Longmont power outage

The Longmont power outage is the hinge between apparent institutional order and a chain of events that brings destruction and loss of life. On August 19, a storm disables the Briska power station and exposes the failure of both backup generators at Shop headquarters in Longmont. The outage lasts until midnight; its consequences begin well before the lights return, as the blackout coincides with a profound, initially unrecognized change in Andy McGee and Charlie McGee’s circumstances.

Causes and Background

The storm arrived nearly five months after Andy McGee and Charlie McGee were captured at Granther’s camp in Vermont. For ten days the weather had been hot, sticky, and still. Thunderheads began gathering shortly after noon, but the people working across the compound’s lawns and buildings largely dismissed the warning. Groundsmen continued cutting the grass, a computer-subsections supervisor rode a horse along the bridle paths during her lunch hour, and Cap Hollister ate a sandwich in his air-conditioned office while working on the next year’s budget.

John Rainbird was the conspicuous exception. He arrived at twelve-thirty, before his one o’clock shift, and the pain in his bones and the hollowed remains of his left eye told him rain was coming. The contrast places the storm inside the Shop’s ordinary routine before it becomes an emergency: while the compound’s systems and personnel carry on as usual, the man named for rain trusts a bodily warning that the others ignore.

By three o’clock the sky above the Longmont complex had become low and black. Groundskeepers put away their mowers, patio tables were brought inside, and two hostlers tried to calm horses shifting at each rumble of thunder. The storm arrived around three-thirty, abruptly and with force. Rain turned to hail; the wind shifted direction, and lightning cut across the sky. Counterclockwise winds accompanied a small tornado that skirted Longmont Center and tore the roof from a Foto-Kwik store.

The Failure of the Backup Systems

The Shop compound withstood most of the storm’s immediate physical damage. Hail broke two windows; wind lifted a low fence around a gazebo by the duckpond and threw it sixty yards. Flying branches and ruined flowerbeds added work for the groundskeepers, while guard dogs ran frantically between the inner and outer fences before calming as the storm eased. These visible effects were limited. The greater danger came from the electrical storm that followed the hail, rain, and wind.

Lightning struck the Rowantree and Briska power stations, leaving parts of eastern Virginia without electricity until midnight. Briska supplied Shop headquarters. In Cap Hollister’s office the lights went out, and the air conditioner’s steady hum stopped. After a brief interval of shadowy darkness, the power returned, only to fail again. Outside, a guardhouse sentry later described seeing an electrical fireball bounce between the outer and inner fences, which carried different levels of charge.

The compound had two diesel backup systems. The primary system supplied vital functions, including the electric fence, computer terminals, and infirmary; the secondary system supplied lights, air conditioning, elevators, and other less critical services. The secondary system was designed to take over if the primary became overloaded, but the primary was not designed to take over if the secondary overloaded. During the storm, both systems overloaded. The secondary crossed over as intended, but the primary continued running for seventy seconds longer. Then both generators blew, one after the other, each having cost about eighty thousand dollars.

Negligence and Institutional Cover

The failure was not simply an unforeseeable consequence of severe weather. A routine inquiry later returned a finding of mechanical failure, but the account traces the breakdown to the way the generators had been procured and built. In 1971, a senator with access to low-bid information about the generator installation and other Shop construction tipped off his brother-in-law, an electrical-engineering consultant. The consultant secured the work by cutting corners to underbid the competition.

That arrangement was one favor among many in a system shaped by favors and information traded under the table. Its importance became clear only in retrospect: the backup generators had been used piecemeal since installation, and the storm’s failure of the Briska station gave them their first major test. They failed completely. By the time the defective design became consequential, the consultant had moved on to work on a multimillion-dollar beach resort at Coki Beach, on St. Thomas. The harmless-sounding official verdict thus concealed a chain of choices that made the Shop’s apparent safeguards unreliable.

Consequences and Narrative Significance

Shop headquarters remained without power until the Briska station came back online around midnight, at the same time electricity returned across the rest of eastern Virginia. The long outage exposes a weakness beneath the compound’s orderly surface: its fences, computers, infirmary, and other operations depended on a backup arrangement undermined by cost-cutting and failed design. The storm supplies the immediate pressure; institutional negligence determines why the safeguards do not hold.

The blackout also joins the compound’s technical failure to the separate, unseen trajectories of Andy McGee and Charlie McGee. After five months in which events had seemed suspended, something tremendous happens to both of them during the storm and outage. Neither knows what has happened to the other. That separation makes the power failure more than a setting for later action: it is a shared turning point whose effects begin at the same time but remain divided between father and daughter. The lights return at midnight; the stasis does not.