Huge Power Outage in Houston Area

Wow, this is incredible. EVERY county surrounding Harris County, where Houston is contained in, is completely DEAD! This is almost a New York Blackout bad. Compared to New York, perhaps more land. CPFer 'PlayBoyJoeShmow' should be out. I am just barely in the area thats with power. In fact my dads house, just 15 miles away is out. I am about to head out there now to have some fun. Perhaps my favorite Holiday of the year just got moved up 20 days or so (4th of July). Truly incredible. What should be thousands of homes, are out. They have helicopters out there, all you can see is car headlights...for miles. Traffic lights are out obviously. And to make things MUCH worse, the first thing the TV (obviously filled with "pre-lies" filling your head with something to keep you entertained) says, is that it could be out for 3-4 days. Of course they dont know much, but maybe their right if an entire power plant went out. Think of how much money is going to be flushed down the toilet, at mostly grocery stores with all the cold items. We do have generators at our grocery store I work at, but they DO NOT run freezers. Just registers so that we can get whats left of customers out of there without too much being stolen. I am on my way out to my dads house right now with a few flashlights. Called him and he said "its really dark." heh. This could become a large issue if it really goes that long, perhaps Red Cross involved and if out long enough, even be possibly declared a Disaster Zone. I am surprised that only one station of 5 or so is talking about it and reporting it, but the more I think about it, its probably because they are out of power too and cant transmit. Truly an eye opener to people who take electricity for granted!

Cameron

WOW...

I just looked at CNN, CNBC and Fox and not a word from any of them.

Google News it. I promise it happened, and still happening. The big prison in Huntsville went into lockdown mode I read. I guess its one of those huge steel lines that go way up in the air. Somewhere one of those are knocked out, causeing all this mess. At my dads house, the power is back, but he is on the southern most tip of all of this, so I suspect bordering energy companies helped each other out to get it back on for some. Now the "official" estimate from Entergy, the power company involved says 8 hours minimum. More realistically is tommorow evening, everyone should be back up. click2houston.com, the NBC branch here has a little story on it. Not much as their is not much to tell anymore. But it was surely dark out there on the streets. Entertained me for a little while.

Cameron

According to this article:

http://www.ktre.com/Global/story.asp?S=3480905&nav=2FH5b5mW

the power has started coming back on.

I read that it was a transmission failure but my wife was just DXing Houston MW and she heard that it was caused by a fire in a turbine.

Hey, I live in spring branch area. no blackout /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/icon23.gif

Heh, Harris County is served by Reliant. It was Entergy's lines that went out. So everything in Harris is good to go. As far as the fire goes, I was listening to the local NBC affiliate and they were talking to a spokesman at the power plant. As soon as the anchors even asked about the rumor of a fire, he said that it was absolutly false. It got around fast, but apparently that wasnt true. Probably looked like it as at the main power plant at the root cause of all this, their were fire trucks and what not all over the place. I believe, from the areas that are coming back, its Reliant helping out, and Entergy just flipping switches to get some power rerouted. But from what I understood, the bulk of the area out, is still out. The 'back-up' generators at a back-up plant also went offlinel, so that tossed that idea too.

Whatever ends up being the root cause, it made it fun for me and I am sure our fellow flashaholic(s) in that still down area are having a blast.

Cameron

boy, am i glad there was no outages here! /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif

Yep. San Jacinto county was among the losers.

We were out from about 7:30P to about 12:30A. I had light WAY covered, but I could have really used some BIG generator power to run the central AC!

Rumor has it it could happen again today... let us hope not! I have a WAY early wake up for a job over in Waller. I need the AC for good sleep!

I love blackouts as much as any flashaholic, but they also remind me of how vulnerable we are to even "small" terrorist acts; knock out a single turbine, down a transmission tower, start a fire in a NYC subway control room (happened a few months ago) and you can easily paralyse a modern city or region.

Sorry to inject a negative note, but after being in Manhattan during 9/11 I find myself thinking about these things more often than I would like.

Brightnorm