Re: now they can't hear us

[TTova <TTova...>]

Don't talk too loud we are back .... FOR NOW
In Toronto Electricity went out just after 4 PM thursday afternoon.
Cell phones were overloaded and so it took a while to reach my husband.
Thankfully my daughter was with me...My son is on a camping trip in Algonquin park and so probablty doesn't even know anything has happened.
As soon as I realized it was not a tripped breaker but an outage we went out to the air conditioned car to listen to the news reports. Thankfully our fears of terrorist attacks were unfounded. It was amazing to see every street light out and we marveled at how polite folks were. No honking...no aggressive driving. We Canadians are nothing if not polite. I can't imagine being one of the thousands of folks stuck in the subway tunnels or in skyscraper elevators!
The evening progressed very slowly as the sun went down. We found enough batteries to run my daughter's ghetto blaster and sat around listening to our public radio, CBC, between the bouts of it going down as well. Reminded me of stories of fire side chats with FDR
We opened cans of Tuna and sweltered with no fans or AC. The stars were brilliant.. that was a plus, and with a full moon the sky was stunningly bright.
We sat out on the front stoop listening to people walk by in the dark.there was a quiet beauty to thursday night that reminded us of just how dependent we are on technology. I admit I was going into computer withdrawl
Every larger store in our area was closed but I managed to buy 4 bags of ice, from our darkened corner store. We have a freezer with a whole side of beef in it. Prayed the blackout would not last the 2 days the radio news reports said it might
Lights finally came on for about 2 hours  at 5-7AM Friday morning but went out again by the time I woke up.
In my part of the city it came back on just after 10:30 AM. I ran to the grocery store and bought a few items. Power went out again at 2:30 and on again at about 5 PM last night. The experts say there will probably be rolling blackouts for the next 2-3 days. No subway service until at least Monday.
Damn our conservative gov't and their privatization of our hydro. There had been a lot of talk about private business running the system to close to overload and they certainly got more then anyone bargained for... Even if there was a fault in the grid, our system should have been able to handle the overload.
Maybe the government will now mandate an upgrading of the infrastructure.
They Ontario  Gov't announced a state of emergency the first night and asked the public to help in many ways....
1.  not to use water unless necessary
2. not to use candles ( we only hada 24 hour reserve and there would not be enough water for firefighting)
3. to stay off the streets in order to allow emergency vehicles easy access
4 they also asked non essential workers to stay home from work yesterday
....my husband is head carpenter on an OLSON Twins Movie and yet is on set.....working with generators?? I ask you why Movies are essential?

yes we will certainly remember the year Toronto got hit with SARS, WEST NILE, and now the Great North Eastern Blackout

Thanks for all your kind wishes.

Theresa Tova


On Saturday, August 16, 2003, at 11:42 AM, david lowther wrote:

> Hey guys, now that the folks on the eastern seaboard are incommunicado, we can gossip about them - except the only nasty thing I can think of is that it's so unfair that they have all these wonderful concerts that I can't get to.
>  
> I wonder how they're doing? 
>  
> Mary
www.theresatova.com