Talk:List of major power outages

message: Does anyone think it would be nice to organize this into a table.  I thought I might give it a try.  --CoolGuy 05:01, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I think this is a good idea and would be an advantage. Angerdan (talk) 11:32, 10 December 2022 (UTC)
thread_title: Table

message: This list is unbalanced. At least 1/3 is 2006 events and no events before the 60s are mentioned. Too much vividness here. --Jambalaya 15:49, 27 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Maybe the article needs a minimum number of affected customers in order to be considered notable enough for inclusion in this article.  And/or number of days they were affected.  Otherwise there's a lot of chaff.  Tempshill 06:11, 1 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: A minimum number of people or a certain % of a country's population perhaps? For instance if the power were to go out in the whole of Luxembourg or even someone like Monaco it would still be a big event, even if it is only a small country in terms of population. Cls14 18:51, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

text: This has not got any better.  The events listed are haphazard and most of the work on the page seems to be deleting those that don't meet the cut.  I was thinking of adding the recent Havana black out and noticed that the Hurricane Isaac blackouts are not listed.  I don't know if this page is really worth having if it is not going to be at least kept up with current events, much less the pre-2006 missed events. Autkm (talk) 23:17, 10 September 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Unbalanced 

message: Hum! This article needs a big clean-up and/or re-arrangement. I would suggest to separate this list into sections for each continent (probably with a table to make it more good-looking. Maybe it the long range we could throw separate articles for each continent if more events from the past adds up.--JForget 01:14, 14 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Split into sections for each continent

message: Every single outage listed here should have references listed, yes? At least where possible. That would include all of the outages from the last few years where online media is prevalent. SongMonk (talk) 22:18, 22 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Agreed, as well. I've tagged every instance that does not have an accompanying wiki-article clearly about a resulting power outage with  (citation needed) tags. - Ageekgal (talk) 00:03, 27 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  References 

message: I think what is needed is a solid set of criteria that entries need to conform to. Not every outage is notable, so we need a solid, well defined test for significance. To start us off:
:1. The outage must not be planned by the service provider. 
:2. The outage must affect at least 1,000 people AND last at least one hour. 
:3. There must be at least 1,000,000 person hours of disruption.
A person hour of disruption would be the number of people multiplied by the length of the disruption in hours. The longer the disruption, the fewer people it needs to affect to become significant. The shorter the disruption the more an outage needs. Nailedtooth (talk) 22:23, 9 April 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Solid criteria for inclusion 

message: Are we intending to list every single blackout?  We had no power where I live for about 4 hours last Saturday, should I add it to the list?  65.121.141.34 (talk) 16:30, 11 June 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Too many 

message: There were two major outages that affected the western united states in 1996, not just the one shown in August.  The first was in July.  Both have been widely reported in the internet.  See for instance http://www.cc.state.az.us/divisions/administration/news/96-1111.htm
I recall a major outage in the western united states in the early 1980's, but I couldn't find any cites on the internet.  During a December storm (as I recall), a transmission tower in PG&E's service area (Northern California) collapsed under wind load and took out to lines on the Pacific Intertie.  There was a several hour power outage affecting perhaps 20% of Southern California (Disneyland was evacuated) and scattered power outages occured as far away as Phoenix.  Perhaps someone has details to corroborate my recollection.
192.212.253.17 (talk) 23:00, 2 December 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Missing Outages 

message: Where is the info about this? Radical Mallard (talk) 21:11, 20 January 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Current California Outage/Storm/Crisis (January 2010)

message: I removed the Waltham, Massachusetts outtage as it did not meet the criteria. Waltham, Massachusetts has a population of 59,226 and the outtage lasted less than one hour and 45 minutes while effecting a few streets of the city. Assuming that the three streets listed contained all of the city's population (they don't) then the man hours of power lost would be 103,645... about ten percent of the required amount. Danpenning (talk) 20:24, 24 March 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Removed the Waltham Outtage

message: I've removed the May 24th (Provo, Utah) and July 4th (Northern Ireland) outages.
The Provo one lasted roughly 1hr 45min, according to this site, which means that it would have had to have affected 1,000,000 people to be noteworthy.  That link and the article linked in the original entry make it clear that only parts of Provo (approx pop. 500,000), meaning that it fails to meet the criteria.
The Northern Ireland one is a bit harder to quantify, as I can't find exact numbers.  However, [the BBC link] is from the morning of the 5th and notes that power was restored by that point (and, in most locations, had been restored that same day), well below the likely threshold needed to reach the 1,000,000 customer hours.  (Speaking of which: does anyone have more information on the earlier NI entry?  The link provided gives no information about the length of the power disruption.) -- g026r (talk) 04:41, 6 July 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Removed 2010 Entries 

