Yesterday, between the hours of 3 and 4 p.m the electricity (or power, whichever word you prefer) went out in most of southern California, parts of Arizona, and even down into parts of Baja California, Mexico. I don't think that has ever happened, at least not in the past twenty years or so.
First, I only found out because a friend called to ask if the power was out where I'm currently living (I was born and raised in SoCal) and I said "No. Why?" After she explained I shrugged it off as another "Oh, SoCal, your massive population has exceeded the demand for electricity, again." Power outages in SoCal are fairly common during heat waves like the one from this past week; the cause is possibly from the high usage of air conditioners.
A few hours after this call, I decided to see what the San Diego news stations had to say about this event. Some of it was the usual reporting that the power had gone out and that they would keep updating as the day wore on. The irony of this: Without electricity there is no cable or internet, televisions, laptops, and computers don't work, so how are people supposed to find out what is going on? Smoke signals, maybe? But, there was also something that really caught my attention. It was a short sentence at the end of the Fox news report I read online, but it had a much larger impact than the rest of the report. To paraphrase, this is what it said: This is not considered a terrorist attack.
This is not a terrorist attack
Wow!
Analyzing this through the lens of English (the subject, not the language), its position at the end of the report suggests one of two things 1) It's not important or 2)It's important, but we don't want you panic.
When I read that I was just SHOCKED that they would even add that thought. None of the other news sources had mentioned it. My second thought was: Why would you even THINK it was a terrorist attack? Closely followed by: "Oh yeah, it's almost the anniversary of the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center towers."
It almost seems like we're expecting another attack near the anniversary of the event that shook the USA as well as the rest of the world. But cutting the power off to only part of the nation seems fairly meaningless considering it only affect a small region.True, the destruction of part of the World Trade Center was on the East Coast, but it affected the entire nation via new policies implemented in the name of safety and anti-terrorism. But at the same time, knocking out electricity points to our dependence on electricity, it's kind of a weakness.
Thankfully, though, this wasn't a terrorist attack. To expect it to be is a bit of a far-fetched idea, but since September 11, 2001 the world and the USA became more uptight about security, more suspicious of seemingly innocent events; the world's socio-political climate changed forever. Something SoCal did learn, however, was it is extremely dependent on electricity, and it probably felt like the world had ended. We are definitely blessed to have a working electrical system.
To learn more about the power outage here are some links:
This morning's
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