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Hi Adam,
Thanks for this very useful news. It's been a
very interesting time from ~4 pm until this morning. Played cards with my
wife by candle-light. I haven't done that for a while.
We have power in our home now, but we don't
use air-conditioning, etc.
Maybe our governments will now decide to invest in
a better electrical grid and some additional power plants (nuclear
too!).
I notice how the B.S. stops when the lights go
out. Reality sets in.
Jerry
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, August 15, 2003 2:07
AM
Subject: [cdn-nucl-l] Blackout: Toronto
lightens up, a little
Posted on globeandmail.com on August 14, 2003 (12:04 PM)
at:
http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20030814.wbpower0814_4/BNSto
ry/Front/
It
appears that Darlington and Pickering poisoned out. Bruce must not
have
been down as long - 3 units back up and running. Initial reports
were that
21 generation plants in the US went down within 3 minutes of the
blackout,
including 9 nuclear units in New York and Penn. Hydro One
and OPG web pages
are still down, though the IMO page is up. It's
rare that the IMO will
report this:
Current Market Demand: 2,315 MW
Current Hourly Price (HOEP): -$2,000.00 /MWh (-200.00¢/kWh)
at 11:00
p.m. EST August 14
Average Weighted Price for August: $51.49 /MWh
(5.15¢/kWh)
Hourly Uplift Charge Estimate: -$58/MWh (-5.8¢/kWh) at 11:00
p.m.
Notice to Users: The IMO-administered market has been suspended
until
further notice.
See more at:
www.theimo.com/imoweb/marketData/marketData.asp
Adam
-------------------
Blackout:
Toronto lightens up, a little
Canadian Press and Globe and Mail Update
Lights are flickering on across Toronto this evening, as power
restoration
hits the city. It has also come back in many outlying areas,
including parts
of Burlington, Oakville and Mississauga.
Ontario
Premier Ernie Eves has declared a state of emergency in the
entire
province, and is asking people not to go to work tomorrow if they
can avoid
it.
Send us your stories
"I urge them not
to go to work tomorrow unless they have to, absolutely have
to, essential
services," the premier said.
"They are working diligently to bring as
many generators back up as they
can," Mr. Eves said. "They have connected
the three units at Bruce with the
grid system which is good
news."
"Darlington and Pickering will be down, possibly for a couple of
days or
more because once those units go into a certain mode, they go into
safet
mode or they shut down and it takes a while to get them back
up."
"There is no definitive time as to when I can tell you that power
will be up
all over the province," he said. "It will come on in blocks and
pieces."
Everyone is asked to use all power sparingly, and to remember
that restored
power could easily go out again. Mr. Eves asked that air
conditioning be
turned off and that motorists stay off the roads until
normalcy is restored.
Earlier Thursday, a power outage of unprecedented
impact hit huge swaths of
Ontario and parts of the United States, leaving
millions of people without
power as officials warned some would stay that
way for days.
At 4:15 p.m. the blackout also cut power to such U.S.
cities as New York,
Cleveland and Detroit. Terrorism was quickly ruled out
by officials with
reports pointing to lightning or a fire at a power
plant.
Hydro One official Al Manchee said many would be forced to wait
out the
blackout in the dark.
Said Mr. Manchee: "We are slowly
restoring. I don't want to put a specific
time frame on full restoration,
but we expect to be making substantial
progress this evening."
Hydro One's Anne Creighton explained that parts of Canada are
vulnerable to
blackouts if U.S. power goes down because the grids are in
some cases
connected.
Parts of Ontario and Quebec are on the same
power grid as the northeastern
region of the United States, she explained.
"We're all interconnected, so an
impact outside of our jurisdiction could
affect our system."
Bill Graham, Minister of Foreign
Affairs, told CBC's Peter Mansbridge that
Ontario's emergency preparedness
officials were working closely with their
U.S. counterparts. He said the
two countries have a very good agreement on
natural disasters that worked
well in this case.
Bruce Campbell, a spokesman for Ontario's
Independent Electricity Market
Operator, said people should expect rolling
blackouts over the next couple
of days until power is fully restored, The
Globe's Richard Bloom reports.
Mayor Mel Lastman asked citizens to
conserve water over the next two days,
and applauded all those who were
helping their neighbours. Police noted that
they would be patrolling
residential areas throughout the evening, but were
happy that no major
crimes had been reported.
