Thursday, May 6, 2021

Spooky Outage

 On May 4, 2021 I awoke at 9:01 AM and in less than a minute, I noticed a power failure occur. There were three indications: (a) a fan I had on stopped running; (2) there was suddenly no sound from a sound machine that continuously runs to make a waterfall sound; (3) my alarm clock started blinking 12:00 like alarm clocks do when the power is interrupted. Still sleepy, I lay in bed for a few minutes, and then the fan started running again, as the power came back on. I had to manually reset the time on the alarm clock. I asked my wife whether she had experienced the brief power outage, and she said she had. Nobody was doing anything unusual in my apartment at the time, and the power returned without anyone touching any fuse box or circuit breakers. 

What was strange was that upon checking the power outage page of the local power company (Con Edison), it indicated there were no recent power outages in Queens on that day. Here is the power outage map that it shows for today (May 6, 2021), and there is no indication of a problem on May 4 in Queens, NY (the borough of New York City in which I live):


I asked a security guard at my large apartment building on May 4 whether he knew of any power outage at our building, and he said no one had mentioned such a thing. On May 6 he told me he had asked the building superintendant (who would have known if anyone was working on the electricity at our building), and that superintendant said he knew nothing about any power interruption. 

So we have a spooky power interruption that seems to have occurred only in my apartment. A check of the circuit breakers showed nothing unusual. No one was doing anything unusual in the apartment at the time. 

I may wonder whether the exact time of the outage 9:01 was relevant. In one of Shakespeare's plays, Julius Caesar gets a warning about March 15, the day he died. Could the 9:01 time of the power outage have been a warning about September 1 (9/1/2021, the calendar date corresponding to the time of 9:01)?

Postscript: A spooky related event (also occurring at 9:01 AM) occurred a month later, and is described here I experienced no difficulties when September 1 came around. But on that day the city where I live (New York City) experienced a record amount of rainfall, as remnants of Hurricane Ida struck the city.  Thirteen people in New York City were suddenly killed by the storm. Referring to Wednesday September 1, 2021, a news story states this: 

"The New York City metropolitan area was struck by sudden disaster on Wednesday night as the remnants of Hurricane Ida flooded subways, roads, and homes. At least 45 were killed in New York and New Jersey, and a total of at least 52 across the Northeast. Ida was the worst natural disaster to strike the area since 2012’s Superstorm Sandy."

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