Word: blackouts
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...failures that, in a little more than an hour, led to a near total power loss for more than 50 million people in the northeastern U.S. and parts of Canada. Full power wouldn't be restored for everyone in the affected area until Aug. 18. It was the largest blackout in North American history - and five years later, with the grid sagging again under the weight of increased energy demand, there's no guarantee that we won't see another outage...
Tracing the causes behind the 2003 blackout reveals just how unwieldy and vulnerable our electric grid has become. When that first transmission line in northern Ohio went off-line, it wiped out the redundancy and excess capacity built into the northeastern grid - and more things went wrong. First Energy, which was responsible for powering northern Ohio, should have detected the loss of that first line, but its energy management system wasn't working at the time (the company didn't know that). Higher up, the Midwest Independent System Operator's state estimator, which helps ensure reliability for several utility companies...
...ended in failure. Sitting in the mission control room during the final moments of the descent is like riding the bench during a baseball no-hitter: no one wants to jinx the outcome, so no one says a word. "Seven minutes of terror" is how Smith described the communications blackout as the spacecraft passed through the Martian atmosphere. One flight technician fidgeted with his pen. A few others rocked back and forth in their chairs, tension lines webbing their faces. Then came a simple radio burst, indicating Phoenix had reached its destination. Said Michael Wright, who helped design Phoenix...
...then the explanation could be relatively straightforward. "Someone who has a simple faint, if it's hot, or hasn't eaten, could have a period of low blood pressure that after they collapse could look like a neurological event." Even a reaction to medications could cause such a brief blackout. "It's just too early to say," he notes...
...groups, forcing several organizations, including the International Committee for the Red Cross and the French arm of Doctors Without Borders, to abandon their field offices. While some NGOs reported that their foreign workers were being granted special visas by the military to help with reconstruction efforts, the previous NGO blackout means that little infrastructure exists to help get supplies to the needy quickly...