6 Years Ago Today...

I was reminded on the morning news that it was 6 years ago today that a massive blackout hit the northeastern United States (and parts of Canada as I recall). I bring this up, because I'm not sure I've ever told my story about that day here on the blog.

During the week leading up to August 14, 2003 my parents, sister, and I had been on a baseball road-trip (sort of). We flew to Toronto (there's a story about that too), saw the Jays at SkyDome - the first modern retractable roof baseball stadium. Then drove to Niagara Falls and over to New York City to visit Yankees Stadium (Mariners were in town). From there we made a stop in Hershey, PA on our way to visit Pittsburgh's new park (they were hosting the Cards). Finally, we trekked it west to Chicago to visit Wrigley Field - where the Cubs were hosting the Astros in the middle of a late summer divisional race.

Wrigley is an awesome park and it was a nice day. We were enjoying the game when I noticed a couple of fighter jets flying along the coastline over Lake Michigan. I have always been fascinated by fighter jets so this caught my eye. They continued up the coastline and out of sight. During the next half inning we heard this thunderous noise behind us then suddenly the fighters buzzed right over the top of Wrigley at what seemed to be really low altitude. Over the next 2 or 3 innings this happened a couple of additional times, but we had no idea why.

Finally in the 8th inning we had to leave because we were catching a flight out of Chicago back to Tulsa. We made our way to O'Hare only to find news vans parked along the curb at the terminal. This seemed a little strange, but we didn't find out until we got inside that the northeast was now without power and most flights weren't coming or going at that point. Basically everywhere we had been for the last week was in the dark and parts of Chicago were too. Thankfully, the airport still had power and our direct flight to Tulsa was on schedule.

We boarded the plane and flew home mostly unaffected by the whole incident and then watched on TV as the blackout played out for the next few days.

When it happened, there were fears that it was terrorism related - hence the fighter jets. In reality it was a failure that set off a chain reaction and took down the whole grid.