Does anyone know about this? We experienced a huge power loss due to severed electrical lines from the feed in Arizona.
Strange that this unprecedented event happened so close to the anniversary of the WTC attacks.

Saw this on a news wire, Devious. It is strange. The first reports were rather confused and unclear. Perhaps there will be more information later today.

Evidently the power outage was caused by a technician's mistake:



By the way, speaking of the anniversary of the September Eleventh atrocities, the CIA is reportedly looking for 3 guys......C or DC. Be careful and alert out there!

The power outage was not "unprecedented". Much of the West Coast experienced a substantial power outage in the 1980s due to issues with the grid.

Very true, Tom, and those of us who are old enough will forever remember the great east coast blackout of 1965. That was apparently caused by the diversion of all of the eastern seaboard's electrical generation capacity in order to power up a particle beam that was used to repel an extraterrestrial invasion. Very little looting (only 5 small incidents) occurred in 1965, in conctrast to the widespread looting that went on during the 1977 New York City blackout, by the way.

It's hard to believe that one guy fiddling around with some monitoring equipment could cut the power to millions of people across three states and into Mexico. Knocking nuclear reactors offline, causing massive sewerage spills, etc. Sounds like that grid is pretty shaky. I'd be a litle concerned.

Hey there Brother Tom! It's good to see you. I should have clarified that my "unprecedented" should have read "unprecedented for San Diego" home of the world's largest naval base. We are essentially in a cul de sac when it comes to power distribution. We only have lines coming in from the north and the east. Mexico is also part of this grid and therefore, they lost power as well.

The power came back on to my area early this morning. School districts are closed, and folks quickly lost patience, some people were stuck on the trolleys and elevators without cell phone service to call for help etc...

All military personnel were recalled back to the base and The U.S.S. Ronald Reagan just came back from a 7 month deployment, but they weren't allowed to disembark until a few minutes ago.

You can read more about it at http://www.abovetopsecret.com
San Onofre was shut down as a precaution and yes, massive amounts of sewage was leaked into the ocean after pump failure.

This link further supports the "unprecedented" magnitude of the power loss that has now been fully restored...nonetheless we are quite vulnerable.

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2011/......zona-de/

However, both Tom and Woland are correct as printed in the article;

The outage is still dwarfed by the 2003 northeast blackout, where a cascading series of power-line and electricity-plant failures wiped out power for 50 million people from Ohio to Canada and New York City in the biggest blackout in U.S. history.

In 2001, California’s failed experiment with energy deregulation was widely blamed for six days of rolling blackouts that cut power to more than 3 million customers and shut down refrigerators, ATMs and traffic signals.