I happened to be visiting family in Toronto last week, and when the power outage occurred I was on the train from Toronto to Ottawa to visit my brother. We thought we were hard done by when we found out that the train had to travel slowly (no power for the r/y X'ing signals, so the train had to go slow every time it came to a road). The train was almost 2 hours late getting to Ottawa, on what is normally a 5-hour trip. Later, I came to realise we were among the lucky ones, when we saw how it had affected air travel and buses.

Arrived in Ottawa after dark - very weird, walking through the train station with only a couple of emergency lights. Kicking myself because I had left my key-ring with the Photon flashlight on it at my sister's place in T.O. Tried to phone my brother but none of the payphones were working - I found out later that I could have made a collect call but didn't realise it at the time. Took a cab to my brother's house in the dark, again very weird driving through the dark and treating all intersections as 4-way stops. I don't know if this happened elsewhere but every driver in Ottawa just seemed to do it like they'd been trained that way. My brother was home waiting for me when I arrived, we sat around talking for a while, then went for a walk around the neighbourhood. Power came back on about midnight, we watched the news, then I went to bed about 1 a.m. Power went out as I was going to bed, didn't come back on until about 5 a.m. when it woke me up. It was on for a while, then went back out, came on again briefly, then was out for most of the rest of the day.

All in all, I think we got off very lightly. Our water kept running and the power came back relatively quickly. We did start to get into the mindset of doing things as soon as the power came on, because after it failed the third or fourth time, we clued in that it could go out again at any minute.

I didn't remember until the second day that I had my Altoid tin in the bag for my laptop, and there was another Photon inside - I took that out and hooked it to my (other) keychain, but I never had to use it.

I must confess, I used to think all the discussions on this board about "urban survival" were a little bit over the top. I have now seen the light - ironically <img src="images/graemlins/wink.gif" alt="" />

I never got around to putting my Altoids tin back together after it got ripped apart by airport security personnel a couple of months ago. I hadn't realised how much I had gotten used to carrying a Photon on my keychain until I needed it and didn't have it. Also, I had debated bringing my Ham radio with me and had decided against it because I didn't expect to use it and didn't want to carry the added weight. I'm seriously thinking about buying a 2m handheld now.

I think the people who were worst affected were probably the people who "put all their eggs in one basket". The ones who needed electricity for *everything*, including water.

For me, the blackout never got to the point of being even an annoyance - it was more a mini-adventure than anything. As we were right across the river from Quebec, which had power, I knew that we could always fill up with gas and, if necessary, propane, albeit at greatly inflated prices, but we never had to. I know that for many others, it was very serious.

With the number of disasters happening concurrently - SARS, mad cow disease, the prolonged droughts in the prairies, the killer heat wave in Europe, the forest fires in BC and southern Alberta, and now the largest blackout in history (at least, if you don't consider the absence of electricity in Iraq and Afghanistan to come under the heading of "power outage"), I think things may be about to get much worse, permanently. Commentators no longer talked about global warming as a theory, they spoke of it as an established fact. It's frightening to think that we may already have passed the point of no return, and that nothing we do can avert global environmental catastrophe.

A few years ago, I would have dismissed such speculation as wacko conspiracy theories; now, I'm more than ever convinced that all these disasters are Mother Nature's way of saying "Geez! Take a hint, you morons!" <img src="images/graemlins/blush.gif" alt="" />