Date: Fri, 15 Aug 2003 11:47:08 -0400 (EDT)
From: Shouri Chatterjee <tuku@cisl.columbia.edu>
Subject: powerless to do much


Hi All,

I guess you all pretty much are aware of the massive blackouts we are
having over here...

It simply amazes me how much our lives over here rely on electricity.
For the 15 hours that we were out of power, there was no internet/email,
no computers, no lights, no fridge, no radio. Traffic lights on the street
were out, so were street lights. My radio runs on power - so that was out.
My telephone (cordless) needs power - so that died as well. My cell phone
was alive, but the base stations were not - so it was as good as dead. The
gas burners in my apartment - there was gas, but the lighter runs on
power, so it was not lighting. I went to the shop and got some matches to
light it up... Talking of shops - most shops were closed. Their cash boxes
would not work and they were afraid of looters, so they closed down and
went home. A few restaurants were open and there were long lines to get
in. Of course, credit cards would not work. One could not have gone to the
ATM to get cash either, because the banks had died as well... So if one
had just a dollar and twenty cents in one's pocket - you can imagine the
plight. I don't think I want to go into the plights of people who commute
to work, or of people who were stuck in elevators, or inside the subway,
or in tall buildings. I am not going to talk about people who ran out of
gas in their cars and couldn't find a manual gas filling station...

The blackout started at 4:10pm. I was in the lab. The computer screens
just blinked off. The haggard ups in our lab was the first to shut down.
(I think now that we know that it doesn't work, we should throw it out.)
We came out of the lab wondering if it was something in our lab that
tripped. We saw that people from all over the building were coming out. We
came out and found that students from different buildings were coming out.
Ken (our prof), went to the street and found out that the traffic lights
were not working. Within ten minutes he was on the phone (a payphone) with
his mother in Pennsylvania who looked up the CNN news and told him that
the blackout was all over north eastern US and parts of Canada. By 4:30 he
decided that he should go home and asked us if we wanted rides to any
parts of the state... I must say, he was extremely resourceful - compared
to millions of others who were out on the streets having little clue of
how widespread the power outage was.

Soon Mike Bloomberg (the mayor) announced on radio that power would be
back by 7:56pm - i.e sunset. At 7:56pm the radios were saying that he had
no idea when he made that announcement that the outage was beyond any
control of any mayor or governor or even president.

I went back home. Chit-chatted with neighbours and building mates - many
of whom I was seeing for the first time. We went for a long walk and then
came back and cooked at home. Rice, daal and saag - cooked in
torchlight... Delicious. :)

In the middle of all this, I managed to talk to Amlan who called in from
LA on my cell, wondering if I was sitting in the darkness. I managed to
call my brother and he insisted that I call on his other phone. However,
the call blocking rate had increased a lot because of overusage of the
network. So I couldn't get through.

I slept at night, my bed bathed in moonlight... :) It was 7am when the
power came back. Came to the lab, slowly got around to have our machines
working. Not everything is up yet, but the network is up now and I can
send and receive emails.

... If all of us electrical engineers decide to shirk their work for a
week - I guess we'll instantly go back to the good old medieval times...
:) This was the first time I saw so many stars in the New York city sky.