PDC '05: Let There Be Light

After spending the beginning of the morning in the Fundamentals Lounge, I went up to see Keith during the intermission of his Art of Secure Coding and to let him know that Mike and I would swing by his BOF's tomorrow.  Afterwords, we grabbed some lunch, and I noticed it was awfully dark.  Seems the power was out in the LA Convention Center.  Since they weren't letting people back into the Big Room, Mike and I went out to walk around downtown, where we noticed that power seemed to be out to the entire city.  It was almost like something out of a movie, people pouring out of buildings, and walking around the streets; fire trucks and ambulance sirens all the time, etc.  When power started to come back to downtown, we were standing outside the Westin and actually watched the building light up again.  Turns out that some power company employees accidentally connected the wrong wires causing a surge that made two receiving stations shutdown, which in turn caused a few generation stations to shutdown.  Power started coming back online in downtown about an hour after it went out, and they expect full recovery by 5:00.  Thankfully it seems that the worst problems will be lots of traffic and people getting stuck in elevators for a few hours.