 Seconds before blackout:
I, your humble correspondent, was sitting in my windowless office, and I noticed a dimming of the lights. I ask one of my officemates, “Did you notice that?” He says.. “Yeah” I say, “Wouldn’t it suck if the power just died.. like a massive blackout?” He says yeah it would. Ten seconds go by.
Meanwhile, people near windows feel a ’strange vibe’ at the time of the initial surge. One officeworker with a window thought a plane had flown by the sun and it had cast a different shade of light. Another likened it to the movie the Matrix, where Neo jumps into the sentinel, and the world kind of stretches and reforms to size.
Oddly enough, right after the surge, our support desk gets a call from a user who lost connectivity to the network. Seconds later, the power dies.
Jimmy half-heartedly calls from his office, “Houston, we have a problem.” He hears Bear, the CIO, from his office, “You’re darn right we do.”
Most instinctively head for the Datacenter, where the computers are off, and there’s a burning smell coming from our poor UPS, who took a kamikaze flight against the surge, and saved the servers from damage.
The smell of burning transistors, those quiet protectors who take each slight power spike and even them out to beautiful current when all is as it should be, fought their last fight.
I haven’t heard ANYTHING about the Surge Before The Spike ANYWHERE.
Given that the entire roll of the blackout from the Lake Erie Loop to the East coast and the rest of the 20+ million took a simple 9 seconds, one concludes that it started here, in this region, but only time will tell.
Remember, you can’t believe anything you read on the internet. 
As for ‘after the blackout,’ I stook around the building with the two other members of the ‘Terror Trio’, the group that formed during 9/11. It’s funny how that happens.
We waited until downtown emptied, and I got home around 8. The lights in the town where Jimmy lives of the highway were functioning throughout the blackout, which made traffic much easier.
The Marathon in Jimmy’s neighborhood stayed open throughout the crisis, and since Jimmy was low on cash, he purchased a big Gatorade.
For the first time since high school in my small town near Chicago, Jimmy saw the Milky Way looking out over his balcony. Both Mars and the moon were extremely bright.
There were party people gathered ’round the complex’s pool, and they all seemed to be enjoying themselves.
It was, by all accounts, a night to be remembered. I just hope the water’s back on when I get home.
‘Til later, -Jimmy