when the lights went out essay

Suddenly, the lights went out – a Story

It was a warm summer night. It was dark and eery the abandoned house without the lights. Suddenly, the lights went out and everything went dark. I tried to pull myself together and find a source of light. I could barely see anything and resorted to waving my arms in front of me to avoid bumping into any furniture. The bright moon was high in the clear sky. My first thought was that there was a power disruption due to the thunderstorm brewing outside. There were no lights in any of the windows. Instinct led me to the kitchen cabinet where I could remember my mother storing some candles for emergencies. All the inhabitants were asleep.

I was alone at home as all the members of my family had fine to another city to attend a marriage function. After a considerable amount of groping, the tips of my fingers came into contact with a waxy candle. I grabbed it immediately with relief and quickly lit it. Then, I noticed that my neighbor’s lights were on. This discarded my first notion of the power shortage due to the storm.  I screamed out in horror and that thing disappeared in a flash. I began to ponder what could be the cause of the blackout. Then, I remembered my father showing me a lamp in his room which used to cause the electrical supply in the house to go haywire for some inexplicable reason. However, I was not scared, as this was not the first time I had been alone.

I rushed to my father’s room and inspected the lamp but found that it was disconnected. The sound of something being moved around upstairs instantly diverted my attention. The hairs behind my neck stood on ends. To ensure I was not seen by whoever was in the house, I quickly blew the flame off my candle.

I furtively moved under the kitchen table and remained as quiet as a bat. The intruder went out of sight but I could hear his faint footsteps on the wooden staircase. Thoughts of me getting kidnapped crept uneasily into my mind. No more than a second later, I saw the garage door plowed down by my neighbor, Mr. Vasu. As the lightning flashed, he saw me hiding and hastily led me out of the house and into his.

Everything seemed to happen at lightning speed. Mrs. Vasu tried to calm me down and explained to me that Mr. Vasu happened to see the thief rummaging the bedroom facing theirs. Apparently my parents had asked him to keep an eye on me while they were away.

When I woke up the next morning, my parents were at Mr. Vasu’s house thanking him for rescuing me. From their conversation, I gathered that the thief managed to flee when he heard Mr. Vasu storming through the door. Nevertheless, I was extremely grateful to Mr. Vasu and will forever be indebted to him. I decided not to tell anyone about this incident, as I knew they would all laugh at me.

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When the Lights Went Out: On Blackouts and Terrorism

When the Northeast Blackout of 2003 killed electricity to more than 50 million people in the United States and Canada, the night sky turned so pristinely dark that in some cities the milky way could be seen by the naked eye. But in New York City, where hundreds of commuters were suddenly trapped in stranded subway trains and stalled elevators, stargazing remained far from people’s minds, at least until initial fears subsided. One reporter in Times Square observed “the bewildered, disoriented throngs, frightened by thoughts of terror” who “were trying to get their bearings in an environment that had been transformed in an instant.”

The FBI, like many in New York who were still reeling from the September 11, 2001 attacks, shared these concerns. Just the previous year the agency concluded that terrorists were studying weaknesses in power grids. Meanwhile, groups across the country had been preparing for and speculating about doomsday scenarios — scenarios that the first moments of the 2003 blackout mimicked to a disquieting degree.

A generation ago, the immediate question when the lights went out was whether a fuse had blown or lightning had struck. But today, when a blackout strikes, time stops, plans fall apart, and fears fill the sudden void.

The FBI’s Cyber Division ultimately found no indication that the outage was the result of an attack; a failed power line and crumbling infrastructure were entirely to blame. But what if enemies had targeted the power system to augment a physical or biological attack?

The military has long understood the centrality of electricity to society. In World War II, both the Allies and the Axis Powers attacked power plants. During the 1992 siege of Sarajevo, Serb nationalists dynamited four power-transmission lines into the city, taking electricity away from 400,000 people . The U.S. military, meanwhile, has designed weapons specifically to incapacitate electrical networks, including the BLU-114/B “soft bomb,” which supposedly disperses a cloud of graphite filaments and tiny wires that short-circuit transformers and switches (information about the weapon remains classified). When used against Serbia in May 1999, the bomb blacked out 70 percent of the country; a similar weapon had been deployed with success in the 1991 Desert Storm operation against Iraq.

