The Traffic Signal Museum

BLACK OUT 2003

Where were you when the lights went out on August 14th, 2003?

I arrived home from work at my usual time around 3:45pm. I wanted to go down to City Hall to see about a permit to do some work on the outside of my home. I got all the information together that I thought they might be interested in and headed out at about 4:09pm with a CD playing in my vehicles audio system. 

After leaving my subdivision, the first set of traffic signals I came to were flashing red. I thought "UH OH, what happened here?" Then they were flashing red and also showing solid green! I saw that traffic from the cross street had stopped, and then the flashing red disappeared, so I started through the intersection. 

Almost a mile down the road, traffic seemed to be backing up. Then I saw that the signals at the intersection I was coming up to were dark. I was heading south and needed to make a Michigan left so I could go east. I eventually got through the intersection, treating it as a 4 way stop. 

Once I was heading east, I was on a stretch of road with 4 sets of traffic signals within the next mile. This was next to a major automotive tech center. All of these signals were also dark. I was beginning to wonder how wide spread the power outage was. I had no idea of the magnitude since I was listening to a CD rather than the radio. 

When I finally arrived at City Hall, traffic was crawling everywhere due to all of the signals being out. I went inside and a lot of people were leaving. I over heard a few people saying that the radio was saying half of the eastern U.S. had lost power. I was thinking to myself that they must be crazy, how could that happen? Then some were wondering if it might be terrorism. I started thinking maybe they weren't so crazy after all. I was able to submit my plans for my house work and then I started back for home. 

As soon as I got back in my vehicle, I turned on the local news station and sure enough, it was true! New York, parts of Canada, northern Ohio and south east Michigan were the first major areas that were mentioned as being affected. To my relief, they were already reporting that there were no indications of this being caused by terrorism. 

Traffic was getting even worse! I tried to take a route that was usually less traveled, but it didn't matter, traffic was clogged up everywhere because of no signals and it was during rush hour. I was surprised to find a rail road crossing that was functioning. Apparently the controls of a crossing have a fail safe built in that activates the crossing signals with a battery back up in case of a power failure. The lights were flashing and the gates were down which was also causing a major traffic snarl. As I neared the gates, I saw them starting to raise erratically and then start falling and raising again and acting very strange. Traffic was able to pass the crossing since the gates were partially raised. When I was only a few cars away, I could see that two men were holding the gates up so traffic could pass. I never knew how the gates functioned before then. I found out later that they are carefully balanced and lower by gravity. There is a motor to raise the gates and a mechanism to hold them in the up position when a train is not coming. 

Eventually, I made it home. My wife thought she would have a surprise for me when I got home and found the power was out, but I had the surprise. She was astounded when I told here how wide spread the outage really was. The radio had talked about water supplies loosing power and water pressure dropping, so the first thing I did was start to gather up containers and fill them with whatever water we could get out of the tap. Our pressure had dropped to a point that only one of our two toilets would fill up, but we were still able to get water out of the tap. After collecting as much water as I could, I got a supply of batteries and powered up a radio. They were still talking about the water problem and that the water system could get contaminated with such low pressure. A boil water alert was soon issued.

I was glad to be home and out of the traffic mess. The radio was mentioning many people were running out of gas because there weren't any stations with power to pump gas! A major run on ice and bottled water also ensued.  I tried to call my parents but phone service was in and out and cell phones were not working at all. I did eventually get a dial tone and was able to contact my parents via our land line. We made plans for the night as far as saving our food was concerned. We also started boiling some of the water we collected. 

Fortunately, we have a gas stove in my home and that utility seemed to be working fine, so we were able to prepare a meal without too much difficulty. After that I waited a couple hours so most people would hopefully be off the streets and then emptied our fridge and took all of our perishable food items over to my parents house. My father had his generator powering his home and told me that I could use the propane powered fridge in his camper/trailer.  So the food supply was now safe.

I returned home to find a new minor problem. Although we had a couple flash lights, we hadn't suffered a power outage at night for so long that we didn't know if we had any candles and where they might be. After much digging and searching by flashlight, we found seven candles and had enough light to see by in the dark. It is surprising how much light you can get from just one small flame on a candle!

