Now London Loses Power???

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HelloAngel

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from CNN.com...

Power cut cripples London
Thursday, August 28, 2003 Posted: 2:31 PM EDT (1831 GMT)



LONDON, England (CNN) -- Passengers were trapped on the London Underground as a power outage struck the city during evening rush hour Thursday.

"We have lost supplies to large parts of south London in the last few minutes as a result of a National Grid failure supply in the south London area," a spokesman for electricity network operator EDF Energy told Britain's Press Association.

"It's difficult to predict how long this is going to take. National Grid has got to get the circuit back."

A spokesman for London Underground said 60 percent of the subway system had been halted by the outage, including the majority of services in central London. The failure happened around 6:15 p.m.

Thousands of people took to the streets as dusk approached. Street lights in some parts of London were not working in scenes reminiscent of the blackout that hit North America earlier this month.

London Underground said the power failure was having a "serious" impact on the whole of the city's metro network. Rail services from major stations including Victoria, London Bridge and Waterloo were also affected.

"There has been a National Grid failure which has affected the underground. At the moment we are assessing the impact of that, but it is having a serious impact on the whole system at the moment," a spokesman for the London Underground said.

He added: "It's also having an affect on some of our buildings. Certainly quite a lot of the network appears to be affected."

An Underground spokesman told Reuters: "Trains in stations are being evacuated. We're trying to get alternative power sources started."

"There will be travelers underground. I don't know the extent of that yet. It's at the end of rush hour, the peak period, so it's a busy time."

A spokesman for British Transport Police said the power cut had affected all major railway stations in south London.

"There is no power in a lot of stations and no trains running in the whole of south London," he said.

"All major stations -- Victoria, London Bridge, Waterloo -- are affected and all main train lines have stopped.

"Some stations are in darkness and others have emergency lighting."

Euston Station was evacuated because of overcrowding, apparently because passengers could not get on the Underground.
 
Ken Livingstone (mayor of London) was just on tv saying it's most likely a failure with the national grid, a little bit similar to what happened in the US a few weeks back. The power's back on now and so they're just moving trains to the next station so people don't have to walk through tunnels or anything.

And I'm officially glad I'm not in London because trying to get a but in London is just too complicated for me. :p
 
Well, from my understanding of things, even though I havent been home for nearly two weeks and hadnt heard about this until just now... from people in England with whom I chat on IRC, it has been unbearably hot these recent weeks - and, it should be no great leap of logic, that when it gets hot out, power consumption increases greatly, just like when it gets really cold. Unfortunately, with the supply and demand system as it is, governments and power utilities seem to like having just barely enough electricity rather than having it in excess, and even when it is in excess its then sold to other consumers so that its just barely enough again. If I remember the one report from Ontario a while back, it would seem that we have come within 1000 kW of a power outage on numerous ocassions, and its just a miracle that it took this long for the systems to fail - I would suspect the case is the same with England.

*shrug*
 
Just to throw in a little twist. there are some reports surfacing that there was some questionable trading going on in the London stock market before the power in the U.S. went out.

It was reported that there was extremely heavy trading going on with a company that manufactures power equipment including power regulators, and other products that would be used at power plants just 4 hours before the blackout in the U.S.

It was trading at 20 times it's normal level and went from 43 a share to 54 a share in the two days preceding the blackout.

At first I thought it was too much of a stretch for the trading to be happening in London and then the blackout is in the U.S. - but now it happened there. Pretty weird.

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omg thank God my boyfriend landed early this morning rather than this afternoon!! :bow: thankfully he got home safe and didn't have to deal with this!! :crazy: :( :heart: I hope everyone gets out/safely fast!
 
Megan and I were headed to london bridge station...fortunately we missed being on the train by about 5 minutes. Unfortuantely, we stood in the rain trying to figure out the bus system with every other annoyed person in London for an hour. :huh:
 
jkayet said:
Unfortuantely, we stood in the rain trying to figure out the bus system with every other annoyed person in London for an hour. :huh:

London buses are mad. I once found myself standing at a bus stop in Hackney at midnight, trying to figure out which timetable was for night buses. Luckily I wasn't by myself or I think I'd still be there. :wink:
 
I have just come back from a two hour trip that normally would have taken 15 minutes. I was stuck in Oxford st for about 45 mins before we eventually 'did' get evacuated, and then I had the fortune to get caught in the bleeding rain for half an hour before a bus that wasn't packed with ppl came along, only to have the bus stop half way to my home, then I had to wait for twenty minutes so that another came, but that one I had to leg it so I could catch it in Paddington station, because two stops behind it was packed with far too many people, and I was not going to wait outside in the pouring rain for another half hour (oh, and did I mention that I had no umbrella, and was wearing shorts and no jacket because I only went into town 'quickly' to enrol at my uni?). After legging it, catching it, the wonderfully useless conductor told us that he was actually stopping at the next stop. I asked the ticket inspector if there was any bus in the God foresaken city that was actually functioning properly and doing the whole route, to which he replied that he did not know.

So, I waited for fifteen minutes until another bus came, and I eventually got home.

Not the best day I've had, by any stretch of the imagination.

Ant.
 
ditto to what Fizz said. :hug: glad everyone made it home safe. i hadn't even heard about this till i just saw this thread. but then again i was at work till 10pm last night, so that's probably why.
 
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