NewsNOW newsfax [NN]—8 July, 2071
MANHATTAN—At 9:11 p.m. ET on July 5, much of the northeastern U.C.A.S. were hit by the 3rd largest blackout in North America’s history. Electricity was cut to 250 million people, bringing darkness to customers from New York to Columbus to North Bay. Streetlights went out, subway trains stopped mid-tunnel and refrigeration equipment went dead. And while some electricity consumers have had service restored by early this morning, many areas still remain in darkness.
As far as Gaeatronics and Shiawase experts can tell, there was some sort of failure in the programming to limit power consumption at dozens of Gaeatronics substations. With no limits on the power consumption, the substations drew excessive amounts of power without triggering a warning. Once the substations reached a critical threshold, a surge blasted through the power grid, tripping emergency shutoff switches from Long Island and Boston on the coast, to as far as Cleveland and Detroit. Power from Shiawase Atomic’s Mid-East plant rushed into the power grid to fill the void, but the energy demands quickly overloaded the few remaining substations, causing them to crash.
The catastrophic chain reaction plunged much of the Northeast into fourty-eight hours of darkness and chaos. A complete shutdown of the roadways power systems and public transportation have left hundreds of thousands of people stranded for several days. Minutes after the shutdown, 80% of the matrix hosts native to the northeast were taken offline, with only critical systems left running. Reports of violence, looting, and break-ins are flooding local police stations.
Power has been restored to more than 70% of the effected areas, as of this morning, but rolling blackouts are expected as the power grid is repaired over the next several weeks.
A federal task force has been formed by the UCAS government and members of the Manhattan Development Consortium to oversee the investigation of this incident and report directly to Washington and the Z.O. The task force is being led by U.C.A.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham.