And today in Ridiculous Yet Somehow Attention-Grabbing News Stories, we have this: A recent power outage at Disneyland in Anaheim, Calif. transformed the park from the Happiest Place On Earth to the Most Irritated Place On Earth. Talk about killing the magic, am I right? Maybe we just didn’t clap hard enough.
According to NBC Los Angeles, the outage was reported in the Fantasyland and Mickey’s Toontown areas of Disneyland Park on Wednesday at around 11 a.m. PT (2 p.m. ET). About a dozen rides and attractions were affected, with visitors being escorted off of some of them. By mid-day, power had been restored to Toontown; indeed, a spokesperson told NBC News that most of the affected rides were back online by noon. Power was eventually restored to all the affected areas, although some guests at the park reported having been stuck on rides for 20 to 30 minutes and experiencing overcrowding and long queues at other rides.
Spokespeople for both Disneyland and Anaheim police and fire departments spoke with NBC News about the outage, which was apparently the result of “an issue with a transformer.” (More information about the cause ofthe problem was not immediately available, although reports on Twitter that Emperor Zurg from is to blame are probably... uh… not true.) Additionally, unlike another outage that affected the park and the surrounding area in 2016, this one wasn’t related to a public utility in the city of Anaheim; rather, it was localized specifically at Disneyland. Disneyland’s other park, California Adventure, was unaffected by the outage. The Los Angeles Times reports that no refunds are expected to be offered, although according to Vanity Fair, refunds are being handled “on an individual basis.”
I’ll be honest: Being stuck on a ride at Disneyland for 20 minutes doesn’t actually sound that terrible to me. I’ve been stuck in worse places for longer: Traffic jams, subway tunnels, airports during horrific travel delays, an elevator with no power and very little air circulation… the list goes on. Compared to those adventures, 20 minutes in the dark with a bunch of animatronics actually sounds like a good time. (At least it’s a great setup for a horror movie, right?) Neither do I find the fact that there were really long queues at other rides that shocking; having been to Disneyland during the holiday season before, I can attest that that’s just the way the resort is at this time of year. That doesn’t stop overcrowding or power outages from being annoying, of course, especially given how expensive park admission is — but it’s worth keeping everything in perspective.
Yes, even if you got stuck on It’s A Small World.
And on a more serious note, as many people on Twitter observed, a power outage at Disneyland is really, really small potatoes in the grand scheme of things:
Yep. After having been devastated by Hurricane Maria in September, Puerto Rico is still largely without power. Now would be a great time to check out a few ways you can help the island, which likely won’t see a full recovery of its power grid until May of 2018. (That's five months from now, and eight months after the hurricane actually hit.)
The Disneyland incident isn’t the only power outage to have struck areas of the United States during the busy holiday season — Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport lost power on Sunday, Dec. 17, in an outage that affected flights for days afterwards — but it’s certainly the one that prompted the most hilarious Twitter responses. There’s even a whole Twitter moment devoted to them… but I don’t think there’s any doubt in anyone’s mind that this one is the single funniest tweet on that list:
Well played, sir, madam, or other. Well played, indeed.
