FREE WHITEWATER

Daily Bread for 8.14.12

Good morning.

Whitewater’s election day will be sunny and warm, with a high of eighty.

About a decade ago, parts of the east coast experienced a day-long blackout:

On this day in 2003, a major outage knocked out power across the eastern United States and parts of Canada. Beginning at 4:10 p.m. ET, 21 power plants shut down in just three minutes. Fifty million people were affected, including residents of New York, Cleveland and Detroit, as well as Toronto and Ottawa, Canada. Although power companies were able to resume some service in as little as two hours, power remained off in other places for more than a day.

The outage stopped trains and elevators, and disrupted everything from cellular telephone service to operations at hospitals to traffic at airports. In New York City, it took more than two hours for passengers to be evacuated from stalled subway trains. Small business owners were affected when they lost expensive refrigerated stock. The loss of use of electric water pumps interrupted water service in many areas. There were even some reports of people being stranded mid-ride on amusement park roller coasters. At the New York Stock Exchange and bond market, though, trading was able to continue thanks to backup generators.

From Google’s daily puzzle, a question about the natural order: “What cannot happen to energy according to the law that’s expressed mathematically as delta U = Q – W?”

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