Blackout 2003

[David Stewart]

Since September 11th there have just been an amazing amount of problems! It's like every six months there is another challenge. There was SARS, which was like a major problem, and there was the blackout when the power was cut during the yeast cell biology meeting in fall 2003. I had been in the city that day and was coming in on the LIE and got here and found the lights were out. We had 350 yeast cell biologists. They were all milling around and wondering what to do. Blackford was wondering what they could do; they had to feed them! Most of the facilities people had gone home so I caught up to my kids and some other teenagers who had been running around and I got them to move all the poster boards over to the back patios. We got candles from Blackford and lit up the bathrooms and lit up the bar. The bar managed to keep serving drinks so everyone actually was pretty happy.