Blackouts are the rage

Gonz

Gonz

molṑn labé
Staff member
This is getting weird

ROME (Reuters) - A nationwide power blackout struck Italy in the dead of night on Sunday, unleashing chaos, stalling lifts, stranding travelers, but causing no known disasters.

Practically all the country's 57 million people were hit, a failure similar in scale to last month's collapse in the U.S. Northeast and Canada -- though, coming on a weekend night, its initial impact was less dramatic and less economically damaging.


"It's chaos, and until the electricity comes back on it will continue to be chaos," said policeman Fabio Bragazzi, 21, at Rome's main Termini train station where passengers, among some 30,000 stranded across the country, slept on the ground.


Disbelief was heightened by uncanny coincidence -- it was the fourth major Western blackout in two months, after cuts in North America, parts of London, and Scandinavia.
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Not really a surpise when we are using more power than ever and doing nothing to increase the amount of power available. Here in Canada (I was affected by the outage for almost a week!) we have a very old power grid, and when the power went out in Ohio, it tripped up everywhere due to lack of maintenance on the alarm system, and lack of simple upkeeping with today's standards.

We have to either be more concious of what we are doing in regards to using power, or we have to make arrangements to bring in more sources of power. This will continue until something is done. Hopefully, more people will start to look into alternative power sources, like solar and wind power generators.

Sidhe
 
Gonz said:
WHOA there. The power went out in Canada & screwed up the American grid :D
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Ha ha. Actually, no it did not go out in Canada first. That has been confirmed and admitted by the US as well. It began in Ohio where a transformer went down and the alarm system that was supposed to alert to workers to shut it off from the main power grid did not go off because it wasn't working either. There is a committee looking into why it was allowed to escalate. The alarm company is under scrutiny now as well.
 
Sidhe said:
Not really a surpise when we are using more power than ever and doing nothing to increase the amount of power available. Here in Canada (I was affected by the outage for almost a week!) we have a very old power grid, and when the power went out in Ohio, it tripped up everywhere due to lack of maintenance on the alarm system, and lack of simple upkeeping with today's standards.
Sidhe
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Um, the grid in Quebec is fine, thank you very much. We didn't go down with everyone else, and were the first to supply those without, as soon as they got their shit straight. The main southern quebec grid was almost entirely replaced after the ice storm. And there's a brand new main being installed on the length of highway 10. 12 high tension cables installed to increase total availible power to everyone from ottawa to NYC outta James bay.
 
Professur said:
Um, the grid in Quebec is fine, thank you very much. We didn't go down with everyone else, and were the first to supply those without, as soon as they got their shit straight. The main southern quebec grid was almost entirely replaced after the ice storm. And there's a brand new main being installed on the length of highway 10. 12 high tension cables installed to increase total availible power to everyone from ottawa to NYC outta James bay.
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Thanks for the commentary. I didn't even mention Quebec, but am glad you had power. We sure as Hell didn't! Guess I should have been in Quebec, then?

In general, I'm just talking the old power grids, which most of them are old and should be replaced, much like yours in Quebec was. My point was that we are not updating our sources of power and keep expecteing them to put out more than they can give, that's all.
 
Many of the 'vunerable' systems in the Quebec grid were discovered during a period of high solar activity that tripped switches on the mains from James bay, about 17 years back.
 
I had a blackout about a week ago too, power was gone for about half a day, when someone finally bothered to ring the electricity company they said they did'nt enen know about the outage! Were on the verge of a serious power problem here in Aus, if they don't do something soon we'll have no power at all in 5 years:faptard:
 
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