(20th)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003] Anniversary today. Just wondering who remembers what they did that day.
I was only 7 so I didn’t do much aside from play with a Spyro game I got from a McDonald’s happy meal until it got too dark then attempt to make shadow puppets with a flashlight. It had color filters so I wasn’t bored too quick
33 comments
I was 12. Wasn’t impacted (Chicago), but definitely reminder it and the videos.
Humans really don’t behave well in those situations.
Not affected in the slighted, but I wrote a paper about it, theorizing how attacks against unmonitored transmission infrastructure in rural areas had the potential to be more devastating and harder to stop than terrorist attacks against generating capacity.
First Energy’s incompetence was inadvertently a blueprint. I am genuinely surprised we’ve gone 20 years without a copycat attack.
I was 18 and I don’t even remember this happening.
It says power was restored within 7 hours, so it really wasn’t a big deal. People were without power for a week or more after Hurricane Sandy.
Interesting read on why it happened though.
I lived in Seattle, so no.
I remember hearing about it happening in NYC, but I don’t recall losing power here for any significant amount of time.
Yes and no. Yes as everything north of me was out, including my wife’s work and most of my extended family’s and friends work and/or homes.
No because at my house I only had a relatively short blip and was back up.
I don’t remember tbh. The power outage that I do remember was after Hurricane Sandy. Our power was out for a week.
In my part of NJ I think power was out at least one day, maybe two. I remember basically everybody just walking around town, chatting with people, and hanging in the park. I spent a lot of time just walking around and reading. I had no responsibilities at the time as I was home from school for the summer, and my memory of it is that it was a novelty and everyone kinda had fun.
My father’s neighbor invited him over to grill some steaks she had because she didn’t want them going bad, but he didn’t really like her. Instead he just stayed home and ate bananas, and the visual of my stubborn father eating bananas at home alone in the dark instead of having steaks with his slightly weird neighbor will never leave me.
I was way the fuck up in Canada when it happened with my dad. When we crossed back into the US it was a bit of a “what the fuck” moment seeing everything completely blacked out.
Yes. I was on a road trip and we were at Cedar Point that day. It was still common then for families to use walkie-talkies at amusement parks. So when the roller coaster we were waiting for went down, we learned very quickly that the whole park lost power. But it did take a while before we knew that it was a massive multi-state event. Sandusky, OH must have been the edge of the blackout because our hotel only a few miles west had power while most of the town didn’t.
And here i though that the 2003 blackout was something made up in the Watch Dogs videogame 😂
In 2003, I was living on Cape Cod, where 2-3 blackouts a year wouldn’t be unusual. One time (because a tree fell down across my house’s specific lines, during a blizzard) for about two weeks. So I will bet you we were affected, but I don’t have *special* memories of it.
(By comparison, I’ve talked with NYC-born coworkers in their 20s who can only recall three blackouts in their lifetimes.)
Yep, my whole city went dark. I had just turned 16 so my mom sent me to the store to get some stuff and it was so bizarre driving there – not a single light anywhere (aside from the car headlights, of course).
I actually distinctly remember buying some tabloids in the checkout lane because I knew I’d need some kind of entertainment. One of them was an issue of Weekly World News where the cover story claimed that Saddam Hussein had been secretly training an army of velociraptors before his capture. I’d never read Weekly World News before and boy was that a trip.
Yeah, it was cool
https://cms.prod.nypr.digital/images/48738/fill-760×498%7Cformat-webp%7Cwebpquality-60
(Except it was hot iirc.. no a/c.. also, sucked for you if you were in the city and needed to get back to Brooklyn.. I got lucky on that part.. My friend had to walk from lower Manhattan to Greenpoint)
I wasn’t affected by it, being in California (although we had our own high-profile blackouts 2-3 years earlier), but I do remember watching news about it.
I was a kid and it was a little jarring to realize that everyone’s power could just go out suddenly.
That Map is incorrect-Michigan was not completely down. Detroit, Ann Arbor and I69 iirc. I was doing a network upgrade for a client. The client was at the outer edge of the outage. The Utility was trying to keep everything on. It was amazing to see how many hits the utility took. It was full blackout to brownout six times or so.
Yes. I was with my mother in Sunset Park here in Brooklyn when the lights went out. My father drove us home and we listened to 1010 WINS for news about the blackout. After we got home I was able to go online using AOL dialup and my grandfather’s landline using my brand new Compaq Presario laptop.
Turn on the grill and eat what is in the Fridge/Freezer.
I was in southeastern Connecticut, but my area was not affected.
The CEO & leadership team of the insurance company I worked for was on a train in southwestern, CT, and they got stuck there for a bit until they climbed off and crawled through a hole in the fence or something. We had to send somebody down there to go get them and take them to a hotel further to the northeast that had power & A/C.
