Friday, September 9, 2011

How Vulnerable We Are

Southern California gets clobbered with a major power outage.

This happened yesterday afternoon, shortly after 3pm. According to sources, a single maintenance worker at electrical station tripping a major line or something like that.

A friend of who drives a delivery truck was stranded two hours from home for the night due to gas pumps not working.
Nobody had A/C, TV, Internet, nothing... total 1850's going on from south Orange County on down for something like 7 million people, for about 12hrs on into the night.
Serious stuff: the airport was shutdown. ATM's didn't work. No traffic lights during rush hour... Clusterfuckville, all the way through.

I'm thinking.. if that were me,... if I were that maintenance worker who just ended modern civilization for a large portion of the country (if only for a night), I'd be pretty damn proud of myself.

Let's hope Al Queida doesn't get a hold of this idea.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ok so I just clicked on the link without reading the rest of the post and didn't see the Al Queida comment. When I saw the power was being sent from Arizona, I thought "conspiracy theory time: Maybe it wasn't an accident. Maybe it was Arizona getting a little payback for the pushback from Cali over the whole immigrant reform push in Arizona"

Then I saw the Al Queida comment and thought sh*t. That's all we need. :(

squeaky

Gino said...

hi squeaky! long time its been.

and the cluster was even worse than i thought. water treatment also faltered and the folk of the region are still advised to boil their water, just in case. and not a restaurant was open in the region.

VLW said...

I remember something similar happened in Fargo when the underground power lines were damaged. Thankfully people all helped each other out.

I am so glad I am mostly off the grid and well stocked with paper.

Gino said...

and you got corn cobs if the paper runs out. ;)