Power grids, nuclear power stations, and computer systems are all potential targets for terrorists. An electrical network is built to be resilient, but an attack on certain nodal points might trigger “a cascade of overload failures capable of disabling the network almost entirely,” as two network systems experts found . A terrorist cell that included several senior commanders of the Irish Republican Army and a former U.S. Marine recognized this when, in 1996, they prepared to attack the electrical system of London and southeast Britain. While their plan was ultimately foiled by the British Secret Service, who found in the cell’s possession diagrams of six power substations in a ring around London and enough detonators and fuses to arm 37 bombs, other groups have had more success.

Between 1975 and 1995, the National Liberation Front of Corsica struck Corsica’s electrical system on multiple occasions, according to a report issued by the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. In the Philippines, the Communist New People’s Army, the Moro National Liberation Front, and the Abu Sayyaf group all attacked the electrical grid. And in South Africa, a military wing of the African National Congress carried out multiple attacks on electrical stations during the apartheid regime. These groups operated inside their own country. Their motivation, the report from the Center for Nonproliferation Studies found, was primarily to embarrass the government without many casualties, which could weaken popular support. In contrast, terrorists who attack countries other than their own generally want to destroy national symbols and to maximize human suffering. They prefer not transmission lines but highly visible locations such as churches in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday. This helps to explain why the power grid has not been a primary terrorist target.

Assaults on critical infrastructure have increased worldwide from 42 during the 1960s to more than 25 a year since 1990.

Yet assaults on critical infrastructure have increased worldwide from 42 during the 1960s to more than 25 a year since 1990. The targets of major strikes have been oil and gas facilities (50 percent), electrical infrastructure (15 percent), office buildings (8 percent), railways (5 percent), and a wide range of miscellaneous facilities (22 percent). Fifty years ago, religious groups almost never made such attacks, but between 1980 and 2004 Islamist groups alone targeted infrastructure 84 times. Moreover, al-Qaeda members have specifically listed infrastructure attacks as a primary objective when attacking industrialized countries. In fact, computers captured from Afghanistan had been logged on to sites dealing with utility security.

After a major blackout in 1965 impacted an estimated 25 million people, the U.S. federal government “focused increased attention on the vulnerability of power systems to disturbance and damage from acts of sabotage,” according to a Federal Power Commission report from the time. But by far the most serious threat remained terrorism directed at nuclear plants or using stolen nuclear fuel. Between 1969 and 1971, explosives were discovered at a research reactor at the Illinois Institute of Technology, for instance, and bombs were detonated in the Stanford University Linear Accelerator, causing substantial damage. Nevertheless, the isolated location, solid construction, and high security surrounding nuclear facilities make them less vulnerable to attack .

Far more worrisome are dangerous “dirty bombs” that could spread deadly plutonium over a wide area. The Atomic Energy Commission concluded in 1974 that “the potential harm to the public from the explosion of an illicitly made nuclear weapon is greater than that from any plausible power plant accident, including one which involves a core meltdown.” Perhaps even more unsettling is the threat of an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, attack. As Lowell Wood, an astrophysicist involved with the Strategic Defense Initiative and former chair of the EMP Commission concluded, EMP “is one of the few ways in which the United States can die as a nation.” It is “not a blackout,” he added, “it is a stayout.” Indeed, the commission noted an attack would paralyze much of the U.S., shutting down radio, television, and the telephone system. The nation would not be able to harvest, store, ship, or market food. Hospitals, schools, factories, and offices would cease to function. It would destroy computer chips embedded in millions of devices, yet leave the physical landscape intact. In theory, EMP damage from one bomb exploded over Kansas could black out most of the United States. Fortunately, vulnerability to EMP can be reduced ; it only requires adopting more robust shielding materials.

Yet even with the recognition of these threats, little was being done to improve the electrical grid before the 2003 blackout. This despite the North American Electric Reliability Council, an industry group, warning that the grid was not being upgraded fast enough, and concluding that “the question is not whether, but when the next major failure of the grid will occur.”

One civilian defense expert concluded that an electromagnetic pulse attack “is one of the few ways in which the United States can die as a nation.”

