Massive Power Grid Failure in 2012?

[Cricket]

Massive Power Grid Failure in 2012?
The HydroQuebec Blackout of March 1989 - a dangerous event triggered
by space
weather.
On March 13, 1989, at 2:44 am, a transformer failure on one of the
main power
transmission lines in the HydroQuebec system precipitated a
catastrophic
collapse of the entire power grid. The string of events that produced
the
collapse took only 90 seconds from start to finish. There was no time
for any
meaningful intervention. The transformer failure was a direct
consequence of
ground induced currents from a space weather disturbance high in the
atmosphere.
6 million people lost electrical power for 9 or more hours.

The space weather disturbance that produced this devastation was a
great
magnetic storm. Great magnetic storms are awesome disturbances in the
near-Earth
space environment that occur relatively rarely. The last five occurred
in
February 1986, March 1989, March 1991, November 1991 and May 1992. The
frequency
of large and great storms increases markedly as we enter the maximum
in the
solar activity cycle. The next predicted maximum is in the year 2000
(the last
solar maximum was in 1989).