At 4:11 p.m. on Aug. 14, 2003, the system supervisor in the control room overseeing Ontario's electrical grid saw four alarms pop up on his computer screen.
"It looks like we've had a disturbance," Todd Parcey recalls saying, in what proved to be a massive understatement.
"My desk itself has 11 computer monitors on it and one of them is dedicated just to alarms. So that initial 'gong,' you look over at your alarm screen. I recognized the first four or five alarms and then everything just scrolled right off the page." In Ontario, the IESO says a series of large power swings pulsed into the province's grid interconnections at Michigan and New York.
"We train for this sort of thing constantly," he says. "You take your pause for a second and then 'OK, what do we have left?' and then try to understand the scope of the event, and then we're trying to stabilize what's left. Once that's stabilized, then basically our next task is start to restore off-grid power to the nuclear plants."
"It's one step after another," Parcey says. "You take baby steps until you get to a point where you have enough connected that you can take larger steps." But most will likely remember the day for the unique moments it sparked among co-workers, neighbours or complete strangers.
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