Without electricity, society loses most of its critical infrastructure. Yet the U.S. electrical system is hard to protect because of its sheer extent, and though American grids have not been attacked, it is not because they are impregnable. Perhaps Alfred Hitchcock’s 1936 film “Sabotage” suggests why transmission systems are not yet a target of choice. The film begins with a blackout that darkens a whole district of central London. A saboteur has thrown sand into some powerhouse equipment, and it takes an hour to clean and restart the system. The public response to this unexpected darkness, however, is not fear but nonchalance and even considerable laughter. Like the crowds in the 1965 New York blackout three decades later, Hitchcock’s Londoners take it with aplomb. Frustrated at this result, the saboteur then decides to bomb a crowded public place. This seems more likely to cause panic than a blackout. Even in 1936, it was clear that short-lived power outages cause few or no deaths and little destruction, whereas a bomb causes both and is terrifying.

Nevertheless, in the popular imagination, a blackout can have dire consequences, leading to spectacular unrest or social collapse. Josef Konvitz, an expert on crisis management, has called this “the myth of terrible vulnerability,” depicting catastrophes that are out of control while ignoring the human ability to improvise solutions and cope with hardships. With worst-case scenarios, popular films and novels depict the electrical system as an ideal terrorist target. After the 1977 New York blackout , Arthur Hailey’s novel “Overload” described a terrorist attack on California’s electrical system during a summer heatwave. It was among the top five New York Times best-sellers of 1979. In his 1987 novel “Patriot Games,” Tom Clancy described an electrical engineer in Baltimore, determined “to hurt America” by “hitting people where they lived.” The character muses that “if he could turn out the lights in fifteen states at once” he would weaken public confidence in the government. A similar theme underlay the 2007 film “Live Free or Die Hard,” in which a disaffected former national security employee, angry because the government has ignored his warnings about the vulnerability of the United States to a computer attack, launches one himself.

Electrical engineers have warned that a “determined group of terrorists could likely take out any portion of the grid they desire.”

But “Live Free or Die Hard” exaggerates the centralization of the grid. There is no single command-and-control center that can turn off all of the East’s electrical systems. Rather, as the electricity consultant Jason Makansi concluded, the U.S. transmission system in some ways is poorly integrated: “Not only is our electricity grid ‘third world’ in quality, it is actually weakly interconnected.” However, he adds, “a weakly interconnected grid may be beneficial when it comes to security. Disconnected systems cannot all fail together.” Utilities are linked, but each can cut itself off from the grid.

Terrorists could more easily provoke a widespread blackout by blowing up transformers or shutting down transmission lines, causing power surges and a cascade of automatic load shedding. This would recapitulate the 2003 blackout that rippled from Ohio to Detroit, Cleveland, Toronto, and New York. Only after that expensive failure did utilities adopt improved communication systems between regions so operators could see what was going on elsewhere on the grid. “Think of an air traffic controller’s screen,” one operator told the New York Times. “The circle we can scan just got a whole lot bigger. So if there are blips [breakdowns or irregularities] further out, we see them right away.” They got information far faster than they could have gotten it by telephone. Indeed, during a crisis, phone calls can be distracting, and it is often difficult to explain verbally a rapid succession of events, which can be quickly grasped in visual representations.

Yet a cascade is extremely difficult to stop. Electrical engineers have warned that “it is impossible to secure the whole system,” which includes more than 180,000 miles of transmission lines, and that a “determined group of terrorists could likely take out any portion of the grid they desire.” The most vulnerable components are high-voltage transformers, many of which are located in substations protected only by chain-link fences and could be taken out with improvised explosive devices.

The grid is also vulnerable to cyberattacks. In 2000, expert witnesses before Congress estimated that terrorists needed only 5–10 years to develop the technical capabilities to inflict major damage on the United States. Indeed, a “skilled hacker could disable a network of several plants without ever entering a facility,” journalist Johanna McGeary points out . He or she could tamper with the monitoring and control software systems, which “often lack rudimentary security, leaving technical specifications and flaws on view to potential attackers.”

“Live Free or Die Hard” reinforced the notion circulating in popular culture that a power failure is the ultimate collapse, ripping away the underpinnings of the computerized state. However, the visions of catastrophe that pervade popular culture overemphasize vulnerability and overlook adaptation and improvisation. Moreover, in anticipation of possible infrastructure attacks, utility companies have worked with the Department of Homeland Security to prepare contingency plans. The focus has been less on the transmission lines, which can rapidly be restrung, than on hardening nodal points of vulnerability against attack and erecting more barriers against intruders. Security measures also continue to focus on nuclear plants and hydroelectric dams, whose impounded waters, if released, would cause destructive flooding as well as power failures. As for cyberattacks, utility computers are in some ways more vulnerable now than before the advent of the internet. Until the mid-1990s, most utility companies had standalone systems that were distinctive in design and cut off from computers elsewhere. Their incompatibilities and relative isolation from one another were undesirable for day to day operations, however, so the companies increased transparency and interoperability, enhancing the operators’ access to crucial information in emergencies but simultaneously opening up the electrical grid to hackers.

The visions of catastrophe that pervade popular culture overemphasize vulnerability and overlook adaptation and improvisation.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University concluded that one can mitigate the effects of an attack on the electrical system more easily than one can prevent it. Drawing on experience with rolling blackouts in California, they suggested maximum defense of essential services, including traffic control, hospitals, and the police. Rather than treat the grid as a fortress to be protected at every point, they call for a resilient system with multiple ways to supply power to any given area. Their suggestion challenges the electrical infrastructure’s design, which for decades has been consolidated into large central stations. Yet a decentralized system with a larger number of generating stations and shorter supply lines would be less vulnerable. “A more regional, decentralized electricity system,” read a pointed editorial in Bloomberg following the 2003 blackout, “may actually be more rational, especially in an age of insecurity.” In 2017, Scientific American published a similar conclusion .

People content to be alone when the power is on seek others when it fails. They want information and reassurance. As long as electricity supplies light and communication, the regular pulse of electrons is an indirect assurance that society is humming along and that a safety net of services surrounds and protects. Disrupt the flow and people immediately look for human contact. Adding the threat of terror to a power outage amplifies both fear and the desire for community.

When the lights go out, the sheer physicality of the world and its inhabitants becomes bewilderingly near.

After the rolling blackouts of the 1990s, and especially after Sept. 11, 2001, the public does not take blackouts lightly. Rather, they improvise moments of solidarity, based on the implicit belief that the power will soon return. Once initial fears are dispelled, people flock into the streets, and the blackout can become a carnival, not an apocalypse. The Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin noted that during a carnival “people who in life are separated by impenetrable hierarchical barriers enter into free and familiar contact.”

Something similar occurred in New York in 2003. As in the 1965 blackout, few people could work and all had to negotiate a city without most of its amenities. At Muldoon’s Irish Pub on Third Avenue, “the loss of power meant a license to party.” Patrons ordered extra beer , and many ambled outside, glasses in hand. The New York City-based blog The Gothamist reported that at first the event “made New Yorkers wonder if there was another terrorist attack” but “then they just settled in for some street parties after finally making it home.” Many brought out battery-powered audio players, sat on their front stoops, and partied into the night. According to one bystander’s account, recounted in Phillip Schewe’s book “ The Grid ,” the “August 14 event was a bit like the medieval Feast of Fools, the Yuletide holiday when in towns around Europe class distinctions were suspended, if only for a day, and masters and servants switched places, church observances were mocked, and revelry overruled solemnity.”

During this time, the city was “re-materialized.” The visiting Brazilian architect Fernando Lara later wrote: “Forget Virilio and Baudrillard and the virtual realities, there is no compression of time and space anymore. You are left alone with the disvirtual reality of space.” Suddenly it was not possible to mediate one’s relation to the built environment, which had to be measured by the body and its ability to climb, to walk, and to adjust. “Without neon lights and electronics, space becomes what it has always been,” he added, where one “cannot hide behind a wireless phone nor dive yourself into the Internet.” The sheer physicality of the world and its inhabitants becomes bewilderingly near.

The average cost of the 2003 power loss was almost $60,000 per hour per business, but some corporations lost as much as a million dollars an hour.

