Word: blackouts
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...arrests on the night of the blackout in New York City compared with 950 on a typical night...
There's nothing like a multistate summertime blackout to get environmentalists and industry groups throwing spitballs at one another. Extreme greens wag told-you-so fingers and dream anew about a grid-free country, with homeowners generating their own power courtesy of clean, renewable energy sources. Industry types speak instead about building new nuclear or conventional power plants or muscling up existing ones--and delivering all the juice through a modernized distribution system...
Long before last week's blackout, environmentalists and industry researchers had begun evaluating the idea of "power parks"--communities or mere groups of homes that would generate their own energy courtesy of solar panels, wind turbines, fuel cells or natural-gas generators. The little clusters could be almost entirely self-sufficient, relying on the grid only in the event that they needed to top themselves off with a sip or two of outside power. Just as important, they would have the freedom to disconnect from the larger network entirely if a regional crash was threatening to knock them off-line...
Certainly, terrorists might be tantalized by the massive social and economic disruption the blackout caused. The episode brought chaos to 50 million people in eight states and Canada and showed just how vulnerable the tightly knit network of generators and transmission lines is. In the wake of a similar wholesale crash of the system that sent the Northeast into darkness 38 years ago, the powers that be said they had enacted safeguards to ensure that such an epic loss wouldn't happen again. The experts assumed that if something went wrong, the culprit would be an act of nature...
...were willing to overlook the 90° heat, the gridlocked traffic, the lack of water, the absence of cash, the 40-flight treks down office-building stairs, the day-old clothes wilting on your back and the food turning into inedible goo inside your refrigerator, the blackout was a lot of fun. Really...