Midwest ‘Electricity Highway’ Might Be Source of Blackout

As power returned but nerve-jangling problems lingered, investigators focused Friday on the possibility that overloaded transmission lines on an “electricity highway” around Lake Erie had triggered Thursday’s crippling power failure in the Northeast and Midwest.

Industry and federal officials said they had all but ruled out terrorist attack, computer hackers, lightning or the effects of 90-degree heat as causes of the outage that left as many as 50 million people without power.

Instead, investigators are struggling to understand why the transmission grid overloaded Thursday afternoon -- probably somewhere in the Midwest. Automated protective devices almost instantly shut down generating plants and distribution networks across a 9,300-square-mile area.

In one early sign of how the trouble might have started, utilities officials said that an hour before the main crash, a segment of the system in Ohio experienced problems and took itself off the grid. A half-hour later, a second segment in Ohio followed suit.

What happened next is not fully known, but it seemed clear that events inside the highly automated and computer-driven power system cascaded so quickly there was no time for operators to react.

“This whole event was essentially a nine-second event,” said Michehl Gent, president and CEO of the North American Electric Reliability Council, or NERC, a private, standards-setting organization that oversees the transmission system.

As for why it happened, he said, “the final verdict could be months away.”

Though electrical service had been restored to New York City and most blacked-out areas of the East Coast, the upper Midwest and southern Canada by Friday evening, problems continued to test the tempers and cooperative spirit of millions of people.

New York’s subway system was slowly resuming service. Airline schedules were in shambles, with thousands of passengers still stranded. Officials in Detroit and Cleveland urged residents to boil drinking water because of possible contamination.

And officials warned that further rolling blackouts may occur before the still-fragile system returns to normal -- probably by early next week.

Politically, reaction to the crisis ranged from pride to finger-pointing.

Officials praised the lack of panic and disorder, as well as the effectiveness of emergency-response systems put in place after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg lauded the orderly behavior of New Yorkers and the efficiency of firefighters and police officers. Friday evening, Consolidated Edison announced that power had been restored to 100% of the city.

“All 23 Broadway shows will be open,” Bloomberg said, and the Mets played the Colorado Rockies at Shea Stadium.

Bloomberg said the city’s water supply was safe and adequate, but he warned New Yorkers to stay away from the city’s beaches, which were contaminated with unprocessed sewage during the outage.

In Washington, officials at the departments of Homeland Security, Defense, Treasury and other agencies noted that federal systems kicked in quickly to provide communications, National Guard troops and other resources if needed by local authorities. However, such assistance mostly turned out to be unnecessary.

Treasury spokesman Rob Nichols noted that “the nation’s financial infrastructure responded remarkably well. The bond markets were not disrupted. There were no major disruptions to the banking system. There was no loss of data.”

At the same time, Friday brought new demands for investigations and reform. And politicians in the United States and Canada rushed to blame one another for failing to deal beforehand with the widely recognized weaknesses of the power system.

“This is 2003, and there is absolutely no reason for this to occur,” Gerald D. Jennings, the mayor of Albany, N.Y., said in an interview on CNN. More cooperation is needed between state governments, Jennings said. “It’s time they got into a room and decided” how to set priorities and address the problems.

Officials in the Canadian prime minister’s office suggested that a fire at the Niagara-Mohawk power plant in Upstate New York might have been to blame. And Ontario’s provincial premier, Earnie Eves, embraced the idea that the trouble started somewhere in the “upper Midwest.”

In Congress, Republicans and Democrats blamed each other for failure to complete action on pending energy legislation that contains provisions dealing with the power grid.

President Bush, traveling in Southern California, described the blackout as “a wake-up call” for reform of an “antiquated” system. And the White House announced formation of a U.S.-Canada task force to probe the cause of the outage. It will be jointly chaired by U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham and Canadian Minister of Natural Resources Herb Dhaliwal.

“Federal, state, provincial and local authorities, as well as private-sector electricity providers, will be invited to contribute to the work of the task force,” the White House said.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee was the first of what will likely be several congressional panels to announce it would summon federal and New York officials to testify as soon as lawmakers return from summer recess.

