I survived the San Diego Blackout

I think I was at the absolute most terrifying place to be during the blackout. Not in terms of actual risk, just in terms of terrible handling of emergencies.

I will now tell you my harrowing story. It’s not harrowing and I won’t fault you for not giving a shit, but for a solid 20 minutes I thought I was going to die and I was never going to see TBU, my mom, my cats or my mom’s dog ever again and for the briefest of moments I made peace with that fact and tried my best to remain calm. It should be remembered that throughout the tale that it is HOT, HOT, HOT. The past few days have been high 90′s low 100′s, dry and miserable. Being outside was suffocating, my skin felt like it was being lasered off every time sunlight even threatened to touch it.

At 3:35 I was driving to school with two friends, we were close to campus when the street lights just turned off. No blinking so people would know to stop and go in a semi orderly (but inevitably selfish) fashion, just off – blank. Simultaneously the radio turns to static. It’s the middle of the day early in the semester, everyone is there. At first it wasn’t bad. It took 20 minutes to make it through a mile of stop lights but traffic was moving. It was just weird.

I get out of the car and I’m already dripping sweat not even 30 seconds outside. Walking onto campus there are helicopters flying low and circling tightly, I think, “oooooook.” On campus lights are working but there’s no internet. That was strange but class starts like usual. Five minutes after 4pm my friend sitting next to me gets a text from her boyfriend, “Where are you?” then, “Tell me where to pick you up, it might be the apocalypse.” Those were the last texts she would send or receive for several hours. Hmmmm, we know he’s home and is most likely listening to a police scanner, cuz he’s just that guy. We look at each other, on edge. I try to text my mom, TBU, friends boyfriend, nothing. Nothing’s going out and nothing’s coming in, I have no cell service, she doesn’t have cell service. It just doesn’t feel right. Finally, one of my texts to TBU goes out. Several minutes later I get one from him, ” What’s going on? Major power outage I hear,” which tells me he’s safe and blissfully ignorant of much of anything, that’s good. It turns out that at this time only iPhones are working, sporadically, but more than anyone else’s. Even other phones on AT&T aren’t working. We’re in still in class with power but we can’t pay attention, for the last 10 minutes we’ve been trying and failing to communicate with the outside world.

Then the lecture hall goes pitch black, save for two green exit signs on opposite sides of the room. My next action will go on to be re-enacted all night because of it’s shear ridiculousness in hindsight. The lights go out, I instinctively shut my laptop, pick up my phone and in less than a second I am out of the room, having left all my belongings, including said laptop. Now I know shit is going down and I do not like it. I try more fervently to call my mom and TBU, at best I get voicemail but more frequently I get the AT&T operator telling me my call can’t be completed. I send the same text 11 times, it only goes through once but I have no way of knowing if the other person is receiving them, I get a feeling they aren’t. By now our class is cancelled and everyone is milling around confused, I’m reunited with my belongings. My friend gets a text from her mom in Northern California, “Massive power outage, all of Southern Ca, parts of TJ, Baja and Arizona. FIND YOUR SISTER.” That freaked us the fuck out, we have no way of knowing what’s actually going on and the only people communicating with us are making our imaginations go crazy. Her sister’s class is just ending and we are trying desperately to get a hold of her so she doesn’t start driving in what we can see has already become traffic-geddon. Right then disaster sirens start blaring, we are yelling right in front of each other and can’t be heard. At this point I’m nervous but I’m not panicking. I just want to know what’s going on, we’re relying on texts that aren’t reliable. Now cell service on the iPhones is going in and out. Nothing’s reliable. We are in a sea of 10,000 students and communication with the outside world is minimal.

We get to the other side of campus where my friend’s sister is walking out calmly like nothing’s happening. Because as far as she knows nothing’s happening, her class had power the whole time, they heard the sirens but her teacher just kept lecturing. What the fuck, shouldn’t faculty know the disaster procedure!? But we’re altogether. There are 5 of us, we’re all accounted for and so we calm down. We talk about how it’s a good thing we are where we are because, after all, SDSU was an evacuation center during the fires of aught seven. If serious shit went down we were already where we needed to be, or so we thought.

We go to a shady, grassy quad area. Still frantically trying to receive and send updated information on whereabouts and safety-ness. Cell service is almost non-existent. It’s hot, had I balls, they would be hanging as low as possible at this point in the story. The sounds of helicopters flying low and circling directly above us has only gotten louder as the number increases. We also start seeing airplanes, military airplanes in flight patterns they should not be in. They are circling above the helicopters. It makes no sense. A friend finally connects to her dad, who is trying to give her all the information he can from Northern California, she can barely hear him over the shitty connection and the aircraft. Then I hear the sound that forced me to immediately make peace with my death. It was the sound of an airplane, not a helicopter, flying low and hitting something. Everyone else in our group was on the phone or trying to be on the phone, but me and one other girl heard it, locked eyes and froze.

