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.

[Edward Campodonico]

So they canceled the evening lecture session that night and swapped the poster session which was supposed to happen the next day, with the lecture session. I think we had Dave Stewart's kids and all their friends and we recruited these guys to get poster board and set the posters up outside (the posters could not be indoors because it was too dark). We did that really fast, I think it took about a half hour but then we started to think, ok it is getting really dark and night's coming, what are we going to do here. So they set up tikki torches, they had three hundred tikki torches from a Hawaiian luau party that they had in the middle of the summer, so they set up tikki torches and it actually was very nice. It was very festive.