The outage

I heard yesterday that Fayette is without long-distance phone service and the internet is also down. At the council meeting last night, someone in the audience tried to explain it as the consequence of a coronal mass ejection (CME). There were large outages in other places, he said, and the Northern Lights could be phenomenal.

Fayette’s police chief had a much more mundane explanation: a fiber optics cable was severed somewhere in Williams County. The actual terrifying news was that he was given a projected repair date of Monday. Now that’s mass dejection.

Here’s what Space Weather says about the space storm:

There was no green snow in Antarctica last night. The CME expected to hit Earth’s magnetic field on Aug. 17th either missed or delivered such a feeble blow that no one noticed the resulting geomagnetic disturbance.