20 Year Anniversary of the Blackout

[2014olympicgold]

20 years ago today the blackout that left 50million people in Canada and the USA without power for almost 48hrs.

It went out August 14th, 2003 at 4:10pm. Full power wasn't restored until August 16th. It was (at the time) the 2nd largest blackout in history (1999 Brazil).

In the name of summer Fluff, where were you when this happened and what do you remember about it?

I was at my familys trailer which meant we didn't have running water for the blackout as it was on an electric pump. So we were buying ice and letting it melt at from the convenience store until their ice turned to water lol.

[Axeman33]

Im not going to lie, I dont even remember this. I know where I was (roughly) on the dates mentioned but I dont remember the blackout. I would have still been working at a radio group, selling advertisements. This was a year before I joined the Navy. Weird I dont remember this.

[finnys_fanatsy]

all powered up in Saskatchewan..lol

[pmorrow]

I don't remember it either. I was pretty young then but I would have remembered a 48 hour blackout. So I was either on vacation abroad or my area wasn't affected. We used to get blackouts a lot back then as well so I think I was used to it.

[Godin]

I was at my office in North York getting ready to head home. Regular people were 'traffic copping' at most intersections. It was surreal. I was living in Aurora and that night, we were sitting out on the deck admiring the star lit sky and the peacefulness. Then some ******* turned on his generator.

[PicklePickle]

Is Ontario still getting their electicity from the US?

[senryu]

I don't remember this!

[2014olympicgold]

I'm surprised this has gotten forgotten. I was also like 12yrs old when this happened at a trailer park where it heavily effected our time.

I remember we had to go into the car to listen to the radio in the car to even know what was happening. And because it was a trailer park, we had power outages often, so it wasn't until like the next day when we figured out it wasn't just a normal outage.

It's also like southern ontario that was effected and I'm from the GTA, so I just assume we're the center of everyone's world.

[happypg]

I live in Ohio, and had taken that week off for vacation. I was with my wife and young children at the movies seeing Freaky Friday when the power went out. They came around and gave out vouchers to come back to see another movie as they routed people out the front door. I thought it was just at the theater where they had no power. Then the drive back home was very strange...

[ross10019]

Oh man…

I was in my 27th floor office in Manhattan, on 54th and Third, when it happened. Had to walk down 27 flights, realized I forgot my house keys, walked back up, and then back down. Once I got home, I had to walk up 40 floors to my studio apartment, which I was living in with my wife as we were childless at the time.

Before heading home though, since it was the middle of the day, a bunch of young lawyers got together at PJ Clarke’s, a terrific little bar just at the corner, and we partied for hours because they were giving out beer in high-volume since it was all going to get warm. Dejeanneret on this forum was there. What a memory.

There were street parties all over Manhattan that lasted until the wee hours of the morning. But after PJ Clarke’s I went home to my lovely wife and we enjoyed a candlelight dinner and a bottle of wine together. Lovely.

[Godin]

Oh man…

I was in my 27th floor office in Manhattan, on 54th and Third, when it happened. Had to walk down 27 flights, realized I forgot my house keys, walked back up, and then back down. Once I got home, I had to walk up 40 floors to my studio apartment, which I was living in with my wife as we were childless at the time.

Before heading home though, since it was the middle of the day, a bunch of young lawyers got together at PJ Clarke’s, a terrific little bar just at the corner, and we partied for hours because they were giving out beer in high-volume since it was all going to get warm. Dejeanneret on this forum was there. What a memory.

There were street parties all over Manhattan that lasted until the wee hours of the morning. But after PJ Clarke’s I went home to my lovely wife and we enjoyed a candlelight dinner and a bottle of wine together. Lovely.

67 flights of stairs? lol You must be in pretty good shape.

[ross10019]

67 flights of stairs? lol You must be in pretty good shape.

67? You’re not counting going down which ain’t no picnic.

And the next day I had to go out and get food and look into rental car options (we were considering driving to Montreal, as my wife was 4 months pregnant and we were worried about a lengthy outage) - so I went down 40 and back up another 40…

Then again I was only 35.

[hockeyrobot]

Ohhhhh I remember this. I was in high school and I just remember roaming around our town on bikes for a couple days. It was like a zombie movie.

[Eskimo Brother]

I was nine at the time, and was stuck in Pearson airport for 20hrs. We were one of the four flights that left in the 30 hrs or so after the blackout because they had happened to fuel our plane up earlier in the day. There was no AC in the building, which meant we were all baking.

They also had to hand-search EVERYTHING, so the line through security took about 7hrs.

When we landed in France, that night the power also went out for about 30mins for the area we were in, so it kind of felt like we were a little cursed.

Not exactly a day I look back on fondly, but the rest of the trip went well

[4T2]

What the hell? I don’t remember this either and I would have been 20.

Was i too drunk to notice?
Is this the Mandela Effect?
An example of parallel universes colliding after they turned on the Large Hadron Collider?