My wife worked in Manhattan at the time and had the presence of mind to immediately leave work and go book a hotel room nearby. She wound up offering space to 2 other coworkers who, like her, had no way to get home that night. 16 floor climb to get to the room but better than sleeping in the office.
Me, despite being only 40 miles or so away, I had power the whole time. Weird the way the grid is set up.
I was trapped in Manhattan at work when it happened – luckily a co-worker had a car to drive me to my home in the Bronx but we had walk from like 42nd to like 89 street on the east side since she got free packing in that area. Then because I was living at home with mom that lived in the projects / NYCHA on the 7th floor – I was walking in pitch black darkness with no flash light nor candle up those stairs that was used as a toilet by crackheads and weed smokers.
​
So yeah, not fun at all with hot ass heat with no breeze and no fans nor A/C til like 9pm.
I was in the Detroit suburbs at the time and was off work because I had had open heart surgery a month earlier.
I was trying to get groceries, but couldn’t do that, and then all the traffic lights were out so it took forever to get home. I made a lasagna for dinner but I couldn’t get the oven pilot light to work, so I ended up cooking it on the gas grill on the patio. It was pretty good, if a little smoky. Then my roommate and I hung out in the basement where it was still cool and ate all the ice cream from the freezer.
A friend was supposed to fly home to Chicago the next day but flights were all messed up, so I drove him to Lansing, where he met his mom and she drove him the rest of the way.
Yes. In Detroit suburbs. I first noticed the power was out because I was on my way to my in laws to pick up my daughter. I noticed a traffic light was out and then another at a major intersection. Turned on the radio and heard out the power failures. Took me a lot longer to get home then normal because people were not treating the lights being out as 4 way stops.
The next day i went to get gas for my car and tried to find ice but had no luck so went home.
I got the next day off from work because our building didn’t have a generator. I think we got two days off? Not sure.
I also remember how dark and quiet it was at night. You could see way more stars then normal.
My in-laws got their power back before we did and we went to their house for part of day. I keep calling our home number to see if the answering machine would pick up letting us know our power was back on
Nothing really bad happened by us that I can recall.
Yeah, I remember it, I was about 11. It wasn’t too long for us, we were back up by the end of the day.
Had pretty wild coincidences that day. I was flying home after some trip. Between the time the plane landed at Laguardia and the plane parked at the gate, the blackout started. We were confused and stuck on that plane for a while (less than an hour, though). Then I was stuck at Laguardia for a while.
Somehow, a friend heard about me being stranded who had been playing golf somewhere out on Long Island. For some reason they had also taken a limo. So I ended up taking a limo to their apartment through much of Manhattan with all the power out.
It actually didn’t hit my home. I remember watching coverage of the blackout on tv and my dad calling my mom to see if we were alright and still had power or not. Not much else.
Fun fact: my dad indirectly had a hand in causing the blackout. He worked for FirstEnergy as a power regulator in the Akron office that watches and maintains the grid, keeping the electricity flowing as needed. It was a bug in the computer network that didn’t alert them to an overload on the system as a series of incidents prior had knocked their alarm system offline, so they never acted to prevent the initial power issues. By the time they had become aware of the problem, it was already cascading out of control beyond what they could do from their control room.
I think power in my area was down for a full day or so? I remember we knew almost instantly that it was a big deal — I was at work, near one of the support guys. He was on the phone with someone a few hundred miles away. When our power went, he told the customer “Oh, our power just went out.” and then we all kind of had an oh shit moment when the guy on the other end responded with “weird, us too”.
Never heard of it and I lived in the North East at that time. I lived in rural Pennsylvania. Then again, a black out from 2-7 hours isn’t that big of a deal. It’s not worth remembering. That happens here in VA multiple times a year.
I lived in CT during that time, but coincidentally went to my in-laws in Kentucky two days prior to this occurring.
My son was due that days he came super early and was on oxygen and a heart monitor. We had to drive for hours to find a hotel with room and electric
I was on the #7 train, but at an elevated station. I had driven up from DC for Mets game and was headed into Manhattan to hang out. Good thing we weren’t a few minutes later or we would have been in a tunnel.
Yup! I lived in the Cleveland area, and was at the coffee shop a mile or so down the road from my mom’s house when the power went out.
We peeked out the window. “Looks like the power’s out all the way down [street]”
Another customer came in. He mentioned the lights were out all the way on [major road a couple miles away].
Someone heard from a relative that the power was out in [neighboring suburb].
At some point, someone heard that the power was out in *other states*. It was wild.
The streets were so quiet, and the stars were so bright at night. We sat on the roof and looked at the Milky Way. It was absolutely magnificent.