My Second Blackout

It was 9:30. I was running late, just about to head out the door, when all of a sudden the light in the bathroom went out. Like an idiot, I pulled the plug a few times, just to make sure the light wouldn’t self-correct. Progressing through the “power’s out and I don’t know why” protocol, I checked a few other lights. The whole house was out.

I had one second of panic while I considered the possibility that this was somehow my fault. Could the power have been cut off intentionally? Had we paid the Eneco bills? Ann takes care of all those things, since I am incapable of domestic responsibilities. But she really IS responsible and reliable and all those things you lie about on questionnaires. So I discounted the possibility. The fault must lie elsewhere.

I checked the fuse box. At least, I’m pretty sure it was the fuse box. I looked at it dumbly for a few seconds until admitting that if there really was something out of place there’s no way I would know it. Nothing looked exploded and nothing was smoking (the main tell-tales I look for).

Then Ann called on my cell. “Do you have power?”

So it was the whole town then.

I decided it was still worth making an appearance at work. As I was walking through the center of Dordrecht I saw things that were oddly familiar from the last time I walked through a blacked-out town. That was New York in August of 2003 when a large chunk of the Northeast lost power. THAT was truly a nightmare. It took me eight hours of desperate travel on one of the hottest days of the year.

There were many similarities. Walking past the shops I saw people standing in their doorways, looking around, trying to find out what’s going on. Too many people in the streets. Dark store interiors. You just knew that somewhere ice cream was melting and cars were minutes away from running into each other because all the traffic lights were out. The entire economic productivity of thousands of Dutch workers ground to a halt within a second. (Interestingly, no one noticed.)

When I got to work I found out that it wasn’t just Dordrecht, but the entire surrounding group of towns. Zwijndrecht, Papendrecht, Riddekerk, and Hendrik Ido Ambacht were all down. I stayed at work for about an hour before packing it in and heading to Den Haag (where there was power) with my friend Ian.

While walking around at noon on a sunny workday is a nice departure from the ordinary, being in a truly large blackout is unsettling. It reveals how fragile our daily routine is, and how massively our lives change without energy.

I remember when I was working at Xlibris in 1999, and we had a mad rush of authors who all wanted to publish their books about the impending catastrophe of Y2K. The scenarios always ended up with the world looking like some flavor of Mad Max. The electricity grid fails. Society falls apart within days. Roving gangs of leather pants clad psychos ruled the world. It didn’t look like I should have rushed to buy my crossbow and fishnet tank-top just yet, but I was willing to give it a few more hours.

The power went back on at 1:00pm and they guy at the boot shop refused to let me return my steel-tipped motorcycle boots. Life continued, with the loss of only a minimal amount of ice cream. Still, nothing like wholesale loss of electricity to throw things into perspective for you.