In 2003 such disorientation did not presage riots. Predictions that future blackouts would lead to unrest, persistently made during the 1980s and the 1990s, proved incorrect. Fear of terrorism partially explains why neighborhoods that erupted in looting and arson in the blackout of 1977 displayed social solidarity in 2003. But just as importantly, by 2003 New York had regained prosperity .

More than 200,000 people owned inexpensive apartments that had been built or renovated in areas that had rioted in 1977. People whose homes are appreciating are unlikely arsonists. Furthermore, New York’s policing had improved. The blackout came when merchants were in their stores, and millions of people were walking home. The economic impact of the 2003 blackout was much greater for commerce and industry than for households. All businesses from Detroit to Long Island were affected. At John F. Kennedy Airport, 50,000 bags could not be scanned, located, or returned to their owners, whose flights were canceled. More than 70 automobile and auto-parts plants shut down, sending 100,000 workers home. Eight oil refineries stopped production, and the main pipeline carrying Canadian oil to the United States stopped pumping. Steel plants lost batches of molten iron that had to be dumped into slag pits, and it took four days to resume production. At food-processing plants, tons of meat, fruit, and vegetables rotted. The average cost of a power loss was almost $60,000 per hour per business, but some corporations lost as much as a million dollars an hour. White-collar work losses, meanwhile, were often instantaneous and usually irretrievable. All unsaved data and many emails were lost.

The power failure exposed just how dependent on electricity American society had become.

Human beings are no longer awed by the immense changes electrification made possible in lighting, manufacturing, transportation, and domestic life, and few are concerned that nations have become so dependent upon electricity — perhaps because it now seems to have been always already there. The wall switch and the light socket seem natural, a power failure unnatural. People notice electricity only in its absence. Blackouts, after all, are breaks in the flow of social time. Each time one occurs, we confront our essential condition — not as isolated individuals, but as a community that increasingly binds itself together with electrical wires and signals.

David E. Nye is Professor of American History at the University of Southern Denmark. He is the author of several books, including “ American Illuminations ,” “ Electrifying America ,” and “ When the Lights Went Out ,” a trilogy of works that form a collective history of electricity and lighting in the United States.

Correction: An earlier version of this article erroneously stated that explosives were discovered at the Point Beach Nuclear Plant between 1969 and 1971.

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"When the Lights Went Out" Review Paper Example

The book "When the Lights went out'' clearly depicts the importance of electricity in our lives. Electricity gives life to our lives such that when darkness sets in, life seems abnormal. Nye discusses power outages in America from 1935 to 2003. In this book, David tackles the issues of what happens when there is a temporally electrical power outage and purports that the moment when lights go off is often memorable. Nye's massive knowledge on the role played by electricity in structuring the modern world enables him to present both sides of an argument. Nye argues that electricity has critically affected the way we work, live, talk and every other aspect of our lives (Nye 02). It would be practically impossible to do most of what life pertains in the absence of electricity. According to Nye, power outages are not merely due to technical problems and can be termed as the result of unreliable political and economic judgements, military tactic against terrorism, social experience disruption, the crisis in a networked city, an abrupt meet with sublimity or even a memory anesthetized in photographs.

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Author Nye starts by discussing the energy revolution that started in the eighteenth century and that saw the onset of development of massive electrical grids (Nye 04). The first electrical utilities covered small areas and were not interconnected leading to frequent outages that were only confined to small areas. Nye argues that the construction of hyper-complex electrical grids covering massive geographical areas not only made blackouts in big areas possible but are also inevitable. Nye says that although electricity loss is still common in small grids, what interests him the most is the loss of electricity in large areas, their causes and the reactions that come as a result of the outages (Nye 100).

Nye discusses various situations that involve power outages to ascertain that power outage is not only caused by technical errors and to show the importance of electrical power in every day's life. The first situation that Nye examines is the world war 2 blackouts. According to Nye, the power loss was aimed at extinguishing lighting without eliminating all the uses of electricity. A lot of effort in the united states was geared towards planning blackouts until it became evident that bombers were no longer a serious problem. During the world war 2, power outages, especially in Europe, were organized and done as a major civil- defense activity that in the end proved not very effective despite the various unplanned total electricity losses (Nye 33).

