bah everyone is blaming each other and nobody knows whats going on.

After the previous outages of 65 and 77 this kind of problem was supposed to be prevented.

In '65 there was a power surge in upstate NY. To avoid damage the transmission lines automatically cut themselves off from the system. Sounds good right? Except when each cut out the power spread further and further down the line until it finally came to New York.

The Commisioner of NYC had an option to disconnect new york city from the network and let it run on internal power so it wouldn't be shut down completely. Unfortionatly he was pretty #### stupid and thought "hmm New York City can power everybody!"

yeah so NYC lost its power and it caused major damage. The 77 outage wasn't as widespread except that in NYC people went nuts. There was over 1000 fires and lootings everywhere and just a massive amount of chaos.

After Sept 11th I think that NYC was better prepared to deal with an emergency. Everybody was willing to help each other, and they're saying only one person died as a result of the outage (which is sad, an old woman who walked down a huge amount of stairs and collapsed, traffic prevented an ambulance from getting to her)