Three major U.S. cities struggled to power vital transport infrastructure on Friday, delaying work and travel for thousands of Americans just before the weekend.
New York's subway B line lost power for roughly five hours, making the morning commute in the Big Apple especially painful, according to several reports emerging from the northern state.
The track lost power at the 7th Avenue and 53rd Street station at approximately 7:25 a.m. and rebooted at 12:36 p.m., subway officials told The New York Post. The B line runs from Brighton Beach in Brooklyn to Bedford Park in the Bronx.
The outage caused the D, E, and M routes to be rerouted, and delays in both directions of the A, B, C, D, E, F, J, M, N, Q and R trains.
Other power outages in Los Angeles and San Francisco occurred at the same time, but officials have yet to determine if the concurring disturbances were related.
The incident in LA affected the Los Angeles International Airport and several surrounding areas, while San Francisco suffered from a near black out, with traffic signals, public transport, and a majority of large office buildings in the dark since roughly 9 a.m. local time.
According to the United States Department of Energy, the American power grid is made up of three smaller grids, known as interconnections, which transport energy all over the country. The Eastern Interconnection provides electricity to states to the east of the Rocky Mountains, while the Western interconnection serves the Rocky Mountain states and those that border the Pacific Ocean. The locations of the cities affected by this morning's outages suggests that there could be issues with both major grids.
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The Texas Interconnected System is the third and smallest grid in the nation, and serves most of Texas, although small portions of the Lone Star state benefit from the other two grids.
By Zainab Calcuttawala for Oilprice.com
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Zainab Calcuttawala is an American journalist based in Morocco. She completed her undergraduate coursework at the University of Texas at Austin (Hook’em) and reports on… More