The Northeast outage of 1665 and 1977 is another situation analyzed. These outages affected massive areas and received a lot of attention. Although New York City is the only area that is analyzed in detail in the two cases, the outage resulted to loss of technological infrastructure and cause a type of social regression in the two cases.in 1965, strangers freely interacted with no barriers in economic classes leading to people rediscovering their neighbors. 1977 was marked by anarchy including looting and riots. In this case, darkness was equated with criminality and chaos unlike in 1965 where people experienced elation in darkness. to explain the reason for social compact seeming to have roots in the first case and absent in the second case, Nye uses psychological and sociological principles. The difference between the 1965 and the 1977 outages simply shows how time had changed causing New York to suffer from an economic loss of more than 600,00 jobs, rise in fuel prices and general electricity use.

Other situations analyzed to support the proposition that electricity outage is not only caused by technical failures and the importance of electricity are the blackouts experienced in the 2000 and 2001 summers in California and the electricity outage of 2003 that affected a large grid from New York to Ohio. Nye uses these situations to ascertain whether large-scale electricity grids are so common leading to normality in failure. Nye after assessing the 2003 blackout suggests that in order to avoid frequent blackouts, we should do away with large scale interconnection although blackouts result in changes that make the grid more robust. According to Nye, the California power outages are as a result of the history of deregulation in California preceding them. The flawed California system created adverse incentives resulting in electricity suppliers owning and exploiting the market power.

In one of his strongest chapters, Nye considers the possibility of terrorists' activities threatening the electrical grid and considers various ways that this could be done. The most serious way considered is the use of an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that results from a nuclear weapon explosion. Nye ascertains that even a small explosion can trigger an EMP that can potentially destroy intertwined circuits over a big geographical grid. The destruction caused by an EMP could cripple both the production and the use of electrical power. Although there are a number of possible counters to all terrorist threats, most terrorist threats are geared towards causing panic and havoc in the population since crippling the electricity supply for long periods using EMP devices is practically difficult to do without being detected.

According to Nye, blackouts lower the value of human life and they break in the happening of social time that tell a lot on the path history of America. Every time that a blackout occurs, Americans are forced to put it to their defining condition- not as lonely and secluded people but as a community that is united binding itself with electrical wires and signals. According to Nye, most of the power outages in the US are due to long-term energy build up and stressed out electricity cables due to overuse errors that could be corrected by the Americans learning not to be over-dependent on electricity and consume less power or by building an alternative power generation system that is efficient and effective (Nye 177).

The author has used several sources to come up with the main content. The book was published in 2010 long after the events described took place. The time gap did not affect the main message because the events he describes were very serious and rememberable. The author wrote the material at the time he had already experienced the impact. The events he describes in the book are those that were witnessed first-hand and they made a lasting impression in the world. The author talks about the great northeastern blackout of 1965 in California when the surging power disaster left fifty million people deprived of electricity. The author got the information from the documentation of the event and used is to pass the message to the reader.

In the book "When the Lights Went Out" the author has used primary sources. He uses the sources to help the reader understand the past blackout that has happened. The sources are written newspaper documentation like New Yorker in 1942 which described riding on top of the fifth avenue bus when a wartime blackout began. The author attempts to use the source to understand what happened in the past and the impact the event had on people. The author gets tons of information form this newspaper about that past event. It is a very useful source to the author because it helps to describe the vent vividly which gives the reader a clear picture

In the book "When the Lights Went Out" the author has used primary sources. Their quotations are from the newspaper used to get the information about the events. The author uses these quotations to present evidence of the event happenings. By using these quotations, the reader is able to know when the event happened and the impact they caused. The author does not represent both sides of the debate equally (Schwarz 78). This is because, in the final chapter, the author provides his solution to the problems on the blackouts. He says that electricity usage could be decreased as evidenced by the voluntary. This gives evidence that the author relies too heavily on the sources that favor one side. Nye does not discuss the mispricing of the electricity and the ubiquitous subsidies received by all forms of energy production. These issues can also cause blackout but the author does not include them in his book.

