Much ado about nothing

By now you've probably heard that a good bit of America's Wang™, especially here in Teh Glans™, lost electrical power for a couple of hours or so this afternoon. I just arrived home after a 2-hour-plus drive from Coral Gables to Boynton Beach (a trip that normally should take around an hour and a quarter or so) to discover that my house never lost power at all.

However, according to Florida Power & Light (FP&L), around 700,000 customers, mostly in Miami-Dade and Broward counties, lost power beginning shortly after 1:00 pm this afternoon. My colleague and I were in a meeting in Coral Gables at the time, and we did lose power in the restaurant ... then emerged to find something approaching chaos around the city and greater Miami in general. Traffic lights everywhere were out ... traffic was nearly at a standstill ... and our concern increased to something approaching panic when we heard that power also was out in Tallahassee (my colleague, who was heading to MIA for her flight home, found out from her friend there), Melbourne (I called my ex-wife there), and elsewhere around the state.

Just to add insult to injury, while all this was going on and I was crawling northward in my car on I-95 in Miami, a tornado warning was issued for part of Broward County, including the general area of Fort Lauderdale. Lovely.

My first thought was to get the hell out of Miami before the looting began ... but perhaps I was overreacting just a tad. By 4:00, when I was nearly home, power reportedly had been restored to the vast majority of areas that had blacked out, and the wingnuts' hopes fears of the outage being caused by a terrorist attack had given way to much more mundane facts: a transmission line somewhere in western Miami-Dade failed, causing a chain reaction of outages in the grid throughout Florida.

There are conflicting reports, even divergent announcements from FP&L, as to whether the Turkey Point Nuclear Power Plant, about 40 miles south of Miami, was involved somehow in the outage. I imagine we'll hear more as the investigation continues. Nevertheless, the bottom line is that it was very, very weird ... and I'm just glad to be home.