Hello and welcome to malicious life. I'm Gran Living. The White's The widespread failures provoked the evacuation of office buildings

stranded thousands of The police were evacuating people trapped in elevators.

Telephones service was disrupted.

Cash dispensing tele machines were also knocked out,

so people who did not have cash on hand

could not buy flashlights, batteries or other supplies.

For people with medical problems, the blackout added another layer of anxiety.

Emergency rooms were flooded with patients with heat and heart ailments.

At Harlem Hospital, a spokesman said that a number of pedestrians had been hit by cars because traffic lights were out. So there was no air conditioning, no

television, no computers. There was Times Square without its neon glow and Broadway Marquise without their incandescence.

All the shows were cancelled.

So was the Mets game against the San Francisco Giants at Shia Stadium.

And there was a skyline that had no Francisco Giants at Shia Stadium.

And there was a skyline that had never looked quite the way it did last night.

The long, long taut strings of the bridges were dark, the red eyes that usually blink at the very top, not red, not blinking. This of course was a passage from Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize winning novel

The Road, a past apocalyptic story of a father and son traveling

across the United States following an extinction event.

Okay, I lied. That wasn't fiction at all. Those were excerpts from the New York Times article on the 2003 Northeast Power Outage.

But you believed me for a second there, didn't you? In 2003, an entire power grid from the

mid-Western United States up through the Ontario province of Canada and over to the American East Coast went down, cutting

light and water for upwards of 50 million people.

The incident was a lesson in how a connected world is liable to face collective problems

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