POST HERE if you experienced a power outage near rollover

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A list of all outages might help to get a more comprehensive idea of how extensive they were. Post at least the State, ( City optional ), approximate time, and duration if you remember. Maybe we should limit it to those that occurred between 12:00 noon on the 31st and 12:00 noon on the 1st in your time zone.

Some of the areas I recall hearing about in the news and firsthand reports include: Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Louisiana, Kentucky, Texas, and California

(If you can verify these areas please post to confirm them, and any other countries would also be useful.)

You should post even if your source tells you that it was "not Y2K related," because the assumption here is that in most cases they were lying (unless you know for a fact it was another cause).

-- Hawk (flyin@high.again), January 01, 2000

Answers

Putnam County Florida had a power outage that lasted oh 20 minutes or so right at midnight (where the rest of my family was). What's funny is that our hideway lost power, the city house (where I spent last night) never did lose power.

Thinking about sharing some of my preps with the venezuala relief efforts,

collocated

-- lol (collocated@homeright.now), January 01, 2000.


Had a water outage last night. A pipe burst, not related to Y2K. But, probably thanks to Y2K there was a crew available working it at 1 a.m. on New Years Day.

-- nobody (nobody@nowhere.com), January 01, 2000.

3000 got blacked out in Minneapolis Friday night when a couple mylar New Years balloons got snared in a power line.

-- john littmann (John.Littmann@mcquay.com), January 01, 2000.

BALLOONS?!?!

YOU MEAN TO TELL ME THERE WERE NO SQUIRRELS RELATED OUTAGES?!?!

Where the heck was the squirrel king? At a party? Abandoning his duty?!?!

Geez, I was expecting headlines.

Happy New Year all!

:)

-- FM (vidprof@aol.com), January 01, 2000.


brief power outage in Madison, WI last night after 1AM not for long though. Clocks blinking this morning

-- cheesehead (behindthe@cheddarcurtain.com), January 01, 2000.


Funny, around midnight Carson City had power outage due to "a mylar ballon". What are the odds??? bc

-- bunkercomrade (lurker@awol.com), January 01, 2000.

I had a brief outage about 10:00am, just long enough to crash my computer. My wife knows a long-time power company employee who says they have the ability to selectively target individual customers who have not paid their bills, with minor wake-up outages. I am less than a week behind the due date however waiting to see if there is power before I pay the December bill.

-- Slobby Don (slobbydon@hotmail.com), January 01, 2000.

Western WY dirty power report:

Although we did not have an outage per se, we did experience a problem with the line frequency, severe enough to cause my ham radio tranceiver to not work correctly. Unit gets its' timing from the line frequency. Radio would not stay on frequency from before noon until late last night. Was 'finally' working normally just before local rollover.

High degree of probability of being related to the existance of a 'dirty power' problem - I had another ham receiver blow its' power supply. Transformer smoked. That occured just before noon. UPS on computer was kicking in, sporatically throughout the day, minimizing the problem on my computer system. But again physical 'proof' of the existance of dirty power.

Any of you other hams out there know where I can find another power supply for a Kenwood TR-500 Receiver? CHEAP?

Note: both the receiver and the transceiver are older models, built back in the early 70's. Age of units + dirty power = failures.

-- hiding in plain (sight@edge of.nowhere), January 01, 2000.


Rollover +41 mins, and the lights went out. All indications were that what I had considered impossible had happened. But it was just some idiot who chose to shoot out an insulator as a new years prank.

Face it Hawk, Y2K did not cause the grid to go down anywhere.

-- Malcolm Taylor (taylorm@es.co.nz), January 01, 2000.


All of these clearly sound like Y2K problems. The fact that you were told otherwise confirms this, as Hawk had stated.

We had a 6 hour outage in MN, supposedly due to a downed power line caused by a drunk driver. Total BS. It was Y2K, obviously.

-- (ross@herfix.org), January 01, 2000.



No outage in Ventura, California, but did get hit with a few surges right before midnight... looks like the boys at the electric companies did a pretty damn good job...

Prepped for 7, expected 5, prayed for a 3...

The grid stayed up, so 7 and above went bye-bye...

Still expecting a 5, still crossing fingers for 3...

-- Carl (clilly@goentre.com), January 01, 2000.


Malcolm,

We're all aware that the grid didn't go down, and I am damn glad because I love piping hot showers and surfing the Net. The purpose was to try to assess if embedded chips have any vulnerabilities, and though I'm sure many will say there is no proof, my own personal conclusion is that there were some problems with them, but we will probably never know the details.

The estimations of less than 1 or 2% appear to be very accurate at this point in time, and I commend those who did extensive research to conclude this, they did a great job. My guess is that several utilities have switched to their contingency workarounds, perhaps manually detouring the affected systems, and I hope that they will quickly be able to get back to standard operating procedures without any further outages. Being the cynic that I am of business management motives, I still doubt some of these reports about drunk drivers and people shooting transformers, except in a couple of rare cases.

-- Hawk (flyin@high.again), January 01, 2000.


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