OT: Where were you 19 years ago today?

Afghanistan.  My family was in Germany and was worse off than I was weather-wise.  Europe was suffering through the end of a brutal two month heat wave - the hottest since 1540 with a huge death toll - I've read estimates from 30,000 to 70,000.

I was a recent graduate and unemployed. I was playing an online game or something when the pc died. A friend stopped by minutes later and said all of the traffic lights were out and said let’s get a bunch of beer and play frisbee golf. Did that for a while, played horsehoes, got drunk. Sun went down, played cards and drank after lighting a bunch of candles at somebody’s house. I’ll never forget my buddy trying to turn the tv on multiple times throughout the night, then being like “oh yea, shit, the power’s out.”

I was mastering a pop shove it with my friends Bobby and Justin. We played street hockey afterwards. 

I was at my parents' house.  I remember being in the backyard and looking up at the stars.  With no light pollution, the night sky was awesome.

IIRC, there were some areas of Southeast Michigan (including Ann Arbor) that got back power in a day and others that had to wait 3-4 days.   

I got married June 15, 2003. Two months later I was probably sitting in my truck wondering how I could be so stupid. Yes, it ended in a divorce. 

We didn’t know it happened for nearly a day.

That morning we left our home outside New York City, driving to Michigan for vacation, and about 6PM when we started looking for a place to eat.

But EVERYTHING was closed, which seemed really strange, till finally a sign taped on a food chain restaurant door mentioned the problem. 

We started looking for a place for the night and got really lucky, maybe the last motel room for 100 miles around.

Good topic. Working at St. Joe’s. My fiancé-now-wife spent a bunch of time at her parents, since they had a generator and a cool basement, and eventually went hunting for gas stations. There was that one in Canton that got news coverage for being open (and consequently had massive lines) but I think we found a working one that wasn’t totally packed a mile or so from there.

A few years ago a massive Derecho swept through Duluth and knocked out our power for a week. It was subjectively worse personally, but obviously on a much narrower scale, so we had friends and other options that still had power. 

IIRC at a Cincinnati Reds game. Cincinnati was not part of the blackout. If this is wrong then I have no clue 

I was working in Manhattan when the blackout started.  At first a lot of people assumed there was another terrorist attack.  That faded after about an hour, and everyone realized two things simultaneously.

1. We could not work anymore that day and most likely the next day 

2. The thousands of beer refrigerators in Manhattan now had a shelf life of only a few hours.

So seemingly every working professional in the city trickled out into the streets to save all the beer from going to waste.  That took the island from about 4pm to 8pm or so.  It was amazing, every sidewalk was comfortably full of people just hanging out and drinking and chit chatting, just good clean fun for the most part.  It was so calm and peaceful, like a miracle compared to the usual unrelenting intensity of working in New York.

And then everyone realized we could not use the subway to get home, and if I recall taxi traffic was also severely limited.  I lived in Brooklyn so walked home, with tens of thousands of others, across the Brooklyn Bridge.  The bridge is very strong, but was not designed for this much foot traffic.  It developed an S-curve horizontal sway, and some of those who did not realize the bridge was swaying panicked a bit.  

Unanticipated and unrecognizable movement + lots of beer = seasickness.  So a pretty decent number of people lots their guts over the side of the bridge.  Surreal but hilarious, knowing no one was in any real danger.

After that first day, my roommate and I just stayed outside as much as possible waiting for the lights and ac to return.   But that one day was a truly magical experience that could not be achieved in any other way.

Thanks for the reminder!

I was living in DC, glued to the television hoping that this wasn't about to be a repeat of 9/11. I was still having a bit of PTSD over that (saw the plane right before it hit the Pentagon). Once I talked to my dad in Michigan, I realized how widespread the outage was. 

I was living in Dexter which was the absolute edge of the blackout. We lost power -- people a half mile down the road didn't, nor did anyone west of that. 

My family went to Chelsea for a few days to wait it out. 

Was in NYC and wife pregnant. Couldn't get home to Forest Hills so had to schlep up 35 flights of stairs to stay at a friend's house in midtown.  

I was in Romania filming a documentary regarding the Romani population. God, my life was a lot more interesting when I was younger. 

