Yes, we were hit by the major power cut. We woke up early monday morning after a night of no power, sitting in a dark with no a/c, no lights, and no fans. Thankfully, we remembered McDonald's now sells breakfast here. So, we made an early morning trip to get out of the dark and heat for an egg McMuffin and hash browns. Then, we went and sat at a friends' house who had a back up battery (which meant they had a working fan). Day 2 - We went and hung out at the mall which thankfully has huge back up generators and had not run out of diesel yet. About 15 minutes after we got home (around 8 o'clock) the power came on in Capital (at which time we heard a cheer all across the neighborhood). We were so grateful. It is kinda funny though that we lose power all the time and it never makes the news. I guess if it effects the Chai Countries politicians, then it is a big deal. ;)
Here is a play by play of what happened throughout the 2nd day by the Times of India
A photo of who was effected
Article taken from the newspaper "The Hindu"
that explains what happened.
"A massive power failure hit India for the second day Tuesday as three national grids collapsed, blacking out more than half the country in an unprecedented outage affecting over 600 million people.
Hundreds of miners were trapped underground in West Bengal when the lifts failed, metro services were stopped temporarily in the capital and hundreds of trains were held up nationwide.
"The North, northeastern and the eastern grids are down but we are working and we will have them restored shortly," Naresh Kumar, a spokesman at the Power Grid Corporation of India Ltd, said.
Power Minister Sushilkumar Shinde said the monster outage, which struck around 1:00 pm in the middle of the working day, was caused by states drawing power "beyond their permissible limits."
There appeared to have been a domino effect, with the overloaded northern grid drawing too heavily on the eastern grid which in turn led the northeastern network to collapse.
An area stretching from the western border with Pakistan to the far northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh was affected, with New Delhi, Kolkata and Lucknow without power.
In New Delhi, the metro train system came to a standstill for a few hours and traffic lights went out, causing chaos for a second day after a failure on the northern grid on Monday which caused the worst outage in more than a decade.
On the streets, people seethed over the lack of air conditioning, crashed computer systems and missed deliveries."
WOW Mel, that is HUGGGEEE! 600 million people... a number I can't even comprehend!
ReplyDeleteGlad you've got power back :)