More regarding solar Storm of 1989

The currents eventually found harbor in the electrical systems of Great Britain, the United States and Canada.

At 2:44:16 AM on March 13, all was well and power engineers at Hydro-Quebec resigned themselves to yet another night of watching loads come and go during the off-peak hours. The rest of the world had finished enjoying the dance of the aurora borealis, and were slumbering peacefully, preparing for another day's work the next day. The engineers didn't know, however, that for the last half-hour, their entire system had been under attack by powerful Earth currents. One second later, at 2:44:17 AM, these currents found a weak spot in the power grid of the Hydro-Quebec Power Authority. A 100-ton, static VAR capacitor Number 12 at the Chibougamau sub-station tripped and went off-line as harmonic currents induced by the electrojet flowing overhead, caused protective relays to sense overload conditions. The loss of voltage regulation at Chibougamau caused power swings and a reduction of power generation in the 735,000-volt La Grande transmission network. At 2:44:19 AM, a second capacitor followed suit at the same station. 150 kilometers away at the Albanel and Nemiskau stations, four more capacitors went off-line at 2:44:46. The last to fall at 2:45:16 AM was a static VAR capacitor at the Laverendrye complex to the south of Chibougamau. The fate of the network had been sealed in barely 59 seconds as the entire 9,460-megawatt output from Hydro-Quebec's La Grande Hydroelectric Complex found itself without proper regulation.

In less than a minute, Quebec lost half of its electrical power generation. Automatic load-reduction systems tried to restore a balance between the loads connected to the power grid, and the massive loss of capacity now available. One by one, the load-reduction systems disconnected towns and regions across Quebec, but to no avail. Domestic heating and lighting systems began to flicker and go out. Eight seconds later at 2:45:24 AM, power swings tripped the supply lines from the 2,200 megawatt Churchill Falls generation complex. By 2:45:32 AM, the entire Quebec power grid collapsed, and most of the province found itself without power. The cascading of events was much too fast for human operators to react, but it was more than enough time for 21,500 megawatts of badly needed electrical power to suddenly disappear from service.

The nighttime temperature in Toronto was 19 degrees F (-6.8 C) with a high temperature that day of only 34 F (1.6 C) so the loss of electrical power was felt very dramatically as most people woke up to cold homes for breakfast. Over 3 million people live near Montreal, the second largest metropolitan area in Canada, where nearly half of the population of Quebec resides. It is famous for its 30 kilometers of underground walkways linking 60 buildings, two universities and thousands of shops and businesses. Over 500,000 people use this system each day to avoid the bracing cold winter air. Pedestrians using this electrically-lit system suddenly found themselves plunged into complete darkness, with only the feeble battery-powered safety lights to guide them to the surface.

The presses at the Montreal Gazette had been rolling at break-neck speed that night to print the Monday newspaper for its 195,000 subscribers, but the power failure shut the production down for a day. Huge rolls of paper weighing several tons each, came to a sudden halt, shredding paper in a storm of debris, and jamming the presses. The Montreal Gazette apologized to its customers in a news release on March 12, blaming what they had assumed was a local power failure in Montreal. Their sister newspaper, La Presse, seemed unaffected by the outage and helped The Gazette press their papers. The only casualty was the color, comics section which came out a day later. Dealing with their own emergency, they had little time to investigate just what had happened. A cursory call to Hydro-Quebec identified the cause of the outage as a defective 12,000-volt cable that provided The Gazette with power. There was no mention of any aurora sighted in Montreal, perhaps because of cloudy conditions and, of course, other more urgent matters. The 5000 subscribers who called the newspaper that day preferred to talk to the Customer Service operator complaining about not getting their morning newspaper. The tone of the reportage changed rather abruptly on March 14 when the details of the blackout had finally all emerged.

The blackout closed schools and businesses, kept the Montreal Metro shut down during the morning rush hour, and paralyzed Dorval Airport, delaying flights. Without their navigation radar online, no flight could land or takeoff until power had been restored. People ate their cold breakfasts in the dark and left for work. They soon found themselves stuck in congested traffic, which tried to navigate darkened intersections without any streetlights or traffic control systems operating. Like most modern cities, people work round the clock, and in the early morning hours of March 13, the Swing Shift staffed many office buildings in the caverns of Downtown Montreal. All these buildings were now pitch dark, stranding workers in dark offices, stairwells and elevators. It cost businesses tens of millions of dollars as it stalled production, idled workers and spoiled products.

