It seems this morning that Tokyo had it’s biggest power outage ever – potentially 800,000 households according to the BBC. Unfortunately, yours truly here (somewhat thankfully) has no story to tell as our area was unaffected. Indeed, at 0738 this morning when the power-cut happened, I think I was waiting for the bus.
Still, it seems a fair few people were affected, though I find it hard to believe that there was truly chaos as Reuters claim. Although Reuters did seem to claim that a spokesperson stopped the Tokyo Stock Exchange:
The Tokyo Stock Exchange was trading as usual, but calculations of the Nikkei 225-share average were frozen by early afternoon trade due to a system error related to the power cut in a spokesman at the index compiler, Nihon Keizai Shimbun said.
People familiar will know that the TSE computers go do every now and then anyway.
Actually, with it being the Obon holidays, there aren’t as many people around as normal. Certainly that means more work for some, but I still didn’t get one hint of chaos all morning. Indeed colleagues stuck on trains and waiting for trains at stations said it was all very orderly as one would expect, as in similar to when someone jumps in front of a train (sad, but true).
Wait till they release the truth that it was Godzilla and not a crane accident which caused the outage.