Check Out Some Haunting Pictures of the South Plains Mall Blackout
When I lose electricity at my house, the first thing I notice is the silence.
The silence is just deafening and I can't stand it. From that point, there is confusion, questions and usually whispering, because somehow whispering seems to be the correct thing to do at the time. This is followed shortly by the temperature beginning to rise or fall because, of course, the HVAC is not working. The next thing is a trip outside to see if the power is out on the whole block and/or if any bombs dropped nearby.
Now imagine doing a little Friday afternoon shopping in Lubbock's South Plains Mall when all of a sudden the power goes out. What do you do? Should you panic? Should you loot? Should you check your phone to see if we're under attack? It's a weird thing to be stuck in a large shopping center with other people (don't forget, this is how Dawn Of The Dead went down).
It turns out that when the power went off Friday (August 19th) due to a bad transformer, people mostly just milled around and calmly left. Apparently, a lot of the shop owners just went ahead and wrote the day off as a bust and closed up shop, too.
We have a few pictures of some of the places closed up early and it's a little weird just because we know the power was out.