Hydro-Quebec officials said that the vast power system was innocent. The fault, they said, was in the geography of Quebec, which had power lines extending much farther north than for other electrical systems. Many people soon pointed out that this was the second major blackout in less than a year, and that Hydro-Quebec's outages totaled about nine hours per year, compared to neighboring Manitoba Power and Electric's two hours per year average. Hydro-Quebec promised to invest another $2 billion to cut in half the number of yearly blackouts, but this didn't derail the investigations that were called for by the government to see if Hydro-Quebec had been negligent. Energy Minister John Ciaccia echoed the sentiments of many people as they sat in snarled traffic facing blackened signals,

"It's frustrating because despite all our efforts to upgrade the system, we still wake up at 5 AM with a total blackout."

By 10:00 AM, power had been restored to most of the customers in Quebec, and by 11:00 AM all but 3,500 of the 842,000 customers were back in business. It would, however, be a complicated process to pick up the pieces. Isolated power failures were promised over the next 24 hours as Hydro-Quebec wrestled with re-starting their vast interconnection of power lines and transformers. Residential customers, they announced, would be at the bottom of the priority list for being re-connected. New York Power authorities lost 150 megawatts the moment Hydro-Quebec went down, and the New England Power Pool lost 1,410 megawatts at about the same time. Service to 96 utilities in six New England states was interrupted while other reserves of electrical power were bought and brought online. In a show of solidarity with their sister utility in the North, by 9:00 AM, New York Power and NEPool were sending over 1,100 megawatts of power up to Quebec to tide them over while the system was being brought back up again. Luckily, these states had the power to spare at the time. But just barely. Some of them had their own cliff hanger problems to deal with. Electrical power pools serving the Northeast United States had come very close to going down as well.

The electrojet currents, now flowing in the upper atmosphere, spread their impact far and wide, causing electrical disturbances throughout North America and Great Britain. A thousand miles away from Hydro-Quebec, Alleghney Power, which connected Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania lost 10 of its 24 VAR capacitors as they were automatically taken off-line to avoid damage. A $12 million, 22,000-volt generator step-up transformer owned by the Public Service Electric and Gas Company of New Jersey experienced overheating and permanent insulation damage. This transformer was the linchpin in converting electricity from the Salem Nuclear Plant, and boosting it to 500,000 volts for transmission. Replacement power had to be bought for $400,000 to keep East Coast residents from sharing the same fate as their neighbors in Quebec. Luckily, the owners had a spare replacement transformer available, but it still took six months to install. Without the replacement, it would have taken a year to order a new one. Across the United States from coast to coast, over 200 transformer and relay problems erupted within minutes of the start of the March 13 storm. 50 million people in the United States went about their business, or slept, never suspecting that their electrical systems had been driven to the edge of disaster. Not since the Great Blackout of 1965 had U.S. citizens been involved in a similar outage. There would have been no place they could drive to in an hour to escape.

The solar flare and accompanying storm conditions did much more than cause a blackout and upset communications systems. Automatic garage doors in California suburbs began to open and close without apparent reason. Microchip production in the northeastern United States came to a halt several times because of the ionosphere's magnetic activity. In space, geostationary communications satellites that sensed the Earth's magnetic field in order to point themselves had to be manually repointed from the ground as the local field polarity reversed direction, nearly causing the satellite to flip upside down. Some satellites in polar orbits actually tumbled out of control for several hours. GOES weather satellite communications were interrupted causing weather images to be lost. NASA's TDRS-1 communication satellite recorded over 250 anomalies caused by the increased particles flows into its sensitive electronics.

end quote from:

http://www.solarstorms.org/SWChapter1.html

To read more from the original article I quoted in January 2012 here is the button for that:The Quebec Blackout of 1989 caused by  Solar Stor...

 Note: I thought it might be fun for people to read about this since it happened on March 13th 1989 or one day ago, 24  years ago exactly. It also gives one pause because things like this are sure to happen again here on earth or worse. It is not if it is only When. And the more prepared areas are for things like this the less loss of life and harm it will cause when it does happen.