Blogtrek

50 Million People in Blackout?

The biggest blackout in our history hit last Thursday. According to the media, over 50 million people were denied electricity from some time in the afternoon of 2003 August 14 to some time after that. That is a huge number of people. In fact, I even heard some media say 60 million. That is about 1/6 to 1/5 of the population of our country of over 282 million. If that had happened, it would be a P8 power outage. But did that really happen? I saw a blog from Peter Dutton entitled Jumping to Conclusions that said that the media really hyped up this one. Mr. Dutton said that the figure 50 million is way overinflated, that it was a creation of the media. If so, then media hype strikes again. But was it so?

I did some calculating. I looked up “united states” and “megawatts” on Google™ and found that in 2000, the US used 604,514 megawatts of energy. I heard from Mr. Dutton that the New York Times reported that a total of 61,800 megawatts of energy were lost in the blackout. I divided the 604,514 megawatts by the 2000 US population of 282,421,906 and got that the US consumes this year 2.14046 kilowatts of energy per person. That seems reasonable, since our household consumes 1.5 kilowatts. So I simply divided the 61,800 megawatts by 2.140 and got that 28,872,240 people (or 29 million people) were affected by the blackout. Media hype exposed! So much for the 50 million. This demotes the blackout to P7 and in fact it is not the biggest power blackout in our history. The blackout of 1965 November 9 affected 30 million people in a nation with far fewer people, although that figure could have been hyped also.

Sometimes it pays to check the figures before believing what is in that pile of papers at your doorstep. I thank Peter Dutton of Jumping to Conclusions (like a lemming?) for alerting me to this latest media hype.

By the way, my “P7” and “P8” notation is explained in Logarithms Keep Dr. Brown in Perspective.