In my opinion, am persuaded by the author's argument. The author analyses all his argument in a vivid manner that convinces the reader about all the events. He makes sure that his message is well received by discussing all the impact electrification had impacted the lives of the Americans. The author's even-handed approach presents well all his sides of the argument which I support. I like his deep knowledge of the ways in which electricity structures modern life. the author I able to convince me using the sociological theory which explains well about human behavior. Use of technology such as electrify is sometimes disappointing causing blackout point which is well explained by the author using various events that have happened in the past (Fischer 108)

The evidence and the sources used by the author validate the author's thesis. This is because according to the author's thesis, the blackout is not only caused by technical errors but also by the effect of political and economic influences and tactics against a terror attack. He strongly discusses how terrorist activity threatens the electrical grid. This has been validated by the evidence given of America's blackout from the 1930s which the power failure had many suspecting terrorism, economic disturbances, political problems and represent a massive failure of infrastructure. Nye examines how all these technical unrelated issues caused a blackout in the past (Nye 147). There is no other way of interpreting this data because it's clearly stated how these issues caused a blackout in America. The authors discuss in World War 2 how the government would switch off power or interfere with the electricity sources to cause a blackout. This cannot be interpreted in another way because the author has supported his thesis with evidence of a past event.

Nye narrative is not complete. This is because although the author has given evidence of the events that the blackout has occurred, he has failed to mention some other part of the narrative like the mispricing of the electricity. I think the author should have provided some of the solutions that can be used to prevent blackout. This would complete the book because the author has strongly talked about the causes and the effects of the blackout to the American people. It would only be fair to the reader if he would have provided them with the solution of the blackout problem (Canfield 40). The story feels incomplete without the discussion of technology-focused initiatives like smart grid which can be used to improve power reliability and efficiency. This point should have been elaborated further for the readers. I also think that the point about how economic and political disturbances caused blackout out should be discussed in more details to let the reader know how it happened expertly to cause lights out.

In conclusion, the author has used this book well to highlight blackout as a method to describe the conflicts that are critical to electricity usage in America. In his book, the customers have the desire to use more electricity but are skeptical to live next to a power plant. This comes as a surprise because, in an electrical grid where amplified difficulty has steered to an advanced likelihood of massive outages, the smart grid solution aids to more developed difficulty. The author relates blackout as the movement of social time and reveals basic facts about the socioeconomic climate and the character played by electricity in our lives.

Nye, David E. "When the Lights Went Out." 2010,...

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When the Lights Went Out: What Really Happened to Britain in the Seventies

Andy beckett.

576 pages, Paperback

First published May 7, 2009

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At the least, a very seventies dread has seeped back into how people in Britain and other rich countries see the world. Economic crises, floods, food shortages, terrorism, the destruction of the environment: these spectres, so looming in the seventies, did not go away during the eighties and nineties; yet they faded – they were often quite easy to forget about. Now that they have returned to haunt newspaper front pages almost daily, it is possible to wonder how many of Britain’s seventies problems were ever really solved. These days Britons no longer mourn their empire. They are more comfortably European. They are more relaxed about race, sexuality and gender. Their government is no longer fighting a war in Ulster. The British population is rising rather than falling. The feel of national life is more feverish than entropic. The look of things is gaudy and skin-deep, rather than heavy, worn-out and grey.

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When the Lights Went Out

It was inevitable that the first question after the lights went out was not when they would return, but whether terrorism was involved. We live now in a world in which no crisis seems quite as critical once there is an assurance that it was not caused by a terrorist plot.

It seemed more likely that the problem was lightning or too many air-conditioners, or a power surge that caused a breakdown near the Canadian border, sending outages cascading through Canada and the northeastern United States. In the first hours, no one knew for sure. But that was more or less what had happened in 1977, and many people in New York still have fond or frightening memories of that blackout. Their reaction to the sudden cessation of power yesterday afternoon, however, was informed by more recent events. We know that when something bad occurs, people are supposed to try to take care of one another. The challenge yesterday was whether the populace could hold onto the painfully learned lessons of Sept. 11 at a time when the crisis was more mundane.

A blackout requires a whole new set of skills from city dwellers, and yesterday the low-tech became king. Bicycles and flashlights were temporarily priceless. The best stereo system in the world could not hold a candle to a child's battery-operated radio. Meanwhile, Mayor Michael Bloomberg sounded calm, firm and well organized -- the perfect tone for a citywide shutdown that required teamwork without poetry.