Newly married and living in NJ, my wife was working in Manhattan. She was going down the stairs to the subway to head home when the power went out. She got on a bus that slowly worked its way down Broadway to Penn Station. Since the trains weren’t running, she tried the port authority bus terminal, but it was a mob scene. Around 8 pm they managed to get a diesel train in from NJ and she got on it and managed to get home between 9 and 10.

meanwhile I was in our apartment, a mile or two south of the line where the blackout started, cranking the AC, watching it all on CNN and trying to get a hold of her to tell her where to go. I thought I could get in my car and pick her up, but as soon as I got on the road I realized that the power loss took out the tollbooths on the parkway, and with the streetlights out northern NJ was basically a parking lot. In driving about 5 miles toward NYC, giving up and driving back, I spent almost 3 hours in the car. Thankfully when I went to pick her up at the train station I was driving  south, where the power was, so it wasn’t a problem. 

The kids were about three months old - I’m pretty sure I had the overnight duty.  So, it was middle of the night feeding, changing, and laying down.  We were in Chicago, and - I honestly can’t remember if our power was affected.

Nothing dramatic that I can recall so probably listening to the backup generator at home north of "Bahstahn", and barbecuing food for the family on the propane grill. 

Had already escaped NYC years before; greatest town to be from, ever. 👍😁

Northwood 3 Grad student housing. Had gas for cooking. We called some friends over from the Willowtree Apartments, who had an electric range. Candlelight party. The next day went to the department to turn off the switches to the equipment/instruments to prevent from surge when the power came back. Then about to start for I guess Columbus as they had power down there, someone told us that AA got power back. Never seen a darker city than that night. I wish I had looked up and saw the stars. 

I am yet to travel down to Columbus :D

In a bankruptcy court hearing in downtown Detroit. Walked down 26 flights of stairs with the Judge, his staff and all the lawyers, all of us sweating through our suits.  I remember the drive from Detroit to Ann Arbor took about 2 hours. 
 

The next day I almost fell getting out of bed due to my sore calves.  Probably the last good workout I’ve had.  

I was doing an internship in Chicago the summer before my senior year at Michigan.  We were not impacted in Chicago so it barely registered for me, but my friends back in Ann Arbor had fond memories of just BBQing food, drinking beer and sweating their skin off with no AC.

just moved back in with my parents after getting my MBA at UNC (name checks out) in small lake town in Michigan because I didn't have a heralded post-MBA job that I had heard about. things were still pretty damn good, we didn't lose power fortunately.

I was about to start my first semester at Michigan. It was a pretty fun and exciting time in my life. I arrived on campus and found a copy of the E3W. There was a "photo" on the front page that was all black with a caption that said something along the lines of: "During the blackout, a monkey was seen riding a squirrel through the Diag, as if it were a horse." I knew I was in the right place. 

I was on the Eastside, leaving out of my moms house when it went dark. Damn near everyone was grilling in the neighborhood, cooking meats before they went bad. My aunt called my moms house phone and was yelling that it was Bin Laden!😂

Playing golf with my future brother in law and Stoney Creek Metro Park. Had no idea what was going on until we were driving back to Sterling Heights and all the traffic lights were out and traffic was gridlocked.

Stationed in Hawaii, with power.

I never even knew this was a thing.

Thanks for posting, that was a weird time. 
Nothing exciting, we had just checked out at Costco and didn’t think much of it when the lights went out. 
Things changed when we hit it he road and all the traffic lights were out on Hall Road, took us a fortnight to get home. 
We had a baby and toddler so a family member lent us a generator so we could keep the fridge running. 

I have no idea what you’re talking about. I would have been in my mid 20s living in Michigan.

My family and I were up north staying on Mackinac Island, which wasn't affected.  Had a fun time, although we were worried about our pets back home.  

Vacationing in Disney World. Arrived back in Michigan hours after the power came back and had to go in to work the midnight shift because we were a bit behind. All in all I got off easy.

I was in the middle of a porn binge, watching only the good parts. (Having seen other responses here, couldn't start any other way ...)

Seriously, I'd just filled the gas tank in Ann Arbor and was somewhere between there and "up north" when I heard about the blackout.

I was driving home from work, listening to the radio. The station went out. I gave it a few moments thinking it would come back. It didn't. So I switched channels. Nothing. Switched channels again. Still nothing. Drove the rest of the way home in silence. Got home, there was no power. Found out that other neighbors also had no power. Then heard that it was a pretty big blackout, like it covered an entire city block or something. Found out later that other cities were also out of power. That's when I connected that that 's what happened to the radio stations.