A federal investigation is necessary “so that the American people can get answers,” New York Gov. George E. Pataki said during a visit to the Buffalo suburb of Cheektowaga.

Pataki said he had conferred with Bush earlier in the day and would ask the president to declare the state a disaster area. That would make New Yorkers eligible for federal reimbursement for the “extraordinary expenses that have been incurred.”

Meanwhile, officials charged with figuring out what went wrong expressed both puzzlement and chagrin.

NERC, formed by the electric industry to prevent a repeat of the 1965 New York blackout, will pair up with the Department of Energy to lead the U.S. investigation, watched closely by officials from other federal agencies and the states affected. NERC is headquartered in Princeton, N.J.

“I personally am embarrassed, I am upset,” Gent told hundreds of reporters on a national conference call Friday. “My job is to see that this doesn’t happen, and you could say that I failed in my job.’

He said the inquiry was centered on the “Lake Erie loop,” a transmission highway for power that goes along the southern shore of the lake from New York west to Detroit, then up into Canada and back east to the Niagara area.

The loop “has been a problem for years,” Gent said. “There have been all sorts of plans to make it more reliable.”

Much of the power moving east from the Detroit area to New York would usually move through Canada. Shortly before Thursday’s power failure, 300 megawatts of power were moving east, but the flow suddenly reversed itself.

“We ended up with 500 megawatts going the other way,” Gent said. “This was a big swing.”

Tim Gallagher, director of standards at NERC, said such reversals in the flow of power around Lake Erie can cause transmission and generation problems in New York.

“The power system depends on all its parts running at the same rate,” Gallagher said. The Lake Erie phenomenon “can cause transmission shutdowns in New York, which in turn can cause generation problems. The whole thing just feeds on itself.”

Several transmission lines in Ohio went out of commission before the blackout, Gallagher added. One system went down an hour before the main crash, and the other a half-hour before it. Investigators are trying to determine whether those shut-downs may have precipitated the problems around Lake Erie.

“Depending on how that was handled, it could start a chain of events,” Gallagher said.

The Ohio lines are owned by FirstEnergy Corp., Gallagher said. FirstEnergy is the nation’s fourth-largest utility. Kristen Baird, a company spokeswoman, said, “Obviously we are going to participate in the extensive reviews of what took place, but we are not going to speculate.”

The initial problems may have been the result of operator errors or a shortcoming in procedures, exacerbated by failure to contain a fast-spreading event. Investigators will have to pore through thousands of line-item entries in the computerized records of dozens of power generators and transmission facilities to discover the actual cause.

Although Gent stressed that investigators had reached no conclusions, he hinted that some kind of violation of protocols and voluntary rules for transmitting power might have played a role.

“There are two possibilities,” he said. “Either the rules we have are inadequate and need to be changed, or somebody wasn’t following the rules.”

In Washington, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission chairman Patrick H. Wood III said investigators will have two key questions to resolve:

“Why did supply and demand get out of balance so abruptly? And why was it not contained in the area where it happened?”

With the investigation focusing on the inner workings of the electricity-transmission system, other possible causes were being discounted.

“There is no evidence of anything blowing up or anybody breaking into something to turn knobs and handles,” Gent said. “Right now, there is no indication of physical intrusion.”

Likewise, no traces of a cyber attack have been detected, he said. Industry computer-security personnel were on high alert because of the emergence earlier in the week of the Blaster worm, a computer virus that infected public and private networks.

Similarly, he said, “We have no reason to believe the hot weather played any role in this.”

Perhaps the most confounding question is why the outage spread so quickly and so far.

In such a failure, transmission lines and power plants essentially shut themselves down automatically to keep from overloading and burning out.

“We did have some severe spikes,” Wood said. “You don’t want to fry the wires or fry generating facilities.”

About 100 power plants shut down Thursday, including 22 nuclear reactors. More than a dozen transmission networks also shut down.

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Times staff writer Edwin Chen in Southern California, Susannah Rosenblatt in Washington, and Bob Baker and special correspondent Andrew VanVelzen in Toronto contributed to this report.