At least for the first hours of the blackout of 2003, cars stopped for pedestrians without the urging of traffic lights -- though in many places the gridlock was too severe to allow anyone to reach a very threatening speed. People with homes they could get to offered spare beds and couches to the less fortunate. The unlucky made do with an office couch and directed their sympathy toward those withthe bad fortune to have been taking a subway or an elevator at the very minute that something went extremely wrong with that power station somewhere up north.

For New Yorkers, the blackout was all about them and their reaction, just as people in Detroit and Toronto regarded the event as uniquely their story. They will remember where they were when the lights went out, and will tell one another that for a few minutes, they wondered whether terrorists had struck again.

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When the Lights Went Out

Poltergeists attack a family in Yorkshire during the 1974 nationwide blackouts. Poltergeists attack a family in Yorkshire during the 1974 nationwide blackouts. Poltergeists attack a family in Yorkshire during the 1974 nationwide blackouts.

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• Trivia The name of the family in the film is the Maynards. The family the 'true' story is loosely based upon were called the Pritchards.
• Goofs In the opening scene when the men are unloading the vehicle, in the background you can clearly see one house has a satellite dish and later on another house is seen in the background with a UPVC extension, both not available at the time the film was set
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• Soundtracks Girls It Aint Easy Written by Dunbar & Wayne Published by Universal / MCA Music Ltd Performed by Tracey Gee

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• Dec 15, 2012
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• September 14, 2012 (United Kingdom)
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WHEN THE LIGHTS WENT OUT

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When the Lights Went Out: A History of Blackouts in America . By David E. Nye (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. x plus 292 pp. $27.95)

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Claude S. Fischer, When the Lights Went Out: A History of Blackouts in America . By David E. Nye (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. x plus 292 pp. $27.95), Journal of Social History , Volume 45, Issue 1, Fall 2011, Pages 308–310, https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shr016

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“Don't know what you got till it's gone” (Cinderella, 1988) is the axiom David E. Nye employs in When the Lights Went Out: A History of Blackouts in America. By tracking the frequency and changing nature of “blackouts”—even the term, he shows, evolved, replacing less dramatic descriptions like “outage” as the implications of electrical shut-downs grew more serious—Nye shows how dependent Americans became on plentiful, cheap, and reliable electricity.

In his latest book, Nye takes a fresh view of what he first covered in his important history, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880–1940 (1990), expanding the vision to take in energy issues of the twenty-first century. “Each blackout,” he postulates, “provides a snapshot of the electrical system and of social relationships” (p. 3).

Nye's first snapshot is not of the routine, small-scale outages common to electrical production in the early years (and still with us now); it is of the planned blackouts western governments experimented with in the run-up to and then applied during World War II. These exercises turned out to be relatively sloppy, perhaps unnecessary, and not that effective, especially when combatants eventually turned to indiscriminate carpet bombing. In recounting the wartime history of electrification, Nye dwells on its growing symbolic and cultural meaning: turning the lights back on represented a return to peace and normal life.

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ebook ∣ Three Studies on the Ancient Apostasy

By hugh nibley.

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Hugh Nibley

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01 January 2001

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When the Lights Went Out: Three Studies on the Ancient Apostasy

Hugh Nibley

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When the Lights Went Out contains reprints of three classic Nibley essays on the fate of the primitive Christian church and its institutions and beliefs. In “The Passing of the Primitive Church,” Nibley presents forty striking and often neglected facets of church history. “The Forty-Day Mission of Christ” deals with the historical relevance of Acts 1:3, which claims that after Christ’s resurrection, he was “seen of them forty days, and [spoke] of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God.” Nibley discusses the implications of the loss of the temple during the fall of Jerusalem in his “Christian Envy of the Temple.” Each of these three articles appeared separately in scholarly journals, 1959–66.

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© 2001 Hugh W. Nibley

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Nibley, Hugh, "When the Lights Went Out: Three Studies on the Ancient Apostasy" (2001). Maxwell Institute Publications . 99. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/mi/99

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• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00FRSJ09M
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ The Neal A Maxwell Institute (October 9, 2013)
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ October 9, 2013
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
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• #3,073 in Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints
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