Power Outage and hunting down the rave.

DI-JoeDI-Joe Registered Users Posts: 368 Major grins
edited June 9, 2008 in Journeys
So the power went out last night…. Here’s how my night went…

There was the most awesome and beautiful electrical storm coming in. I was totally vibing with the thunder. So I grabbed my 5D setup a pod at the door and setup my laptop to capture consecutive 2 second exposures.

That’s when this big guy struck and took out the power:


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here's a detail-enhanced version:

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The power went out, but it was hardly noticeable at first what with half the house being on batteries. Almost immediately though the home theater backup starting beeping it’s death knell since the TV and a computer were on the same battery. It’d been the first time I’d had a long term outage with both the tv and my mediacenter pc on the same battery, must add more cells. Anyway…

So the power was out… it started getting REALLY warm. I tried to sleep but what did I hear? Trance music… at 10pm… no biggie, someone’s having a party and has a generator, should be over or chilled out soon… WRONG.

I go to bennigans to get cake. I get back, and the area is still without power, and still droning on is the trance music in the distance. It sounded as if someone with a decent car stereo was parked in front of the house with trance music playing.

I try to sleep… it’s a million degrees upstairs, it’s quiet…. All except for what sounds like a rave in the back of my skull. Coming up on 1 am, I get up and go downstairs where it’s slightly cooler and get on my phone trying to get some sort of news or information on what’s going on. Nothing.

I decide… .screw it, I’m hunting down the party and calling the police.. So I go out, windows down, armed with my camera. I search the neighborhood to no avail. For some reason I can’t find the source of the booming trance music.

I decide to increase my radius… using my acute sense for sound I begin to zero in on the music. It’s funny because when I left I was joking with angie telling her that I was going to go track down the damn rave…. I wasn’t off at all actually, I found an actual rave… with some 15,000 people in attendance..

Apparently, there was a rave called Starscape at Ft. Armistead park just down the street by the constellation energy plant.. As soon as I started to get close, the street was lined with cars for over a mile. The park is about 3 or 4 miles from my house, not close… yeah… miles… and I could still hear the crap. The party had a direct drop from constellation energy so they weren’t affected by the outage.

(Forgive my handheld night shots, it was late and I was tired and frustrated)

As I was driving up Ft. Armistead Rd. from the light:

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every lot around the area was full, folks were parked up on the grass perpendicularly where they should be parallel, it was ridiculous. At the entrance it was more of the same:

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Doubled up cars and more insanity. I had to turn around because I didn’t have a parking permit. The tickets were 60 bucks a pop from what I learned.

It was after two and folks were still showing up. Ravers were making their way out and many were still making their way in, walking well over a mile from their cars to the park:

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This was as I was making my way back out. Folks where everywhere, there were people along the sides who were trying to flag me down as if I was looking for someplace to park, they were selling their spots.

I made it out and cruised around a little bit then stopped to talk to some AA county police. I was told that Ft. Armistead park is actually within Baltimore City limits, so they can’t go in there to enforce parking. Additionally, the rave actually had a permit from the City, and thusly they weren’t illegal in their noise making. Anne Arundel county noise ordinances don’t apply. Even more so, Baltimore city police can’t get to the park because the only way to do so is through AA county, which they’re not allowed to go without permission which they didn't obtain. So essentially the whole thing was getting completely out of control. Drugs, alcohol, underaged stuff, nudity, sex, everything was going down there…. The fact that I could hear the freakin music 3+ miles away doesn’t mean anything..

After crusing around I found the source of the power outage, the precise spot where the aforementioned bolt struck:

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And saw that they were making repairs, which in turn, the power was promptly restored to my area:

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I got home and the juice was flowing, the AC cranked it slowly cooled back down. But the trance music was still going and going. The rave lasted till 6am.. I didn’t sleep until 4am. I got up at 10 and I feel like ass.

Peace. :)
Modus Imagery
Moving away from photography and into cinema. PM me if you have questions about DSLR workflow or production questions.
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Comments

  • CuongCuong Registered Users Posts: 1,508 Major grins
    edited June 8, 2008
    Looks and sounds like you had quite a night and morning there.

    Cuong
    "She Was a Little Taste of Heaven – And a One-Way Ticket to Hell!" - Max Phillips
  • ian408ian408 Administrators Posts: 21,904 moderator
    edited June 9, 2008
    Thanks for the tour of your town lol3.gif

    I hate when there's a loud noise and finding it is nearly impossible. We had a
    similar problem with the concert venue 10 miles away. When ever there is an
    inversion layer, the sound is piped great distances :eek1
    Moderator Journeys/Sports/Big Picture :: Need some help with dgrin?
  • schmooschmoo Registered Users Posts: 8,468 Major grins
    edited June 9, 2008
    That's actually a great story! lol3.gif

    I can probably say that because it wasn't keeping me up. Thanks for sharing your little adventure there on the south side. thumb.gif
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