The fact that it was soon to be the 10 year anniversary of 9/11 flashed in my head. Then I panicked. Not 30 seconds later a sound that confirmed my need to make peace with my imminent death began. You know when bombs drop in movies? It sounded like this except louder, like right in my ears and without the explosion at the end. That’s also when everyone around us started to panic. No one really knew what was happening. People started running under awnings, bridges and anything that seemed safer than out in the open. The thought of protecting myself from shrapnel actually went through my mind. We didn’t know where the sound was coming from, it was completely different than the campus emergency siren we heard earlier. The sound continued for several minutes, just one bomb dropping after another without an explosion, then an announcement began. We couldn’t understand it at first or tell where it was coming from – the helicopters? the military airplanes? campus intercom system? It was just this big brother, Orwellian voice you could not escape. Then the bomb sounds started again and went on for several minutes. The voice came back, “This is an emergency, campus is now closed. Please immediately leave campus in an orderly fashion.” Where are we supposed to go?! We thought this was the safest place to be and now we have to leave, from what we could see the roads were mayhem. Being on the roads in  “Do the Right Thing” heat sounded like a recipe for disaster on top of whatever disaster we were in the middle of. Leaving was the last thing we wanted to do. I called my friends boyfriend whining, “Dude, what’s happening?!” He doesn’t know much just that the blackout is everywhere, nowhere has power only hospitals. Police and emergency stations are intermittently without power and only responding to injury calls. The airport is open to pilots that make the decision to take off without electricity until sunset but incoming traffic is being diverted as much as possible. He seems calm.

The bomb siren and the voice just repeated over and over. I left panicked, voice cracking voicemails for my mom, “Mom, please call me back or try to text me. Call TBU, leave a message with someone. I’m on campus I’m ok but we’re being evacuated.” I left increasingly distraught voicemails over the next few minutes while my friends and I tried to figure out what the hell we were going to do. We make it to the edge of campus near my car. My phone started to vibrate and I see my mom’s picture on my phone. The connection is terrible, we can barely hear each other, she is safe, she’s on the road home stuck in traffic. She’s otherwise totally calm.

I’m starting to realize that everywhere but where I am is calmly going about their day and simply adjusting to a massive blackout with grace. An hour after we’ve been instructed to leave campus, my friends and I decide to brave the traffic and make it to the closest house which just so happens to be disaster preparedness central, there are guns, motorcycles (if the need to flee in gridlock should arise), extra gas, stockpiled food and water, among other necessities. Luckily our route is West then North,  which just happens to be fairly traffic free. Before leaving, we took inventory in case we were stuck on the road: 2 full water bottles, a full tank of gas (I just filled up the day before luckily), several phones and laptops in various states of charged-ness, 3 whistles (at a fratty university these are as common as STDs) and a 6 day survival pack with all kinds of scary shit you would need if it came down to it that my father in law just so happened to give me a couple weeks ago and I hadn’t yet removed from my car (yay for procrastination!). We decide we are as ready as we are ever going to be and like a scene from a movie we start making our way to the car – game faces ON.

We get to her house, where her boyfriend is casually sipping a beer on the porch with a police scanner monotonically twittering in his lap. We walked in and he showed me where the guns and bullets are, he turns to me and says, “Millz you’re on the shotgun.” Sidenote: I kickass on the shotgun.

Then it was just a party in the dark. TBU met us there a couple hours later after partying at his bosses house where there were “grounds” to tour. He couldn’t get a hold of any of us to say he was on his way. Before we knew it was him coming up the stairs movement WAS made towards artillery – DO NOT test us! When his adorable face popped through the doorway I cheered. TBU and I went home and our neighborhood was in the middle of what I later named Blackout Blockparty 2011. It turned out to be quite fun.

In summary: SDSU has two separate disaster alarm sirens. One that is piercing and awful and unsettling and one that sounds like bombs are dropping. I would like to propose that instead they are standardized across all areas of campus and replace the sound of bombs dropping to get people to pay attention to announcements to something less…terrifying. Like maybe an un-ignorably audible but pleasant dooo dooo dooo. The next morning I got an email from campus police explaining the situation. Hey SDSU, how about sending that out immediately instead of what you did do, which was freak me out, force me to leave and tell me nothing. Also, we still can’t explain the weird airplane noise that was the start of my panic but others heard it and were equally terrified and that’s good enough for me.

In closing it wasn’t that bad after all, fun even. But fucking-a SDSU try not to create such a shit show. I’d also like to compliment the drivers of San Diego in general. I know Southern California drivers get a lot of shit from people who I suspect are just jealous of not living here, but during the blackout apocalypse, without traffic facilitators of any kind we did a pretty good job. People were patient, let others cut in, stopped at darkened intersections and followed the accepted protocol of being a good samaritan driver. I was pleasantly delighted, you guys. Nice job.

The Millionizer is ready for the next disaster