I live one hour west of Ottawa. Our power was off from 4 p.m. Thursday until 11 a.m. Friday, then from 2 - 4 p.m. again as they ran (intentional this time) rolling blackouts.

Strangely enough, peaceful Ottawa seemed to have more incidents of looting than anywhere else that I heard of--22 as opposed to 4 in NYC! Two of the three reported deaths (in the whole outage area) were in Ottawa too, and there were several opportunistic armed robberies. My hometown seems to be changing somewhat.

It seems the politicians on both sides of the border are playing the "blame the other country" game without actually lying. All the reports seem to indicate that actual power station incidents occurred in the U.S., possibly relating to the Con Edison plant in Manhattan, a lightning strike in Niagara Falls NY, or, most ominously, what was reported variously as a "fire" or a "shutdown" at an unspecified nuke in Pennsylvania. That's why our PM is saying it's American-caused.

The other side of the coin is that the situation may indeed have been related to a sudden increase in demand from the Canadian side--which caused the whole grid to become unstable when one or more of the incidents occurred at the American plants.

Truthfully, it's entirely credible to me that there was a problem on the Canadian side. The Ontario government has shown themselves to be a bunch of complete nitwits with no idea how to run a complex power system, they keep making radical changes (you guessed it--deregulation and "free market") then back-tracking three months later. They also broke up Ontario Hydro into several different companies. One runs generating plants, another runs all transmission facilities, and yet another, which sounds like a stock market, decides what power goes where when. If there's a bright side to this, it's another drop-kick to the Tories chances of re-election.

Everything seems OK now, until the next crisis. Except I can't get e-mail.

Bill

Bill