On Saturday night around 8:30 or so the power went out. A check of the neighborhood showed the lights were on two blocks east, on the other side of Knight, but were out as far west as I could see. I later learned that the outage extended to Cambie Street. The power doesn’t go out often here so it’s always a novel experience. It took a couple of hours to be restored and in the meantime I skulked the darkened streets with a flashlight, talked to a couple of young women at Kingsway and Inverness who had never experienced a blackout (but were soothing their nerves with some glasses of red wine), then sat in the candlelight on the deck with the others until the lights came back on. It was slightly annoying to be so close to the next grid that stood unaffected. Oddly, all of the traffic lights on Knight appear to be on the unaffected grid save for the ones at the major intersection of Knight and Kingsway. Much horn-honking ensued there as people tried to figure out how to navigate without having red lights to peel through.
Two days later, shortly after 10 a.m. the power went out again. Annoying, but it was restored in about an hour this time. The power then went out a third time just past 6 p.m. It was restored within 15 or 20 minutes but still, whoever is responsible, stop pulling the plug already! The CBC News website reports that there was actually a fourth outage in a nearby area and the others are blamed on ‘problems’ at an electrical substation. Odder still is usually you think of these things happening in the summer when the grid gets overloaded due to air conditioners and so on but the weather the past few days has been seasonal, not really hot at all.
Am I the only one who starts thinking of end-of-the-world scenarios when the power goes out? There’s something primal about being a big city plunged into utter darkness that gets the mind going. When the aliens arrive, they’ll EMP-and-awe us, no doubt. One minute you’ll be watching Leno, next minute you’ll be slaves of Xantor and the Zerbinians.
