Lions and tigers and blackouts, oh my! Sorry for delayed posting
Earthquakes, hurricanes and tornadoes? They don’t faze me — especially if they’re in the East. But in a patch of the Left Coast this week, a 10-hour power outage knocked me for a loop. Actually, I had the ability to post to this blog all along. I just got distracted by day-and-night work obligations. I updated a story on the Great Blackout of 2011 dozens of times between 4 a.m Thursday and 5:30 a.m. Friday. (See it here.) I acted as rewrite man for all 13 Patch sites in San Diego County. Later Friday, my wife and I focused on La Mesa fallout. And Friday night we covered high school football.
Here's some spoiled food discarded by a local Ralphs. (Photo by Chris Stone)
My laptop’s power was supplied by my van (through a cigarette lighter connection), and I eventually moved to the La Mesa Police Station for a couple hours. I had a cute little (micro-boombox) battery operated radio to monitor KOGO, the only radio station on the air, and my Blackberry conveyed email from fellow Patch editors.
I have a backlog of two dozen masters track blog items — how the masters did at Daegu worlds (led by Bernard Lagat’s silver in the 5000 after lowering his own M35 WR on the Diamond League circuit), what USATF board member Steve Miller told Track & Field News about any new CEO (he said screw everything but elites), and possible USATF nominees for IAAF World Best Masters.
But tomorrow is 9/11, and I have a ton of chores and stories to do. So stay tuned.
Thanks for your patience.
One Response
A bit scary for me. My parents and siblings live in Yuma. Earlier that day we had the terrorist threat and now the outage. I called home and no one was answering. I couldn’t help but think the outage (from Yuma to Tijuana to San Diego) was terrorist related.
I work for the local electric utility and know it’s very rare to have an outage in different towns at the same time.
I have the explanation now and eventually my family called me back but it was scary at the time.
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