Wednesday, December 15, 2021
On March 13, 1989, a geomagnetic storm collapsed the Hydro-Quebec grid in 90 seconds, leaving six million people without power on a subzero morning.
On this day in 1989, at 2:44 in the morning, the entire Hydro-Quebec power grid failed in about 90 seconds. Six million people lost electricity before most of them had woken up, on a night sitting near minus 15 Celsius. Nothing had broken on the ground. Three days earlier the sun had thrown a coronal mass ejection at Earth, and the resulting geomagnetic storm drove currents through the bedrock of the Canadian Shield and into the long transmission lines running across it.
Power came back within about nine hours for most customers, and longer for some industrial sites. Utilities in the United States logged roughly 200 problems that same night, and satellites went off course or off line by the hundreds. Until then, few operators believed the sun could switch off a modern grid.
March 1989 is still the reference event for space weather, and it remains the clearest argument for treating the grid as the thing everything else depends on. A storm of that size gives forecasters minutes, not days. Knowing how to be prepared for a solar flare comes down to the same shelf that carries a household through any extended power outage, plus a way to stay warm without the furnace fan.
