San Diego Power Outage Restoration Time Lapse

This is a time lapse video of electric power coming back on to downtown San Diego very late September 8 and early September 9, 2011. Power to the city, as provide by SDGE, went out at 3:38 PM on September 8 due to a problem in Arizona.

I started recording the video at 8:59 PM, with the frame interval set to 20 seconds. The camera, a Nikon D7000, has frame count limit of 999, meaning that for me to capture the power coming back on, the power had to do so within 5 1/2 hours with the interval I chose. And it did!

I set the aperture and exposure manually to work with the little light the city was giving off, hoping that full power wouldn't wash out the exposure. The full power shots did come out pretty bright, but the over all sequence is very cool!

Going by the frame times, the first wave of power came on at about 11:43 PM and the rest of the power within 20 minutes of that.

One note: The low clouds of the marine layer came in very shortly after power first came back on! When I started recording, the stars were still out.

Видео San Diego Power Outage Restoration Time Lapse канала John Stokes