Florida Blackout, Feb. 26

(close this thread if there's already another on it. I couldn't find one)

Was anyone part of the blackouts in Florida today? If so, where were you and what did you do?

On a side note, I couldn't believe how crappy people were driving just because the street signals were out. Don't they know to treat them like a stop sign?

Well, traffic signals were created for a reason. That's because people people often don't know what to do otherwise. It was like watching those old silent movies of cars and deadly intersections at the beginning of the last century. I suspect that these cascading failures will increase as our tired power grid continues to show its age.

Mods may want to move this to the cafe.

I put this in General Flashlight Discussion because I was hoping to get responses as to what type of flashlights were employed during the outage.

Supernam said:

On a side note, I couldn't believe how crappy people were driving just because the street signals were out. Don't they know to treat them like a stop sign?

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The wider the street (more lanes going in one direction), the more anxious people seem to get when the street signals are out.

I was in the UM school of medicine when the power outage occurred. The lights didn't even go out, just flickered for about 2 seconds...the generators here act very quickly!

I had this in my pocket as usual. Too bad I didn't get to put it to good use :candle:

The power outage was during the day, so not much use for flashlights.

Also, most residents down here are hurricane-hardened, so most people
have generators. (Especially since the last hurricane season was a non-event, everyone should have been fully-stocked.)

I had a Surefire A2 that people borrowed if they had to use the bathroom.
(Most of the office can receive natural lighting except the bathrooms)

I live in Central Florida and was not hit with the blackout. I was in Miami during Hurricane Andrew some 15 or so years ago and remember what it was like driving around without street lights.

Many people simply don't understand that when the signal lights are out, you treat every intersection that would have signal lights like a stop sign. It was an unpleasant experience stopping at every intersection just to have people in back of me honk their horns like I was doing something wrong.

Back to topic, when I heard about the blackout down in South Florida, I secretly hoped, just for a second, it would make its way up to my place by night.

We flashaholics must dream.

Nope, I was in School when it went down and nothing. I live in Broward county like a half hour from Downtown Miami but there are only two Schools in my county that get power from that reator and I was;nt in one of them. Almost all schools in Dade-Miami county though were hit and traffic lights did'nt work for like three hours down there. I did however have my L4 in my Backpack though so it would'nt have been dark in my class anyway.

-Evan

It didn't effect us in North Florida.

Another "huh?" from Gainesville.

we got hit with a hiccup or two here and there.
My school [Brevard Community College, Cocoa campus] was out from 3-6PM, running on propane backup gennys. I didn't get to use any flashlights
I heard it was allocated in the southern triangle beginning with the line drawn from Tampa to Miami...I think ours was an isolated issue:candle:

when i heard it on the news i thought of cpf
i was hoping for some more stories but none..:shrug:

anybody from britain lose power from the earthquake? :devil:

spyderknut said:

Another "huh?" from Gainesville.

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Yep, although I did get buckets of water on the drive home.

Funny thing is the wife and kid were going to Disney yesterday but canceled due to the in-laws being sick. I get home and she tells that Disney lost power too.

I live in Southwest Broward. The lights flickered here, perhaps 5 seconds in a surge-like momentary outage. I was watching CNBC and around 1:30 they announced that Miami was blacked-out and that is how I found out my community was an island with lights, surrounded in the east, south and north by a blackout, then I put 2 and 2 together and realized that the surge I experienced about 20 minutes earlier was related to it. Dummy me! :thinking:

I placed a few calls to family and friends and all of Miami was out.

But the media really hypes it too much. It was really only about 1 million people, not 4 million and many people got power back in 10 minutes, most in 1 hour, and a very few lingered for 3 hours.

I was surprised to see how the news spread all over the world. Google news showed over 1000 worldwide news hit for the event. Every TV channel and radio station was pre-empt and school buses were forbidden to carry students. I felt that was a bad decision because the kids were being let out only if parents came and got them. This means that for a school bus that normally carries 40 students, there would be 40 parents in cars coming to pick up their kids...only adding to the congested traffic nightmare. Somehow I think the authorities in charge just don't think things out.

Oddly, at the same time the Brits got hit with a 4.4 reichter scale tremor because I was online with some Brits at another forum and someone posted they felt a tremor.

I was carrying a Surefire 6P, but it was bright out, and I only saw one traffic signal down. Other than showing off the new acquisition, it didn't come out. I was a little disappointed ^_^

Did lose power for a half-minute to two minutes or so a few hours later as Florida Pillage & Loot made repairs, I guess.