tara cleveland

08/21/2003 Archived Entry: "How I Survived Blackout 2003"

So there I was gathering up clothes to put into the washer. I snapped on the bedroom light, took two steps and it flashed off. "Damn", I thought, "blown another fuse". I took my laundry down to the basement and tried to turn on the light. It didn't work either. "That's odd. I can't have blown all the electricity in the house" (I talk to myself a lot). I put the clothes in the washer and decided I'd investigate the power situation before putting any of the detergent into the washer (smart move Tara!). I went outside and everyone else was on their front porches looking confused, yelling across to neighbours in Portuguese or Italian and waving their arms around a lot. I walked down to the traffic lights - they were out too. I figured it was an outage like a couple of weeks ago when the transformer around the corner exploded in a huge fireball. I tried calling Toronto Hydro and got a recorded message saying that the number was out of service. I tried calling the operator. No answer. Curiouser and curiouser .

I called Dave at work. The phone rang and rang. I tried his cell phone. He answered. I told him the power was out. His power was out too. That's odd. The whole city without power? That explained why his work phones weren't working. There's something to be said for buying a cheap phone that just plugs into the wall with no extra power supply needed. His boss was on her cell talking to someone. We heard that Ontario and Quebec were without power. I decided to call someone far away, someone that would have internet access and could find out what was happening. I called Sabrina in London.

She was the goddess of information. My link to the outside world. Power was out across the east/mid-west. Cleveland, Toledo, New York, Ottawa, Toronto, Albany all out of power. Shit. Is it terrorists? No one knew. She told me to call back in a bit - or she'd call me if she heard more info. It was a bit scary. I wandered around the house aimlessly, wondering if I should continue working and use up all the battery on my laptop. I tried connecting to the internet via dial-up. I could connect to my ISP; I just couldn't get any web sites or download email. I guess their connection to the internet was off. I decided to conserve the rest of the battery in case I needed it for something important in the hours to come.

I tried calling my dad at the cottage - his power was out so the portable phone wasn't working - no answer. I tried calling my sister - no answer. But a few minutes later she was there. Apparently she'd been having trouble with her phones, she figured out that she could answer calls but not make any. The phone service answering machines seemed to be out. I called Dave again. Same deal. He could answer calls but not make any. No one at his work could make calls. They gave me the names and numbers for family that they needed to get in touch with and I called and passed on messages.

My mom was still not home after a couple of hours... I was getting a bit worried that her worst fear had come true and she was stuck in an elevator. But she eventually managed to get a lift home with a bunch of workmates that stopped in to use the toilets and call home. My sister and mom were safe and my dad was probably oblivious to the chaos because power outages are not uncommon at the cottage.

People in the neighbourhood were starting to arrive home from work, leaving their car radios on at top volume with all the doors open so everyone could hear the news. Some of the radio stations were out. It seemed like they had no backup generators. The news was on all the radio stations that were left. Even the music stations had gone to constant news.

I'd talked to Sabrina again and she let me know that they were claiming that it wasn't terrorists, just an overloaded grid. No one knew where the problem started. A fire in a power station in Manhattan, a lightning strike, a fire in a nuclear power plant in Ohio, not a fire in a nuclear power plant - just an overloaded nuclear plant ('cause that's so much better you know), it started in Canada, it started in New York, it started in Pennsylvania. Who knew? What I wanted to know was how they knew it wasn't terrorists when they didn't know how or where it happened.

Dave finally got home from work. Luckily we've got a gas stove and a barbecue so no problems cooking food. We'd eaten the last meat out of the freezer the night before so I wasn't too worried about food spoiling. We knew it was going to be hours before electricity came back on.

But I wanted - no needed - to know what was happening. What was the news? What was going on? When were the lights going to come back on? Would it be hours or days?

I went upstairs to see how many batteries my old ghetto-blaster took. As I turned it around the heavy metal speaker (the thing is almost 20 years old) fell on the top of my foot and I screamed. It was excruciatingly painful. I took the icepack out of the freezer and sat while the ice melted and my foot throbbed. I went through one ice pack. Dave got me a little transistor radio to listen to. I used up another ice pack. My foot was starting to feel better.

My sister called. She was taking my mom to the emergency room with a broken finger. Apparently they'd been out by the garden pond and my mom had been standing up on the rocks and had lost her balance. She'd managed to leap over the pond, but crash-landed on the other side, breaking her finger and dislocating two knuckles. My dad called a few minutes later (he'd finally plugged in the old phone and found out that the blackout was huge and that Mom had hurt herself). Dave joked that my sister had better watch out since with my grandma getting shingles, me breaking my wrist and hurting my foot and my mom breaking her fingers there was obviously a curse on the Colley-Cleveland women.

It got dark. It was still really hot. An overnight low in the mid-twenties was forecast, but the humidity made it clingy and sticky. No air-con tonight. We sat out in the backyard with the tiki torches going and listened to our neighbour playing guitar. We stared at the stars. I've never seen so many stars at night in Toronto. We could hear low voices in all the backyards down the street. I was still compulsively listening to the news every few minutes.

I decided I needed to go for a walk. My foot was feeling much better - using it would be good right? So we took a walk around a long block. Along Dupont to Christie, down Christie to Bloor, back to Shaw and up Shaw to our house.

Candles flickered in the windows of every house but everyone was out on their front porches - it was too hot to stay inside. Crazy people were out biking and roller blading in the dark. The cars swished by with headlights that destroyed our night vision. People had their battery-operated radios on full blast out the windows. People out smoking and drinking and eating junk food while watching the world drift by in the gloom. Kids had glow sticks they waved around. Flashlights flickered and waved in faces as walkers tried to avoid crashing into each other on the sidewalk. There was a general sense of jovial fun and excitement mixed with boredom. Lots of people were out wandering.

We stopped in Christie Pits, the closest park, and watched the stars. We could hear the voices of others doing the same on the other side of the park. We could see flashlights dancing as people picked their way down the hills. I wondered how many people were taking the opportunity for a little naked mamboing under the trees ;-)

We walked up Shaw street. It was eerily silent. No hum of electricity that is the background soundtrack of city life. I could smell all of the night flowers, honeysuckle sweetness drifting around me. I heard crickets in downtown Toronto for the first time ever. In fact I almost stepped on one on the sidewalk!

We got home. My foot was hurting again. Sat for a while longer and then decided there wasn't much else to do but sleep. Dave slept on the couch in the basement - it was too hot for him upstairs in the bedroom.

We woke up the next morning and our power was back on. But it wasn't on everywhere. I went to the hospital to have a new cast put on and I was lucky I had one of the first appointments because they closed the hospital to all outpatient and elective surgeries about 2 minutes after I checked in. They'd decided it was necessary to conserve power in case they had to use the back-up generators again. I wandered around the city a bit. It was quiet. The Eaton Centre was closed. I couldn't get any errands done because everything else was closed too. Traffic lights were out on one block and the next they were working. Strangers were still in that "disaster mode", chatting with one another and complaining about inconveniences. It took me an hour and a half to get home because the subways were out and I had to take hot, stinky buses home.

By the time I got home my foot was killing me. We were supposed to go to the cottage, but all the gas stations were out of gas and we didn't have enough in the car. I decided to go to emergency (all the other doctor's offices were closed) and have my foot checked out. I was just a bruised bone - not broken. The power went out again a few times, they said there'd be rolling blackouts all week. We got some gas on Saturday morning and stocked up on food. It was time to go north, to the cottage, where it doesn't really matter if there's no power, and "air-conditioning" means "the windows are open". It was good to be out of the chaos.

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