The Tomigaia Blog

The blackout of 2003 hits, and I hit the road....

Yesterday, at 4:11pm, I was working on my computer. Suddenly, the screen looked warped and wobbly. I heard funny noises coming from my UPS. Then it all goes black.

I think to myself "oh, just another fire drill". We had a fire drill in the office last month, and I thought that the building management were giving us a pop quiz. I went out into the hallway, and saw that it was pitch black. It was only then that I realized it was a real power failure.

I ran back to my office and shut down my computer (without a screen to help). Despite the fact that so many people were in trouble, stuck in elevators and subway cars, all I could think about was that my UPS was working and that all my data on the computer were safe. Then I ran around guess what I should do.

The phones were working, so I called my father, and he said that he still had power in his office, about 5 blocks away. Only later did I find out that his building had a backup power source. This made me think that it was a local outage in only my building, but it turned out to be the whole Northeast!

At that point I decided to give up on doing any more work, and I ran down 20 flights of stairs, and got to the street. After talking to some people on the street, I found out that the subways were all stopped, so I went to Pier 11 to see if I could catch a ferry uptown. The roads were already badly clogged, and police cars were trying to get through. There was already a giant crowd at Pier 11, and I quickly gave up on taking a ferry and started walking uptown.

[I felt a memory rush into my mind... A discussion back in 1998 with a manager of the Tokyo Electric Power corporation. He said that Tokyo could never have a giant blackout. The grid was so well designed with redundancy in mind that a surge blackout was incoceivable. Now I am beginning to wonder....]

The heat of the afternoon sun was excrutiatlingly hot. Thousands of workers walked with me, and we all headed north. I had a plan in mind: get the ferry across the east river at 34th St. About 1.5 hours later, I arrived at 34th St, and it was a bedlam. There were fistfights in the ticket line which was hundreds of yards in length. I asked a cop what was going on, and he said that the police had just convinced the ferry operator to allow customers to pay on the boat instead of forcing them to buy tickets before boarding. This news gave me hope. I jumped into the end of the shorter ferry boarding line, and was able to get on the 2nd boat that arrived. On the first boat, a woman fainted and had to be put on the dock by the police. She looked green with heatstroke, so I gave her one of my bottles of water. She drank some, and seemed to get better.

As the ferry pulled away from the dock, I was able to see the thousands of people still waiting at the ferry terminal. No one looked happy!

After the 7 minute ride across the east river, I started walking to Roosevelt Island. I arrived home at 8:30, four hours after leaving my office in downtown Manhattan. My feet hurt, and my Teva sandles were worn down, but I was happy to be home. It was only then that I remembered that I had to climb up the stairs to the 19th floor! (It was then that I wished I could post a rant on I HATE NYC.)

Since the cell phones had stopped working immedieately after the blackout, I had no idea how my wife and son were doing. Luckily they were fine, and so were my sister and parents. Our landline was still working, and it felt great to get some good news.

I listened to the radio in the dark for a while, and then lit some candles. Soon Kerstin and Darius came home.

After a night of deep sleep in the warm muggy bedroom, I woke at 6:00 am to the cries of my son screaming "The sun is up! Time to wake up!" In my dream, the one that had intruded upon, all the power had been restored throughout New York. I was shocked to see that reality was very different. Most of the city was still without power. My home regained electricity at around 5pm today.

It feels great to have a computer to work on, a light to see by, a ice cube from the fridge. I appreciate them much more today than I did yesterday.

But I also feel that our dependence of technology and electricity has gone too far. 2 more days without power, and the whole region would have become a living nightmare. I now want to become less dependent on the Grid, if I can.