Happy Friday, WDIV Insiders!
Do you remember where you were when the lights went out, 17 years ago today? That’s right -- it’s the anniversary of the Northeast Blackout. One of those moments you just don’t forget.
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For WDIV, it was pretty difficult to communicate about the power outage when, well, not a soul in Metro Detroit could actually see us on their TV.
Here’s Local 4′s Rod Meloni’s reflection the events of the historic 2003 Blackout:
I vividly remember this day. I was standing in the Newsroom when our chief engineer said the entire Eastern seaboard was without power. I had just tracked (voiceover) two pieces, then immediately had to run, physically, over to DTE’s headquarters, which is about four blocks from the station in Downtown Detroit, to start going live, because we went into wall-to-wall coverage.
Remember, though, that even though we were going in wall-to-wall coverage, nobody had any power. They called the chopper, and as soon as I did my first live hit, they immediately had me physically run back to the station, up to the helipad, and then put me in the helicopter. I spent the next three days flying around in the helicopter doing live shots.
Remember, we were largely servicing CNN, for anybody could actually see what we were doing. No one in Metro Detroit could watch us because they didn’t have power.
I remembered flying over an apartment complex in the Ann Arbor area that burned, and while we were in coverage, I remember saying to DevIn that the people who were living in those apartments were waiting for the locusts, because not much more could go wrong.
One of the things that happened because, everything, and I mean everything was off (no water, no toilets everything was off), all the refrigerators were down. This is the time before whole home generators were a thing for you. People were lining up for blocks around the ice companies looking to buy ice. It was quite a scene. It was one that we regularly showed as we were flying around during the outage.
That day my parents were driving from Massachusetts to Michigan, to spend a couple of weeks with the grandkids. They were driving through Niagara when the power went out and didn’t even know. When they got to our house, my wife packed them up with the kids and took them all to Lansing, because believe it or not, they had power.
They stayed there for three or four days until they could come back. I remember that we literally didn’t even have water because the pumps didn’t work in the bathrooms, the toilets, nothing worked in the house, and I was flying all day, and then coming home, sleeping, and then going back and flying some more.
We flew in the dark. One of the most eerie moments was when we were flying over the city of Detroit for an 11 p.m. newscast, and it was entirely dark on the Detroit side, except for maybe a couple of terminals that had their own generator truck. And then you look across the river to Canada, and they had lights as far as the eye could see. Quite bizarre.
I was asleep on a Saturday morning when it ended, because I could hear the faucets running in the house, because after four days the water finally turned back on. Quite a time.
Read more: 17 years ago: Blackout hits Metro Detroit, Northeast putting 50 million in dark
We’d love to hear your 2003 Blackout memories! Email us here. And don’t take that faucet for granted.
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