Satellite Views Of The Blackout

An anonymous reader writes "These Before and After satellite views of the blackout, from the NOAA, show the geographic extent and intensity of the outage. Toronto, Ottawa, and Detroit seem the worst hit. Currently, a cnn article mentions that a reverse of power flow around Lake Erie may have caused an overload that triggered the programmed shutdown of the power grid. Would be interesting to know how the system and software works, but then again, that information could be dangerous in the wrong hands."

Comments

Continental drift

[MarkoNo5]

If you put the images in two separate tabs, and switch between them you can see the continental drift ! If you stand in Soviet Russia at this moment, America is coming to you !!! (although not using the shortest path :)

Blaster worm?

[TheFairElf]

I'm curious to know if the Blaster worm had anything to do this outage. So far I haven't seen any mention but it does seem to be a possibility.

News organizations and geographical chauvanism

[ishmalius]

This is obviously a lie. ;-) According to news reports, only the stalwart working class heroes of the mighty New York City, and a few random people from some unimportant outlying areas were affected.

Why is is that anything that happens in New York, Washington, or Los Angeles receives saturation news coverage, yet anything from anywhere else must meet a far higher threshold to rate the same treatment? With all of the local news stations and affiliates in the Northeast, this can't be attributed merely to media access. It's almost as if these places are being paid a banality tax.

The Beltway Sniper story was a fine example. Had the shootings occurred in a blighted urban neighborhood, instead of the upper-middle-class suburbs where the journalists actually live, it would never have received the same kind of coverage.

Or are people so ignorant of geography that stories of places like Albany or Hartford are lost on them?