Power Outage

[Iris]

I was meeting with clients from a Midwest utility to discuss why an ITproject, just initiated, was recently cancelled. The conversation was very congenial, though the clients wouldn't provide any specific reasons, just that the decision came from top management. I then noticed that we were sitting at a round table outside in a field, on a rather nice, mild day. Suddenly there was a lot of activity. As I looked around to see what had happened, I noticed that there were hundreds of other tables around us in the field, at which people wearing hard hats had been sitting. Now, however, these workers were quickly moving in various directions, yet in an organized fashion. Close by I could see that a series of the very large electric transmission poles (the type all lined up in an electric transmission corridor) was starting to fall like dominoes. Although I was very concerned, the client staff I was meeting with werecalm and said they had known this would happen and they were prepared to handle it. In fact, the hard hat workers were each assigned a specific pole to attend to. I also recall that the wires weren't 'live', and there wasn't an issue about electrocution by a loose wire. I was under the impression there was a wide spread power outage.I did not seem to think the cause was an earthquake.