Anyone experience blackout last New Years?

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Last New Years' coming home from a party early, it was eirie driving through our town. There were no lights. I had just started learning about the depth of the Y2k issues, and felt like I'd been transported into the future. It lasted about a half hour.

Later I read in the NRC's contingency plan that clocks run ahead twelve months at the New Year, and that Jan 1, 1999 was a date for potential problems. Recently I talked with a Y2K buddy who lives about an hour from me. So he's in a different electrical circuit, I assume. He said his power was blacked out last New Years for about 45 minutes.

Did any of you experience blackouts at that time? Can those of you who work for the utilities explain what happened?

Victoria

-- Anonymous, October 09, 1999

Answers

Hi Victoria. There weren't any date-caused outages reported anywhere in North America for the rollover into 1999. For that matter, there haven't been any I know of up through September 1999. So there is a high likelihood that your particular outage was caused by something other than the date change.

As has been discussed numerous times before, the pre-Y2k dates aren't a very good indicator of what will happen 1/1/2000, so this doesn't necessarily mean that there's nothing to worry about.

-- Anonymous, October 09, 1999


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