Power Failure Traced to E-mail
By Angie Brennan
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JACKSONVILLE, AR—Early Tuesday morning Janice Turner flipped on the lights in her
Mound City, Illinois home. Nothing happened. Across at least seven states others were
experiencing similar problems—no lights; no heat; no morning coffee. A major power grid
failure gripped the entire region.
Restoration of power took nearly two days. Then came the big question: what happened?
George Carlyle, president of ABC Power Company, said initial investigations didn’t uncover the
cause of the outage. That’s when officials from the federal Office of Electrical, Cable, and Fiber
Optics Management Division offered their assistance.
Officials meticulously pored over the ABC Power Company computers’ files. Slowly but surely
they traced the cause of the failure. Their investigations finally led them to the home of Harriet
Williams of Jacksonville, Arkansas.
Ms. Williams, 64, said she was sitting in her living room one evening watching “Casablanca” on
television when she heard a commotion outside.
Says Williams, “Humphrey Bogart had just lit into Sam for playing ‘As Time Goes By’ and there
was a tremendous banging on the front door. I could hear sirens wailing, then a man shouted,
‘Open up—police!’
“I hurried to the door and three or four heavily armed troopers burst inside. They told me to sit
back down, then asked if I had a computer. I pointed to the spare bedroom. My son gave me a
computer last Christmas and showed me how to check the weather and do e-mail.
“They were in there for a good hour or more, so I just kept on watching my movie. One officer
stayed in the living room with me. He told me he’d never seen ‘Casablanca’ before, but he sure
planned to rent it later to watch the beginning.
“Well, as I said, they looked at my computer for quite awhile, then came out and handed me a
piece of paper.”
The document turned out to be an e-mail she had received about a week before.
“It was from my friend Ida Mae,” said Williams. “She had forwarded me a sweet little story
about a boy who was extremely ill and gave some ice cream to an old man at an adjoining table.
Wait a minute—I might be getting a few of them mixed up…”
The law enforcement officials then asked Ms. Williams to read aloud the final paragraph of the
e-mail.
“It said, ‘Someone who cares about you sent you this story to bring a smile to your face. PASS
THIS ALONG TO TEN FRIENDS, INCLUDING THE PERSON WHO SENT IT TO
YOU.'" Williams grimaces and shakes her head as she remembers the officers demanding
whether she had done that.
“I hadn’t,” she admits. “I was going to, but I couldn’t think of that many people right then. I just
ended up forwarding it back to Ida Mae, so as not to hurt her feelings. Lord knows I never
dreamed all this would happen.”
The officers insisted that Williams go ahead and forward it to nine more people to ensure the
power grid would suffer no further ill effects.
“Let me tell you, I was racking my brains to come up with the final two names. I thought about
sending one to my son’s home e-mail and another to his work e-mail, but with those officers
standing around watching me I figured I shouldn’t cut corners. Plus, I didn’t want to cause any
more problems for those poor people who had lost electricity.”
After officials were satisfied that Williams’ forwards were successful they urged her to take
“forward instructions” a little more seriously in the future.
When asked whether Williams had received any more forwards since that day she replied,
“Good gracious, no. I couldn’t handle the pressure. I gave the computer back to my son.”
©2004