Massive power outage blackens Vancouver Island

Massive power outage blackens Vancouver Island

www.ctvbc.ctv .ca

www.nationalpost.com...

A massive power outage has hit southern Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands.


The blackout, caused by a transmission outage, affected about 178,000 customers south of Ladysmith on Vancouver Island, according to B.C. Hydro.


The lights went out at about 5:40 p.m. PT and almost to the hour switched back on in areas around Victoria.


Ted Olynk, spokesman for B.C. Hydro, said: "Crews are patrolling the line trying to detect the cause of the outage."

(visit the link for the full news article)



Headline: Please use the original story headline from your source.

[edit on 13-10-2008 by 12m8keall2c]

So what about all of these power outages? It is all over the world, not just were we live.....

What do you guys think is going on?

here is another snipet:"I can't remember a power outage of this scope," Schenk said. While some traffic lights continued to function on back-up power at major intersections, other lights were out during the power outage. There were no known traffic accidents as a result, Schenk said. "We're relieved it was as short as it was," Schenk said.

However, when the lights came back on, it seemed like "basically half the alarms in the municipality went off," he said. Because police couldn't assume the alarms going off in businesses and households were false, officers were sent out to investigate each call.

"They just kept going to the next one, and the next one, until they were all done," he said.

Although Saanich, a city in the greater Victoria region, has a three-strikes policy for false alarms at homes and businesses which can result in a hefty fine, the police cancelled the policy for Sunday night with the understanding the power failure was to blame. Meanwhile, the power failure turned out to be a blessing in disguise for some.

"Thankfully we had just finished cooking a huge spread for Thanksgiving dinner when the power went out so we lit candles and had a family feast by candle light," said Victoria Times Colonist reader Matt Amedro in a post to the newspaper's website. "It was nice."



www.ctvbc.ctv .ca
(visit the link for the full news article)

reply to post by mellisamouse


Why does the article say what caused the blackout, then say they are trying to find out what caused it?

[edit on 13-10-2008 by space cadet]

Originally posted by space cadet
reply to post by mellisamouse

 

Why does the article say what caused the blackout, then say they are trying to find out what caused it?

[edit on 13-10-2008 by space cadet]

yeah, it is a wee bit strange. I read another one saying it was high winds, and it aren't that windy at my house, and there wasn't even a breeze at THAT time.

(my poor english is intentional just to be charming)

Whazzap with the thread title??



Thought power outages were common. I don't see the big deal

Originally posted by Chadwickus
Whazzap with the thread title??

Thought power outages were common. I don't see the big deal

Never at ALL like this in our area....it was not just one ISland but the GULF islands, and parts of Alaska, and apparently other parts of the world as well. (I am trying to find sources of the other places)

Haarp powered up? I wonder how much energy that thing needs and where it all comes from...

Living here, I can only ask how the power can go out on Thanksgiving weekend for 200,000 people, and here we are the next morning and B.C. Hydro is telling us that they "don't know what happened"?

How can you not know what happened?

Does this mean power just "stopped"?

Obviously nothing blew up or was damaged, because the power was on again to everybody only a couple of hours later.

We live in a part of the world where power doesn't go out like this, and if it does, it's not over this large an area, and Hydro tells us what happened within about 15 minutes of it going out.

That didn't happen this time, and for an idea of the scope of the blackout, the lower half of Vancouver Island is a VERY big place, with power lines running through some of the most remote country in Western Canada.

Prolly has something to do with the new controversial TRAVOL power lines through Tsawwassen to the island/Port Angeles.

[edit on 13-10-2008 by all2human]

Hey, can I say UFO on this one.

Blackouts were quite common and don't think a UFO was ever connected
but some people like to hear about UFOs as a cause.

Knocking out power plants was a Tesla exclusive since he invented them
(and GE built them).

In Colorado Springs he managed to burn out a generator with
his immense coils of copper wire. Guggenheim must have loved this
guy Tesla beside all the telegraph lines of copper.
Wait, radio would some day reduce the need for copper wire but
there was always the power plant and plumbing.


Now quite a different phenomena called eddy currents was displayed
by Spielberg in 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind" when the
stalling of electrical car ignition occurred.

So the same electrical effect might manage to knock out power
plants somewhere down the line.

So I say UFO which will never be found anyway.

ED: Yeah I always thought it was black mail to get more UFO
funding or we will knock out more power plants.
They do it every time.
They made NASA for them and the funding has dried up now.



[edit on 10/13/2008 by TeslaandLyne]

It would be cool if it were the UFO thing, but what if it IS some harp thing or whatever.....


I just REALLY don't want the net to go down at all. I don't care about all the cable blackouts, but the power sux. I never watch TV and barley use a cell, so that part dosen't bother me, but I am a net junkie!

I read somewhere the Canadian military was being put on heightened alert this week, due to elections.

Coincidence? OK, I'm just a conspiracy theorist digging for a connection...I'll admit it.

Meh, I doubt it. I have seen UFO's, and didn't make some dramma about it like I was telling a story about the boogie man.

I don't understand the fear, OR the DRAMMA about the ufo thing. In my opinion, they have ALLWAYS been around, they are HARMLESS, because if they really wanted to do something they would have by now.

