When Darkness Falls Ed Watts felt he had nally recovered from the nightmare of the ower outa e a week a o W sunny pleasant summer day deteriorated to an absolute disaste:J as the citygfaced a blagkout hfagtsgatregdogtt 1a; a AM. and lasted for almost a day. As the director of engineering at the 300-roorn Edison Hotel, Ed had never expenencedsuoh a challenge. The hotel emergency generator was sized only for the power requirements of emergency lighting in stairwells and corridors, re alarm systems, and other items required by code. And the fuel supply for the generator allowed for operation for only the code-mandated two hours. At noon, the generator stopped running and the hotel went dark. Now lacking the needed life safety systems and without any water in the budding (no pumps to circulate it), the hotel had to be evacuated, putting guests out on the street with occupants from other buildings in the downtown area. Evacuating gueSts from the ten-story building in the dark stairwells and corridors without elevators was not fun. Ed was worried about all the candles that seemed to appear all over the hotel as well. Staff pitched in in dozens of ways to assist and care for guests, including putting out food and bottled water (until they ran out) in the porte cochere. As night fell and guests realized they were going to be stranded forthe night (nothing was moving due to the power outage), the hotel provided some blankets and pillows. since people had to sleep outside. Luckily, it was a pleasant night and everything went reasonably well. Even better was having the power come back on around 10 AM. the following day. And then began the process of getting the hotel back to normal operations. Because all the door openings to get food had allowed the temperatures to warm in the refrigerators, the food and beverage staff decided they needed to dispose of a lot of stored food. The front desk was buried trying to handle folios for the rooms and handle billing issues. Housekeeping was trying toget all the rooms into ready status, encountering day-old room service trays and other things guests had left behind and resetting all the clocks that were ashing 12:00. It seemed like a million other items needed attention from every department. Even though the Edison's daily operations recovered from the blackout, Ed's work was not done. At a staff meeting held to recap responses to the outage, it became apparent that the hotel was lucky. No one had been hurt during the blackout and, so far, it looked like there would be no lawsuits or major Issues (other than dealing-With the insurance carrier). But leading people around in the dark with candles and hauling luggage down staircases was not something the GM wanted repeated. Each department head was tasked with putting together a 'quickfix' list of things that the hotel could do to better respond to the next outage and that could be funded from the operations budget. Department heads were also asked to put together a long-term solution list. So, it looked like Ed's recovery from the outage was still underway. Lots of work appeared to be ahead