I have such great memories of the blackout. I was in college at the time, so obviously indestructible.

The first night, we had 2 grills with 10ft high flames roaring but I would say in a controlled fashion. The cops quickly asked us to not do something dumb like that anymore and we agreed.

Memories of the local party stores selling 40oz's for pennies on the dollar, as the outage would last days but the booze would not. It didn't really turn into anything bad for us in SE Michigan other than a fun story I can tell my internet pals about 20 years on.

If I recall correctly, we were also somehow the first house in the neighborhood to get power restored...I remember playing a Dreamcast with a hacked NES emulator running Rampart 2 player. I never made good on it, but I always said I wanted to make a shirt that read "I blacked out in the black out of '03"...which is probably for the best.

Older readers would remember the 1965 blackout. 2003 was only 22 years ago

Good documentary on the ice storm of 1998

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ccTzHBUsYQ

> In January 1998, Montreal and the region surrounding it was hit by the most disastrous ice storm ever recorded: more than four inches of ice entombed an area larger than the State of Florida, causing trees and power lines to collapse on an unprecedented scale, leaving millions in the dark without heat (some for up to four weeks). 35 people died and damages totalled more than $5 billion making it the worst natural disaster in Canadian history.

4 out of 5 power lines to Montreal went down

And a computer system failure.

Full grid failures are almost certainly never down to a single cause.

That was a mad few days. We were stuck on campus. Water ran out by the next day. And students were using water from the campus fountain.