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One Of The Worst Blackout In The United States

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The blackout of 1965 was one of the worst blackouts in the United States. It left 30 million people about 800,000 square miles with out electricity. This blackout lasted about 12 hours which left this part of the united states without defense systems. But why did this blackout even happen? There were many ideas to what had happened to make this blackout happen. People thought it was circuit error, human error, electricity transfer error, and some people even thought it was Aliens but what really happened. This all happened because of a protection relay issue from the workers. They set the safety relay for a slower traffic current then they thought would be needed. When this happened the safety relay switch(or a breaker) went off because the demand was to high because of the time of the year it was. It was cold so people were most likely using more energy for heating. So a surge happened due to the high demand. This made new york and surrounding areas including the Robert Moses power plant were using too much energy going through the main power line, which shut off putting more stress on the other lines soon to be overloaded. The other lines …show more content…

The grid had different sections and because it had sections it was like a domino effect. After one station went out it went to the other station and kept overloading each station on by one. But did this have do with if it was AC or DC currents? Around this time there was the AC and DC power wars. This was between Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla were in the middle of a battle. Thomas Edison developed a current that runs continually in a single direction. It is similar to a battery or a fuel cell. During this time direct current (also know as DC) was standard in the U.S.. But there was one problem with Edison's DC it could be converted to higher or lower voltages

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