On to the next problem. Our six year old is used to sleeping with a night light. He was wide awake due to the unusual activities of the evening and the fact that there were no lights on in the house and it was very warm by now since the AC was not working. At almost 11pm, he finally gave up the fight and fell asleep in the living room where all the candles were. I had been scrambling to find some small battery powered source of light so that I could put him in his bedroom and leave him with a night light. I did find a small battery powered utility closet light and put that on his shelf in his room and prayed that the batteries would last the night.

I decided to try to sleep in a hammock that hangs in my basement since it was much cooler down there.  I went down there, turned on one light so I would know if the power came on in the middle of the night, made myself as comfortable as possible and turned off the flashlight. WOW! PITCH BLACK! I couldn't see my hand in front of my face! We are so used to city lights illuminating the night sky enough that you can usually see something. What a strange experience this was! I was tired and it didn't take me long to fall asleep. I woke up around 1 am because sleeping in a hammock wasn't as comfortable as I had imagined it would be! After laying there awake for about 15 minutes I drifted off to sleep again. 

Just after 3 am I was awakened by the terrified screams of my six year old son upstairs. THE BATTERIES MUST HAVE DIED! I turned on the flashlight that I had with me in the hammock and got out of it so fast that I dropped the flashlight and it hit the floor with a crash and went out! PITCH BLACK AGAIN! UGH! I felt around in the dark for the light and finally found it. I thought for sure it had broken by the sound of it hitting the floor, but it came back on when I hit the switch. I raced up stairs and grabbed some more batteries for the night light. My son was very relieved once dad came in and put in new batteries. 

After that I returned to the hammock and slept again until about 4:55am when I was awakened by the light above my head turning on. HALLELUJAH! The power was back on! I went upstairs and turned on the TV. They were saying that power was starting to come back on in a few areas, but that full power wouldn't be available for at least a couple days so people should try to use as little as possible. I really wanted to switch on the AC, but instead I went to bed in my bed upstairs and just used a fan to keep cool.

I wasn't able to sleep much so I got up a half hour later since it was the usual time that I would get up to get ready for work. I called the fax machine number where I work to see if it would answer. If it did, then I knew there would be power and I would have to go to work. It just rang and rang, so I knew I could stay home for now. 

 A couple hours later I decided to have breakfast in front of the TV. OOPS! NO MILK for the cereal! I discovered that dry cereal is really pretty good! The TV was now saying that even though some communities were starting to get power back, there were concerns in some places that the sewage pumps had been off for too long and some basements might get raw sewage backing up in them. What a nightmare that would be I thought! 

Later that day, I went to my parents home to retrieve our food since our power stayed on. While driving through our subdivision, I realized that half of the sub was still without power and I was right on the edge of a small area that received power first. My parents still were without power, but later in the afternoon, about 24 hours after the outage began, many places were finally getting power back.  A new problem was now developing. Many people were low on gas in their cars on Thursday and now that some gas stations were getting power to their pumps, these stations had lines of cars from just out the parking lot, to some as long as close to a mile! This lead to the few stations with power, quickly running out of gas! I was glad that both of the vehicles that my family relies on had plenty of gas in them.

As of this writing, it is now almost 48 hours after the power went out. All power has been restored except for a few small areas with isolated problems. I am very thankful that this was just a normal failure of an aging electrical system and NOT a terrorist attack. We call our nation a super power, but look at how many problems arose from just loosing power. Water pressure loss and contamination, traffic jams, communications problems, possible sewage back ups, restaurants and stores loosing perishable food supplies, mad rushes on non-perishable food, water, and ice, and then on gas once power was on in some places. We as a nation have become so dependant on everything working smoothly and we take it all for granted! People need to learn to be more prepared for things like this! Stock up on non-perishable food and other emergency supplies. Learn a lesson from this! 

Over all it was good to hear that there were not big increases in crime because of the situation. There were some tense moments at some gas stations, but for the most part that was the worst of it. I heard of some great things happening where people were helping others out. For example, I heard radio stations announcing where some people were located with their cars out of gas and people would come out with their lawn mower gas cans and give people some gas so they could get to a gas station or get home. I also saw a person in a passing car hand a container of bottled water to a policeman directing traffic. The policeman had a few bottles of water at his feet from other drivers as well. It was so great to see the good in people come out in a situation like this. I would like to extend a thank you to every person out there who did something to help out someone else through this crisis.