Who was affected by this and what did you end up doing during it? This outage happened August 14th 2003 and affected almost all of the Province of Ontario Canada and the US States that boarder it.

I was 9 and about to settle in to watch a VHS and then it went off around 4:30 PM, it was a hot sunny day during a heat wave. After some time the family decided to go spend the evening at the local beach. Had to come home, and get ready for bed in the dark. The power for my area returned overnight sometime in early morning and I woke up to the fancy flashy light coming off the stereo's Vaccuum display as it puts on fancy intro when standby. There was also cheering and clapping coming from outside as the streetlights warmed up.

The next day and a while after the power was unreliable and blackouts and brownouts were frequent, the city even had vehicles drive around the neighbourhoods a few times announcing that people should refrain from using heavy appliances due to limited power and also to boil water. It was a small town so they must have decided to get hooked up to some alternate temporary source of power. As weeks went on the power did get more reliable but it did go off at times even during the first few weeks of school.

Although the town i lived at the time only had the main blackout for just about 12-13 hours, cities nearby including my current one didn't have power for a few days. Sometimes I rewatch the old news videos about the outage and think about how hell it must have been in the larger cities like Toronto or Ottawa and even in the US like New York. It also brings back memories of how things looked and all the old lighting that around back then. such nicer simpler times lol.

I remember this one pretty well, better than the nasty winter storm in 1998. At the time I was home and was playing video games on the TV when the power went out. It was a fairly hot day in the GTA too so we ended up opening up all the windows to let the house cool. At the time the only thing that we were able to use to get info was a old battery powered radio.

Anyway shortly after the blackout happened, there were concerns that it was a terrorist attack as 9/11 was happened less than two years ago at the time. Then I believe they blamed it on a lighting strike at one of the power plants near Niagara Falls. It was determined after the fact that it was caused by powerlines shorting near Cleveland I believe.

The power went out from around 4:17 pm to around 3:00 am the next day when it was restored. I remember they were really stressing conserving power during the month or so after as the power grid was still unstable during the first week after. Many stores would have reduced lighting and the local subway system did not run train service for a few days after due to concerns about rolling blackouts stranding passengers.

At the time the traffic signals were all incandescent too so they didn't have battery backups at key intersections like they do now, and I remember 400w MH highbays still being used in most stores and remember seeing half of them lit up to save energy.

I remember very well what happened in Italy, i was playing with one of my friends, then during night, power went out (so we ended to watch stars we couldn't watch because light pollution).
I was lucky to have power restored next morning, but southern cities had power after 24hours.