inkstuds - Day

8:07PM - Site down

In case anyone is wondering why the Inkstuds site has been down for the last couple of days. Well, it seems a fire can take down the server that hosts the Studs for who knows how long. I have some great interviews that i am waiting to post. so umm, please stand by.

VANCOUVER -- An underground fire in downtown Vancouver darkened skyscrapers, brought public transit to a halt and caused gridlock that left the core of the city paralyzed for much of yesterday.

Thousands of customers in the heart of Vancouver will be without power again today as B.C. Hydro warned that the power failure that gripped the city's downtown core could take "a couple of days" to repair.

B.C. Hydro spokeswoman Susan Danard said last night that crews must pull 14 damaged cables out of a manhole, flush out the underground vault thoroughly, then bring in new cables and splice them before they are reconnected.

The outage started about 9 a.m. and affected the eastern part of downtown Vancouver.

Power was cut to more than 2,200 Hydro customers, many of them major employers in the city.

Traffic signals were knocked out and buses were overcrowded as workers in the city core went home for the day. Downtown bus routes experienced severe delays, with some passengers waiting for more than half an hour to board packed buses.

Vancouver police spokesman Const. Tim Fanning said police sent Traffic Authority members to the downtown core to help direct traffic at intersections where the traffic lights were out. However, Fanning said there simply weren't enough officers to staff every intersection.

"Of course, the traffic was a mess," he said. "We covered off the intersections that we saw the biggest hazards for pedestrians."

Police warned motorists to stay out of the downtown core.

The problems started yesterday in one of B.C. Hydro's underground manholes in the 500-block of Richards Street near the Marble Arch Hotel. One of the 14 major circuits that travel through the manhole somehow caught fire, said Gary Rodford, B.C. Hydro's senior vice-president of operations.

The fire in that seven-centimetre-wide cable then quickly spread to three adjoining cables and over the course of the next hour, took down six more cables.

Firefighters were able to douse the blaze by 3 p.m., but at that point the air quality still wasn't safe enough to allow workers to go underground and officials measured the temperature in the manhole at 93 degrees Celsius (200 F).

Internet service for many companies was blacked out when one of seven backup generators at Harbour Centre, a major telecommunications and Internet hub in Vancouver, conked out.

Douglas Hume, vice-president and general manager of the Harbour Centre complex, said the repercussions were felt all over North America.

Nav Canada's air-traffic-control tower on top of Granville Square downtown lost its main power but switched immediately to a battery backup and diesel generator systems to continue operations, Nav Canada spokesman Ron Singer said in an interview, so seaplane and helicopter flights in and out of Vancouver Harbour were not affected.