Not terrorism, Pentagon says
Pentagon officials in Washington were quick to say the cascading
afternoon
blackouts in sweltering summer temperatures were not an act of
terrorism.
But into the early evening, there were still conflicting
theories about why
a 15,000-square-kilometre stretch of land was blacked
out at about 4:15 p.m.
The Prime Minister's Office first said
lightning had struck a power plant in
the Niagara Region on the U.S. side
of the border, but later said there had
been a fire at a Con Edison power
plant in Niagara Falls, N.Y.
But the Department of National Defence
said it was indeed lightning that
wiped out power.
As darkness
fell, Defence Minister John McCallum weighed in, speaking for a
cabinet
committee that deals with national emergencies. He pointed the
finger at a
fire at a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania, but he had no
other details.
The PMO said it was getting its information from U.S.
officials, and blamed
them for the changing picture.
By early evening, Hydro One, the Crown
corporation that operates the
province's power, was separating from the
U.S. system in order to restore
order, said Jim Munson, aide to Prime
Minister Jean Chretien.
But while officials tried to sort out what had
gone wrong, it was reported
that most in Ontario, home to more than 10
million people, were without
electricity save for some in the province's
northwest. The greater Toronto
area, with a population of five million,
ground to a complete halt.
From Ottawa to Windsor
The blackout
stretched to Ottawa in the east, Windsor in the western reaches
of the
province and North Bay in the near north.
Toronto police said there
had been no major incidents, despite the chaos and
paralysis caused by the
blackout. In New York, with almost eight million
people one of the largest
cities in the world, was turned into a
horn-blowing gridlock. Manhattan
streets were flooded with pedestrians who
had no idea how they would get
home.
Police in Toronto praised the way the city's residents stayed
calm.
"We're very encouraged by the way this emergency has developed,"
said Sgt.
Jim Muscat.
"We're in this together as a community."
U.S. cities: New York to Cleveland
In the U.S., cities
stretching from New York to Cleveland and Detroit were
affected. Thousands
of people streamed onto the streets of lower Manhattan
following the
blackout in a scene reminiscent of the first hour after the
Sept. 11
terrorist attacks. For some, even those far from Manhattan,
the
similarities were frightening.
"I was in the office building,"
said Dean Petrovich, 33, a property tax
consultant in Toronto. "I just
walked down 20 flights - I didn't want to be
in any building."
Upon
hearing that it was a widespread outage, Petrovich added: ``Now I'm
freaked
out. I've tried using my cellphone - I can't get a hold of anyone."
While there were some reports that the Niagara-Mohawk power grid
had
overloaded, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg went on CNN to point the
finger
briefly at Canada. The outage, he said at one point, might have
originated
in Niagara Falls, Ont. A later CNN report said it began in
Ottawa, the
nation's capital, where the everlasting Centennial Flame on
Parliament Hill
was snuffed out by the blackout.
A helping hand
But while the majestic Parliament Hill in Ottawa was forced to operate
with
only scant lighting, Gatineau, a stone's throw away across the
Quebec
border, had all the power it needed. Other provinces - Nova Scotia
and New
Brunswick - were sending their excess power to the grid, said
Margaret
Murphy, of Nova Scotia Power.
"Between ourselves, likely
New Brunswick and possibly Maine, we'll probably
be sending about 100
megawatts into the greater New England area," she said,
adding that amount
wouldn't come close to solving the power problems.
Ontario Premier
Ernie Eves denied the province's dependence on imported
power played any
role in the ordeal. "We've imported power - more than 10
per cent - on lots
of occasions for the last 70 years in this province at
peak times when
demand goes up as high as it did today to 25,000 megawatts,"
he said.
"We all pay the price when we're interconnected. There's no way of
avoiding
that because all the jurisdictions in the northeastern part of
North America
interchange power." Officials said late Thursday they were
particularly
concerned about a potentially dangerous surge once power was
restored that
could cause further blackouts as far as Manitoba and the
American Midwest.
Almost 40 years ago, on Nov. 9, 1965, Ontario and
the northeastern seaboard
experienced a similar blackout, although that was
many years before
businesses and citizens became so heavily reliant on
high-tech
telecommunications. Residents were kept in the dark from anywhere
from five
minutes to 13 hours in that blackout.
With files from
Richard
Mackie
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