It has been roughly 3 weeks since a fire at a nearby substation left John Wayne Airport in the dark. On August 2, 2019, John Wayne Airport was in a full operational stop as all inbound flights were diverted and all outbound flights were cancelled.  It took about 30 minutes until backup power kicked in. This post reflects on the blackout event and focuses on the takeaways that emerged.

Keep The Lights On 

The month of July was eye opening as New York City was plagued by power outages. The first power outage occurred on July 13th and affected Manhattan for about 5 hours. The following weekend, the surrounding neighborhoods of Queens and Brooklyn were impacted by an outage. During an emergency is not the time to think about emergency lighting—yet that seemed to be the case! While Con Edison has determined the cause of the outage to be a faulty connection, the event has stirred conversations about emergency preparedness.