Just catching the news about the power outage in New York and—reportedly—also in a number of major cities along the east coast, up into Canada and even into the midwest. I wonder why this is happening, especially if the early reports of outages in other major cities are accurate. Apart from the obvious (but I imagine unlikely) explanation that we all don’t want to jump to because we’re responsible people, the other thing that springs to mind is the network structure of the national grid. This is a topic of which I of course know nothing. But in his book Small Worlds I seem to remember (it’s a pain not having access to my library) that Duncan Watts has a discussion of power grids and the potential for serious cascading failures under certain conditions. The idea is that small failures can spread rapidly through networks with the right properties. Here’s the Google cache of one of his working papers on this topic, that treats power grids as a sample case. I wonder if this is what’s happened.

I guess I’ll just have to keep watching the news (like all the other bloggers who are reminded of their dependency on primary media sources).

Update: CNN is now reporting that the Niagara/Mohawk power grid may have become overloaded and then failed. Score one for CT analysts over that jumpy guy on CNBC that I just saw. He was clearly hoping for terrorists. You could see the hungry gleam in his eye. So, although the Sociology Department isn’t at the top of your list of places to call for comment on events like this, someone should give Watts a ring. Except they can’t, because, um, he teaches at Columbia and there’s a blackout.