message: The Globe and Mail says the fire started at 4:40 PM and power was restored everywhere by 8:30, so just under 4 hours. Only some people were affected for as long as 4 hours.  The Globe and Mail says up to 250,000 people affected. This barely makes the cut-off; it's not encyclopediac to record every time the lights flicker. True, it's embarrsasign to have an outage with the Queen in town, but at least she didn't get stranded in the middle of the river like the previous visit to Winnipeg. --Wtshymanski (talk) 21:47, 6 July 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Toronto July 5, 2010 doesn't quite make it

message: I lost power for 3 days after 8 inches of snow in Rockville Maryland.  My house went down to 48 degrees.  I have pepco.  Why isn't this on the list?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 138.88.128.150 (talk) 21:21, 19 February 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  DC outages 2011 from January 26th storm 

message: There was a super storm that hit the south east VA area on the 24th and knocked out power to more than 172, 000 people and it took the power company 3 days to restore power. Would that be a good thing to add to the list? Here is the story about the storm. --Akemi Loli Mokoto (talk) 13:25, 28 May 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Hampton Roads Power outage of March 24th

message: There was a power outage in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Maryland that lasted ten hours.  It spilled over into New York City, as well.  I believe it belongs on the list. ghh 19:04, 22 October 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: June 5, 1967

message: Some entries have been unreferenced for 4 years - and some entries no longer meet the arbitrary 10000000 customer-hours cutoff. I have removed these if they didn't link to a main article about that particular outage. --Wtshymanski (talk) 14:43, 4 April 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Unreferenced

message: Article is unreferenced.  A search of news websites, even local MT do not show it despite blackouts affecting 5000 people being reported.  Flathead County had a 2010 Census population of 90,000 and the comment in this article indicates parts of Flathead County were affected.  Even if all 90,000 were blacked out for the entire 9 hours, this does not meet the million threshold. Autkm (talk) 18:16, 18 August 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Removed Flathead County, MT June 26, 2012

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message: It's in all the media - even being twisted by CC Deniers that it was the Wind Power Gen that caused it, denying that about 30 towers down and 80,000 strikes blacked out about 1 million for about 24 + hours .... :-)
60.242.247.177 (talk) 13:35, 29 September 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  South Australia 2016 Failure. 

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message: Moved from article page. Only citation I could find listed "thousands" without power, not 285,000. Stono rebellion (talk) 08:01, 26 August 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  February 25 2017, Scranton storm 

message: This section heading is misleading. Surely when someone sees it they're going to expect results measured in real time rather than "customer hours". (Analogy: Just because there were more people around to experience it, was last Christmas Day longer than the one in 1919? Of course not!)
Best fix for this would be to have incidents ranked by how long they *actually* lasted. (By all means, retain the existing info in this or its own section.)
Alternatively, rename the section to be more descriptive of what it actually contains.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A02:C7F:961C:1F00:3457:DCB4:2142:64C5 (talk) 13:32, 21 June 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Longest? 

message: The criteria for inclusion include the following: “There must be at least 1,000,000 person-hours of disruption.”
Given one of the four conditions is specified in person-hours, would it not make sense for us to include (approximate) figures for person-hours of disruption in the table? My thinking is that this could help to give readers a better sense of the overall impact of the events listed, as well as another way to rank the disruption caused (if desired).
Let me know what you all think. Qofif (talk) 13:51, 24 September 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Adding (approximate) figures for person-hours of disruption in the table? 

message: This paragraph, which is about major blackouts in parts of England and Wales, mostly references one source, but uses the same source excessively in inline citations. Could we possibly cite the source just once at the end of the paragraph to reduce clutter?
Scotty2083 (talk) 02:37, 22 November 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  August 9 2019 England and Wales 

message: I'm not sure what numbers to look for to see if this event meets the criteria. Sorta cool it was caused by one security guard wandering in and flipping a switch. 
https://www.google.com/search?q=August+of+1978%2C+memphis+blackout+
Lent (talk 13:54, 21 December 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Does Memphis, August 1978 meet criteria