Oxford Remembers the 2003 Blackout

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Monday, 14 August 2023 11:08

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the largest blackout in North American history.

WOODSTOCK - It has been 20 years since the largest blackout in North American history, where 50-million people in Ontario and the northeastern United States lost power.

Failures in Ohio's electrical grid triggered the widespread outage at 4:11 p.m. on August 14th 2003.

Woodstock Mayor Jerry Acchione shares what he remembers from that day.

"I don't remember a whole lot except kind of being in a panic when reality clicked in that Mel, my ex-wife and the mother of my daughters, was at home with a three-year-old and a one-month-old. I thought I'd better get home to check on them to make sure everybody was okay."

He was working at Anderson's GM in Woodstock at the time

"If memory serves me correct it was around supper time, maybe 5:00 p.m. or 6:00 p.m., when reality kicked in. We're usually open until 9:00 p.m. but we shut the dealership down early and we all went home to our families when we realized there was no sense standing around in the darkness."

Acchione also remembers what happened after the blackout.

"What I really do remember was the after effects. The talk about what caused it and realizing some of the problems in the system. I guess as Mayor now, that emergency preparedness for an occurrence like that is important to think about and I'm glad we do such good training here in the City for so many different scenarios."

Director of Long-Term Care for Oxford County, Mark Dager says that when the power outage happened, he could remember the state of panic for the Woodstock location of Woodingford Lodge, as their old location on Devonshire was not equipped with the proper tools. He added that it took a while for things to get back to normal.

"It was a good 3 to 5 days after that event before we gained total power to resume the services we provided to the residents."

Dager says that now Woodingford Lodge is in a new location and has the necessary equipment that would allow the facility to better support the residents if another event like this one took place.

It was also a crazy day for Oxford County Paramedics as they had to attend to calls as people living at home with devices that ran on power were failing.

Acting Commander of Oxford Paramedic Services, Jay Pember says that it wasn't until 2 to 3 hours after the power went out, that the Paramedic Services got flooded with calls, and states that it was a team effort.

"Despite the fact that alarms were going off for the Fire Department, they realized they were false alarms, and they weren't sending everything to them, they were allowing resources to come help us."

Pember mentions that Police Services were also sent to help as they would have to carry some paitents down flights of stairs in their buildings as elevators were out of service.

Across Ontario, the blackout caused a net loss of 18.9 million work hours and a drop of $2.3 billion in manufacturing shipments.