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Tag: power outage

  • Disney World Monorail Evacuated After Power Outage

    According to a Disney World spokeswoman Jacquee Wahler, dozens of people had to be evacuated from one of the park’s monorails after a power outage on Sunday, July 13.

    Apparently the weather surrounding the Florida amusement park was getting unpredictable when the monorail halted. However, Wahler says that they do not think lightning was the cause of the outage.

    “When we sat there, we heard a lot of thunder and saw a few bolts of lightning,” 15-year-old Lily Mock, who attends the park on a regular basis, said. Lily went on to explain that, while they were 30 feet in the air, the train suddenly stopped. “It wasn’t a jolting stop, but it did stop really fast — the monorail glided to a stop,” Lily said.

    When the power shorted, so did the air conditioner, leaving the approximately 120 passengers in a heat trap. Despite the rising temperatures, Lily said no one seemed to panic and she and the other passengers passed the time, as they waited for the firefighters to rescue them, by creating small talk with one another.

    Although the firefighters were able to open the top hatch of the monorail, they were able to get each passenger out safely through the main doors with the help of a mechanized lift. “I kind of wanted to go through the top, I thought it’d be fun,” Lily said.

    “Due to weather, there was a power outage on the monorail. There’s currently one train on the system without power and all the guests are now off the train,” Wahler said in a statement.

    No passengers were hurt during the incident, and they were all given free passes for the inconvenience.

    Image via Wikimedia Commons

  • Disney Monorail Up And Running Again

    The Disney monorail that was shut down on Sunday because of lightning was back up and running again on Monday. The lightning did not strike the actual car of the monorail, but did shut down the power around 6:30 pm.

    After several attempts at a restart, the car was evacuated beginning at 7, and was totally empty by 8, thanks to Disney’s fast response. No one suffered injury.

    Renee Wells and her husband, of Ray City, Ga., actually saw the lightning strike. They tried to calm other patrons as they waited for the Disney monorail car to start.

    Many of the other guests began “freaking out” after the Disney monorail slowly came to a stop after the lightning hit, according to Wells. “We kept having to tell them it’s fine – yes, we’re 30 feet in the air, yes, it’s hotter than you know what, but we’re OK.”

    It got hot and it caused a little worry, but that didn’t stop guests from drawing Mickey ears on the windows of the Disney monorail in the forming condensation, as show in some of Wells’ photos.

    It didn’t stop the couple, who was traveling on the Disney monorail with their two young children, from looking on the bright side of things. They did get to have a little adventure as they were evacuated.

    “It was neat because we got to be on top of the monorail.” Wells said.

    Because of the inconvenience caused by the halting of the Disney monorail, park employees went above and beyond to make things right for guests like the Wells’.

    Disney gave toys to her children and FastPasses to the entire family. If you’ve ever been to Disneyworld, you’ll know that is worth a small fortune in itself! Employees also made sure that the Wells’ were not charged for the dinner they missed and rescheduled their dinner at a closer Disney parks restaurant.

    Image via YouTube

  • UC Berkeley Explosion Leaves 4 with Minor Burns

    The LA Times reported yesterday that an explosion devastated UC Berkeley’s campus, sending four to the hospital with burns. The main campus was evacuated as a precaution.

    “It was dark. It was pretty scary. We just wanted to get out of there,” one student, sophomore Jesse Kay, said. Another student, 19-year-old Jay Reddy, was in electrical engineering class when the power went out. “We had to figure out how to get out of the building,” he said.

    When the outage happened around 6:30 pm on Monday evening, a campus staff member and several students reported hearing a boom and seeing flames as several buildings lost power. 20 people needed to be rescued from elevators in the affected building.

    Twitter was abuzz with reactions and images of the incident:

    Officials have stated that they believe the power outage is related to a recently discovered vandalism: an off-campus electrical station saw its copper wiring ripped out.

    Dan Mogulof, the spokesman for UC Berkeley, said to reporters “We have a strong suspicion that what happened is related to vandalism discovered last week. The damage they caused may have been far more extensive than we originally thought.”

    The blast area was apparently two stories high, two road lanes wide, and sent at least one manhole cover flying. The explosion happened as engineers were attempting to restore power.

    “Something happened here that surprised the expert… Somebody attacked our system. Somebody stole key parts of our system,” Mogulof continued. “[Classes] aren’t going to happen and people aren’t going to come back here until we’re sure we have a safe situation.”

    [Image via Twitter]

  • Power Outages Force People to Face Life Without Instagram

    Power outages, in addition to leaving over two million people without power, forced many to consider the question, “Is life worth living if I can’t post anything to Instagram?” The storms that ripped through the Eastern half of the United States on Friday wiped out service for the popular photo-sharing app, where individuals gather in virtual droves to share everything from their eating habits to the daily antics of their four-legged friends. Oh, and feet. You can’t forget the countless photos of people and their shoes. Without the ability to post these images for all to see, many were left to contend with social media withdrawal.

    Also hit by these storms were Pinterest and Netflix, the latter of which went down during one of the few times I actually decided to sit down and watch something in my queue. Since I almost never use the service anymore — if it weren’t for the wife, my subscription would be a phenomenal waste of money — this particularly outage was frustrating for me. I guess this is what many would consider “first world problems”. Seeing as how my electricity and air conditioning are still alive and well as of this writing, I suppose I should count my blessings.

    In an effort to communicate with their legions of disconnected users, all three companies took to Twitter and/or Facebook to keep folks abreast of their respective statuses. Pinterest and Netflix both had their services restored by Saturday afternoon. Instagram, meanwhile, continued to face problems throughout the day. My wife, an avid photog on the popular app, was concerned that many of her pictures would not be restored. Alas, service was up and running smooth Sunday morning, allowing addicts to share their eating habits with the world at-large.

    Netflix, Pinterest and Instagram all use Amazon’s web service division, which provides “cloud computing” functionality to a number of different companies. It was this service that was effectively knocked offline by Friday’s deadly storms.

    How were people around the world coping with the absence of these three technological wonders? You can sample some Twitter reactions to their endless jonesing below. Thankfully, Twitter stood strong during the outages, otherwise there’s no telling what folks would have done with their free time. By the way — your waffles look delicious this morning.