I guess wehn people first started to see things like say a WHALE they proby made some big dramma about it like they were "chosen" or "special" too......to me itis like seeing a whale...cool, but not a big dramma like you witnessed a murder or something so need to be all in shock.

As for the military in Canada, well......they are probly getting ready for november 11th, they do lots of ceremonies and stuff like that hee for remeberance day.

Oh well, if it goes out for longer periods of time we may have to bring out the candle light dinners again, and mabey play some twister and monopoly I gues......mabey it isn't such a bad thing, like on the Simpsons when the cable went out, and all the kids started playing outside again etc.

I can confirm that random house alarms were going off during the time of the power outage. I was locked outside my house during the whole event (I had no key; my garage doors are automated) so I could hear them all over the place. It only lasted for about an hour. I was walking along the beach in the evening and saw the most fantastic sight, as the entire coast of the Island, from where I was standing, lit up spontaneously and synchronously.

[edit on 13-10-2008 by cognoscente]

Originally posted by cognoscente
I was walking along the beach in the evening and saw the most fantastic sight, as the entire coast of the Island, from where I was standing, lit up spontaneously and synchronously.

[edit on 13-10-2008 by cognoscente]

really? Like lightening or something? Could that have caused a power surge-knockout like that?

Here is an not so cool event:

- The fuse box in the Bickfofd's home blew up and shot 2 fuses 20 ft. down the hall and left imprints in the opposite wall.
- fuses were not blown.
- Seconds before the "Boom" Mr. Bickford's daughter, Cynthia heard a loud sound, like P.A. feed-back and Mrs. B.heard hailstones hitting her bedroom window and felt a terrible pressure in her head.
- All light switches and TV were blown out.
- A ball of fire shot of the oven and passed through the front door.
- A neighbor saw a blue flame shoot up out of an iron baking pan.
- Many neighbor's lights came on for a few seconds but switches were off.
- Many neighbor's TV's and electrical appliances were destroyed.
- Blue flames shot out of plumbing fixtures. (neighbor's)
- Boy on a bike saw a ball of blue fire 3 ft in diameter hovering, with orange around the edges, discharging sparks from the outer surface of the ball.
- A grandfather clock that had not worked in years, suddenly started and the hands moved forward at an accelerated rate. (Paul Bickford)
- The bickford's 2 room shack, behind the home, had a portion of the roof and wall blown out in the rear corner.
- The wire inside the A.C. drop into this building was completely vaporized, leaving only the melted insulation.
- Chicken coop behind summer home was destroyed killing 5 chickens.
-Horse in attached barn was OK ( no electrical wires in barn)
- Behind the barn in the woods were three mysterious holes in the ground 2 ft. deep, in a equilateral triangle formation 2 ft apart.
- Above the holes, a fir was scorched a quarter of it's height about 20 ft.
- A man outside sawing wood, saw odd blue hail that stuck to his raincoat that disappeared within seconds, before he heard the boom and saw a bright orange flash.
- Many witnesses saw an orange glow or smoke in the woods, "like iron ore dust."

TESLA WEAPON EVENT AT BELL ISLAND, CANADA, 1978

I always like to think of this as a UFO backfire.

This new event is weird, like an alarm system locked up... due
to high frequency electrostatics perhaps.

Electrostatics is always weird.

Very interesting indeed. I've always been curious about Tesla's more enigmatic inventions... It would be so strange and wonderful to see them in work today. Though in all honesty I believe the power outage here had something to with a transmission line failure, due to the very sporadic, very violent windstorm we had over the weekend. Traffic lights went out just a week ago after a similar storm.

There is just so much more to Tesla and his marvels with electricity, I feel, than anyone really knows, even those commanding his secrets. He is THE mad scientist. A model for satire for the last hundred years; he has become a sadly unacknowledged genius. Who knows, out of the so many unexplainable happenings, some related to power outages, some not, some must surely be attributed to the recreation of Tesla' wildest, strangest, most uninhibited experiments...

[edit on 13-10-2008 by cognoscente]

My theory on this is:

(www.spaceweather.com...) GEOMAGNETIC STORM: This past weekend when magnetometer needles began to swing at the Polar Light Center in Lofoten, Norway, researcher Rob Stammes knew something was up. "A geomagnetic storm was underway," he says.

The storm began on Oct. 11th when a solar wind stream hit Earth's magnetic field. Stammes' magnetometer recorded the impact and subsequent reverberations, which lasted for hours. In the chart recording, above, red shows how the local magnetic field was swinging back and forth while blue denotes electrical currents surging through the ground in response. Outside, Northern Lights were pulsating in sych with the chart recorder's colored pens. "Ground currents fluctuated with a 5-to-10 second period; the visible auroras were switching on and off in the same way," he says. "It was a really special sight."



-I was on the island when this happened.. there was no bad weather.. infact, it was really nice out....
-just before the power actually went out, the power surged quite a bit..
-with the transmission lines being a problem, I could see static build up being a problem.
- I believe the total with out power end up being over 250,000

would have been neat to see this from the sky or something, it covered a large area.

anyways, what do you guys think? possible geomagnetic storm influence?