The Oil Drum

Originally reported by Con Edison as a small isolated power outage affected at most 2,000 people, it was determined yesterday that the outage really affected something like 100,000 in Astoria, Long Island City, Sunnyside, Woodside and Hunter's Point sections of Queens. The power outage was caused by a mixture of aging infrastructure, high temperatures, high electrical demand and thunderstorms that flooded certain areas since last Sunday. And there is currently no end in sight, despite original promises of 1-2 days.

Here's today's coverage: NY Post, NY Times and more NY Times, NY Newsday and NY Daily News.

It probably will become clear over the next few days, but currently I'm proud that once again New York has shown that it can handle disruptions like this without going crazy. See an old classic PO-NYC post comparing the peaceful 2003 city-wide blackout to the more violent and distructive 1977 blackout and my review of James Goodman's book "Blackout"