| vidkid145 |
| Dead as Disco |
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| Joined: 03 Sep 2002 |
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THE ENORMOUS blackout cascaded across the eastern seaboard and Canada late Thursday afternoon, knocking out electricity to millions of people in New York, Toronto, Detroit, Cleveland, Ottawa and elsewhere. Power began to return to some areas about four hours later, and on Friday efforts were being made to restore public services:
Light was restored to skyscrapers in midtown Manhattan (50th Street north to Central Park).
By 5 a.m. ET, power had been restored to 819,000 of 3.1 million customers in the five boroughs of New York city and Westchester County. One-third of customers in Manhattan had their power restored, leaving an estimated 2 million without.
Buses in New York City, a quarter of which were running Friday morning, will be free until full service is restored, transport officials said. The city’s subway system is completely shutdown.
About 1.5 million Cleveland residents faced a crisis because there was no electricity to pump water from Lake Erie. At least three eastside suburbs were out of water and officials said westside suburbs could go dry.
NO TERRORISM, HACKING SEEN
Officials of the Homeland Security Department said there were no indications that terrorists were responsible for the blackout. The CERT Coordination Center, an Internet security clearinghouse, said it also did not appear to be related to the W32/Blaster worm or other recent computer intruder activity.
Investigators concentrated on transmission lines and transformers in search of what might have caused the surge in power that triggered safety mechanisms and shut off the flow of power from New England to Michigan.
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Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien said Friday a severe outage at a Pennsylvania nuclear power plant seemed to be the cause of the massive blackout.
Earlier, the prime minister’s office said that officials on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border maintained that a fire or lightning had hit a power plant near Niagara Falls in New York state and started a rolling blackout over an area of 3,600 square miles. But the National Weather Service said there was no lightning within hundreds of miles of the Niagara area, and American officials were skeptical of the Canadian claim.
“Such speculation is uninformed and premature,” said William Edwards, president of Niagara Mohawk. He said his utility reported no equipment damage and that power losses in the Niagara system were mostly from “safety mechanisms built into our system” to prevent damage. “It’s going to take time for experts to analyze the data and determine the cause.”
Federal and state agencies, as well as congressional committees, are expected to investigate the blackout and try to determine why measures put in place to isolate grids and keep power disruptions from spreading failed to do so.
“We’re the world’s greatest superpower, but we have a Third World electricity grid,” said New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, energy secretary during the Clinton administration.
GRADUAL RETURN
In all, tens of millions of people were without power as the effects rippled across the enormous Eastern Interconnected System power grid. The failure knocked out several major power utilities, including the entire Consolidated Edison network that supplies much of New York state.
New York Gov. George Pataki told reporters Thursday evening that more than half of the state’s 19 million customers were without power. Estimates were that 10 million people in Canada were affected.
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, for his part, referred to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks when he said New Yorkers would “look back on this as another test of New York.”
Officials reported that some areas of Cleveland also were coming back up. Detroit, however, remained almost completely dark.
Pataki and New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey declared states of emergency, allowing them to send National Guard troops to help control crowds. Cleveland Mayor Jane Campbell imposed a curfew beginning at 9:30 p.m. for all those 18 and under.
There were only scattered reports of problems in New York City. In Bedford-Stuyvesant, one person was arrested in the looting of a cellular phone store and five people were arrested in the looting of a Rent-A-Center. Earlier, a Brooklyn shoe store was looted and police said they arrested about 20 people.
BLAME GAME
The early confusion underscored the bedeviling complexity woven into the North American electricity network in recent decades, the boom in cross-border power trading, and the interdependence of the many parts and partners multiplied by energy deregulation born 10 years ago.
Some Democrats blamed the Bush administration for not having more closely watched the deregulation.
“I believe the federal government has a responsibility to see this doesn’t happen,” Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., told MSNBC.
President Bush, who spoke to reporters at a downtown San Diego hotel during a two-day California trip, vowed to order a review of “why the cascade was so significant, why it was able to ripple so significantly throughout our system up East.”
“I have been working with federal officials to make sure the response to the situation was quick and thorough and I believe it has been,” the president said. “We’re offering all the help they need to help people cope with this blackout.”
WIDESPREAD IMPACT
The evening rush hour was just beginning in the East when the power went out at 4:14 p.m. NBC News and MSNBC.com correspondents described scenes of pandemonium as thousands of New Yorkers streamed into streets where traffic signals were not operating.
Major transport links reopened slowly on Friday, but significant delays in travel times were expected.
The blackout stretched over huge areas of the Northeast, the Midwest and Canada:
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said nine nuclear power plants in New York state, New Jersey, Michigan and Ohio were shut down because of “grid instabilities.” All of the plants were in safe condition and could rely on emergency diesel generators if needed, it said.
Some 350,000 people stranded in New York City’s subway system were evacuated within several hours of the outage on Thursday. All Broadway shows and the New York Mets’ game against the San Francisco Giants was canceled.
Every prison in New York state reported a loss of power and was operating on backup generators.
Using backup generators and other contingency plans, newspapers and television networks struggled to tell the story of the blackout while dealing with the same hardships as their consumers.
Stock trading was sharply reduced in after-hours sessions as traders scrambled to work on emergency power. Stock markets were still expected to open on time Friday morning, however.
Other affected cities included Buffalo, Albany and Syracuse, N.Y.; Hartford, Conn.; Lansing and many other smaller cities in Michigan; Akron and Toledo, Ohio; some counties in northwest Pennsylvania; and Ottawa.
Washington and the federal government were not affected. Neither were much of New England — including most of Massachusetts, Rhode Island and southern Vermont — as well as Chicago, Philadelphia and other areas of Canada, including Quebec City.
It's not clear. At one point, Canadian authorities said it appeared lightning had struck a power plant on the U.S. side in the Niagara Falls region, but U.S. officials disputed that.
Officials of the Homeland Security Department said there were no indications that terrorists were responsible for the blackout.
The blackout cut off electricity to millions of people in New York City, Toronto, Ottawa, Detroit and Cleveland. Other affected cities included Buffalo, Albany and Syracuse, N.Y.; Hartford, Conn.; Lansing and many other smaller cities in Michigan; Akron and Toledo, Ohio; some counties in southeast Pennsylvania.
Power slowly started returning to some areas late Thursday, but federal power officials said it might not be fully restored until Friday morning.
Kennedy and LaGuardia airports in New York, as well as Cleveland, Newark, N.J., Toronto and Ottawa. All six airports resumed full operations Thursday night.
All Broadway shows and the Mets game against San Francisco were canceled.
Police reported some looting in Ottawa, Canada, but no other instances of law-breaking or civil disturbances.
The last major blackout in the New York City metropolitan area occurred July 13, 1977.
MEMORIES OF ’77
Especially in New York, where police were nervously gearing up for nightfall, the sudden loss of power revived memories of the ruinous blackout of 1977.
On July 10 that year, power officials guaranteed Congress that another power failure like the 1965 blackout would never occur again. Three days later, the lights went off a little before 9:30 p.m. and stayed off all night — 13 hours in all.
More than 3,700 people were arrested in looting across several neighborhoods. More than 1,000 fires were set, and estimates of the damage ranged from $61 million to more than $300 million. |
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