Losing power wasn't scary, but the scary part was that we had just witnessed 9/11 less than 2 years prior and were concerned that this was part of an attack or attempt to take over. Fortunately, it was merely a loss of power.

Oh yeah, and the Buckeyes were still defending BCS champions.

In the Mott NICU with my 26 week under 2lb premature son on a ventilator extremely stressed about how long power was going to last.  Very stressful time for me.  My son is now starting his sophomore year as a computer science/engineering major.

Holy Schnikeys, I did not realize this 19 years ago. I have a great story about this. 

We were coming back from Italy and flew into JFK for our connecting flight back home when the blackout happened. My parents, my younger brother and I were standing in the middle of customs trying to get through when all the lights went out. Surprisingly there was no screaming, sounds of intense panic, etc., and there were hundreds of people in this room. Remarkably everyone kept calm. Think about it, this was less than two years after 9/11, you're in NY, one of the busiest airports in the world. All it would've taken is for one person to tell "TERRORIST" and it would've sent the entire customs area into utter chaos. People would've been trampled, someone likely would've been inadvertently killed. I kept my mouth shut, but that's all I could think at the time. "Are we under attack again?"

Anywho, the airport security quickly sent everyone back to their respective planes so they could attempt to get the situation sorted out. Also helped that the planes had air conditioning on them. Eventually, when it was understood that this was a long term issue and would not be resolved quickly, they slowly filed everyone off the planes. I was 12, maybe 13 years old at the time, and I remember standing in the customs line for at least two hours while they had to manually process everyone through by flashlight.

Somehow, we ended up finding our bags, and what made us even luckier is that my grandparents lived in Valley Stream, no more than 20 minutes from the airport. My grandfather, having worked in the city for 50 years, knew NYC, Long Island, and JFK like the back of his hand, and knew exactly where we were to come get us. We had no idea where we were, gave him the vaguest instruction of where we thought we were as it was almost pitch black out, and he still somehow found us. My mom had just enough juice in her cell phone to get a hold of him and come find us. I remember he and my Nana coming to get us, and thinking how lucky we were when I remember seeing couples and families standing in taxi lines well over 500 people long, and a family throwing out a blanket for their kids on the concrete so they could sleep there for the night, since there was no way they were going to find a hotel or get a cab. So many people had absolutely nowhere to go, and here I was, bummed that the bed I was about to sleep in wouldn't be in an air-conditioned room. 

Where I think everyone would get a kick out of this story is that the day before we flew back to the states, we went on a ghost walking tour of Venice, and one of the last stops was an old square with a red brick in the middle of it. The legend was that no one who lived in that area got sick with the bubonic plague when it was ravaging Europe, and the red brick was considered good luck. My brother, who was probably 6-7 at the time, thought it would be funny to stomp all over the brick. Everyone in the tour group, probably a solid 20 people, got a good, yet somewhat nervous laugh out of it, and the tour guide laughed it off and said "you are a very brave little boy." Sure enough, within 24 hours the entire NE corridor is blacked out. 

Sorry folks, you can blame my little brother for your troubles that week. 

I was working in a hospital in Mt. Clemens. I believe they called a code for a terrorist attack or chemical attack or something like that. We had back-up generators but not all lights work so we had to wheel beds into the hallways to do blood draws at night or patients would have to hold a flashlight for us with their other arm (they were happy to help). It was an unusual experience. 

I moved from MI to PA.... was actually driving thru ohio when news of the blackout hit the radio... I was hoping I'd be able to find a gas station that was open because I needed 1 more tank full to get to PA....

I did.... and when I got to Erie there was power (not sure if they ever lost it)

Somewhat similar story, I have actually in Salt Lake City on a business trip.  My recently married wife, with a 3 year old child, was still in the habit on calling me consistently and I was thinking that it was odd that I had not heard from her all day.  

I get back to my hotel room that evening and turn on the news to see the surreal scene that was going on.  That too was my moment where I felt the need to find a way to reduce the number of business trips I would need to take.

I was a senior in high school.  We went to our friends house and got super fucked up and had a bonfire 

Largely unaffected in Dayton Oh.  Either back or getting ready to go back to university for my senior year and in full prep mode to get married the following June.

edit:

actually that was all the year prior.  So I was already married and living in an apartment with my new wife and we were completely unaffected.

19 years ago today, August 15th, I turned 36. I don't remember the blackout. I had a 3 year old and a 5 month old and was probably deep in the sleep deprivation stage of parenthood.