Blackout 2003: Perspectives from Watson School students

[Amy Caudy]

During the Blackout I was visiting CSHL and I went down to the Barbara McClintock Building but I couldn't open the door and suddenly we realized that there was no power and so we decided to go to the bar and somebody went to their car and they heard that the entire coast was out. Well, a few days earlier when I was leaving St. Louis to visit Cold Spring, I was walking by an ATM and something had possessed me to take out some cash. So I got out 80 dollars. Well, I was so popular because the ATM was not working in Grace and there was no way to continue the celebration of the Blackout without a bit of money. Then it also happened that their had been a lab party the day before the blackout so we had left over food that had not been cooked so we fired up a gas grill and enjoyed ourselves.

[Charles Kopec]

Well at the lab, we are all used to power going out and power flickering back on. It happens often enough that it is not a big deal and we do not panic about it. But when the lights went out during this blackout, someone must have went to their car and turned on the radio to discover that this blackout was not only big but it was the entire eastern coast. But you know we are trapped in our own little bubble because we have back-up generators. This is actually kind of awful because most rooms on the CSHL campus have both regular and red outlets, the red are those that are powered by the generator and you want to put things like freezers that require power at all times into those outlets. Anything non-essential can be turned off. But we don’t have that in Jones, the whole building is powered by generators, so we were kind of being a little gluttonous. You know, we were sitting there saying “ok, our laptops are working, the espresso machines are working.” We had all the lights on and we realized that if we went home we wouldn’t have anything to do because our homes were going to be dark. So we decided to stick around at the lab but we did not really feel like working so we hooked up our computers, and the DVD, and the projector and watched movies all night…but we felt gluttonous.