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Great Eastern Blackout of 2003.

This reminds me of 1999 and the Y2K fears. While some nervousness about the issue was actually justified. The absolute doomsday scenarios being predicted were absolute black helicopter conspiracy theories.

If you listened to their explanations, it was just ridiculous leaps in logic that every step would be the absolute worst case scenario, everyone right after another and some just utterly false assumptions, like everything using electricity now has a computer chip in it, and every computer chip would cease to function when 2000 came and could never be made to function again.

There biggest explanation as to how society would collapse in utter free-fall, was the electric power would go out world wide. Because it was controlled by computers, which all would break and couldn't be fixed ever again. And since the power company's were so greedy, they would never manually control the power grid to restore power, without their computers to precisely measure what they would be owed for the power they supply.:cautious:

So 3 years later, there actually was a massive blackout, the doomsday scenario probably for 20% of the population of the country. Most got their power back within hours if not the same day.
 
RickAnderson said:
This reminds me of 1999 and the Y2K fears.

If you listened to their explanations, it was just ridiculous leaps in logic that every step would be the absolute worst case scenario, everyone right after another and some just utterly false assumptions, like everything using electricity now has a computer chip in it, and every computer chip would cease to function when 2000 came and could never be made to function again.

There biggest explanation as to how society would collapse in utter free-fall, was the electric power would go out world wide. Because it was controlled by computers,
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When i was in IT I was in charge of the Y2K project for a major auto supplier. There was a lot more to Y2k than just computer chips. In fact it was every single program and every single file with dates in it were effected. And there was very real danger if not addressed. The problem had been known about for 20 years and we even joked about hoping we were retired prior to Y2K. Fixing it actually became the single largest project in history and was even somewhat government funded and inspected.

The entire premise started because in those years computer storage was very expensive because disc's were small and everything was stored on tape. Every single byte saved was important. Therefore it was industry practice to lop off the first two digits of the year for storage and date comparisons. 991201 would be December 1 1999. The problem came after 2000 when the current date would have been 001201. Dates are used for all sorts of comparisons and 001291 would now be earlier than 991201. Every single date comparison suddenly would fail. And I mean every single computer used everywhere had the ability to be effected, basically throwing us back in time prior to any kind of modern industry, without the ability they had prior, it really had the ability to change the world. But, it was well know and fixable before, given enough time and manpower.

In your power example say they had a date comparison to say turn off a turbine and then to turn it back on tomorrow morning at 6 am. The date would have been compared and it would NEVER be tomorrow according to the date. 991231 is now GReater than 000101. That was the basic issue. And computers all over in every application now stopped working, and even getting in to reprogram would have been very hard in many cases. The solution was to go in prior and change every single stored date to a 4 digit year. 2000 instead of 00. Then every single program had to be changed to use that 4 digit year. And then everything had to be tested and documented. It was a huge undertaking.

Those of us in IT tried to ease fears when the new year started because we knew just how well tested everything was now. But people had been so saturated by sensational tv and talking internet experts that it was a huge fear now. Billions was made selling emergency supplies it created its own cottage industry especislly online. This industry depended upon fear so it was fed as heavily as possible,especially as tge beware year got closer People bought firearms tons of ammo, camp food, hell I knew a lady with an entire garage of toilet paper. I say i got some nice buys on firearms when people tried to recoup thier money on 20000101.

1999 was an interesting year..
 
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I remember we even had to look into things like camera software to insure it was compliant and get and store the certification documentation. Machine code for things like cnc machines, water jets, everything had to be certified.
 
HayesGreener said:
Living in hurricane alley I understand blackouts. Thus the 40kw diesel generator in my back yard
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Yep and that's good planning. However, this was quite different than a hurricane in as much as there was zero warning, not one week nor one hour. What you had was basically it, there were few places to get anything. And unless you had cash even those were out of luck.

And like I mentioned people were in some real bad situations, such as being stuck in an elevator for long extended periods with no water because no one knew they were there. And like I mentioned there were at least two neighbors I knew who had generators but had little to no gas for them because well we never had a power outage in August..

Which is not saying a hurricane is not worse, I understand how bad they are, I had family go through Katrina and was down there about a month. That's why I do not live down south lol.

This was just a unique learning experience. We were younger, had just moved into a new house and while somewhat prepared we found holes to plug.
 
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One lesson we learned during power outages was how handy those little led puck lights are. My wife still keeps one to this day on her night stand.
 
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