I am honored for the privilege of being here. It was August 14, 2003. My wife and I were on our way back from New York City, my favorite place to go,

and we were at LaGuardia Airport.

We're at LaGuardia Airport, and preparing

to catch our flight back to Dallas. We stood at curbside check-in and waited for

what seemed like in an ordinate amount of time for us to get our bags checked.

I stepped out of line and walked down to the baggage handler and said,

is there a problem? The line is not moving. He says, yes, nothing is working. He says,

we've had some kind of problem here at the airport.

The conveyor belts aren't working, the computers aren't working,

the magnetometers aren't working, things are just not working.

So we waited, and we waited and we waited with thousands of other people at the airport for hours and hours and hours.

After a number of hours as dusk was setting in on this hot August day. They said we are so sorry

LaGuardia is closing down. We were caught in the blackout of 2003 when a power grid failure in Canada had worked its way down the East Coast,

creating a blackout in the Big Apple, New York.

So I, like thousands of other people, found ourselves in a

desperate situation. We found ourselves in a scenario with no place to go.

Everybody's now wondering what are we going to do? Everybody's trying to find a hotel room because of course like us we had checked out.

We called back to Dallas to our travel agent and she said I've been calling around and there's one room left at the Crown Plaza of Guadia, one room, but they can only hold it for 10 minutes because people were coming to get in. And so we hailed down a taxi, it's now

dark, we walk into a candlelit hotel because remember there is no power in New York so there

are no lights.

And we had to register by hand because the computers were not working.

We had to go up to our room by flashlight because the lights were not working. We walked into the room with a flashlight on

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