Lights Out
The biggest blackout ever in North America brought out the best in millions of citizens–while exposing a woefully fragile electrical system

We learn most about power when we lose it and are left eating cereal by candlelight on the front stoop. Or helping the waiter and the hairdresser and the deaf man direct traffic at the intersection. Or meeting an elderly neighbor for the first time when we stop to deliver some water. One woman who had lived in Manhattan for 40 years saw the Big Dipper for the first time. You could see Mars hanging over midtown.

Some cities still carry scars from past blackouts that turned into festivals of looting and despair. But it was clear that we are living in new times, when at 4:09 p.m. on Thursday, August 14, the power flickered and died in the largest blackout in North American history, and instead of exploding, the cities fell quiet.

In Toronto store owners sold bottles of water for less than the usual price; people shared cabs in the city and cell phones at the airport; and one theater company moved its performance out onto the street by the light of a pair of parked cars with their high beams on. In Harlem a group of church ladies in large hats outside a small Pentecostal church set up a card table with cups and plastic pitchers of iced tea and lemonade; they were giving drinks away.

Maybe people didn't panic because word went out so quickly from every public official from President Bush on down that there was no evidence of any kind of attack. Though officials were quick to say what hadn't happened, they were at a loss to explain what had. How can the power demands of a not unusually hot day somehow bring a huge chunk of the northeastern electrical grid crashing down? The blame cascaded as fast as the blackout. On the ground some Americans blamed Canada for its origin; Canadians returned the favor.

Experts will have to wade through 10,000 pages of log data before they can say exactly how the disaster started, but they had a pretty good idea why: the electrical system in the Northeast and Midwest consists of a lot of capacity to generate power and too few means of moving it around smoothly. Over the past 10 years, electricity demand has jumped 30%, but transmission capacity has increased only half that much. Because everything is tied together, too much strain in one place can cause the whole system to snap.

Even the experts were surprised by the speed and breadth of the failure. It began, according to experts, with an immense buckle in the system, when a still mysterious event–three transmission lines near Cleveland failing–began pulling down parts of the grid. A broken alarm at First Energy, a northern Ohio utility, may have allowed too much to go wrong before technicians noticed. The loss in power soon forced as much as 5,000 mega- watts–almost enough to power Nevada for a day–that had been moving west to east to suddenly change direction. The reversal happened so fast that operators did not have time to react, and within about 10 seconds, vast sections of the grid were overwhelmed. The failed lines in Ohio started a cascade that was able to crash more than 100 power plants, including 22 nuclear plants in the U.S. and Canada, despite a structure designed specifically with such a danger in mind.

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Vast amounts of money and time have gone into solving the problem of such chain reactions ever since the legendary blackout of November 1965, when an overloaded relay switch near Toronto left 30 million people without power all through New England and down to New York City. In those days, people wondered whether the Russians had attacked. That experience frightened the industry into the creation of the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC), an industry group that sets standards for the whole transmission system. The NERC set up the system for quarantining sick plants so that if one failed, it would not infect the others. The council also hoped to coordinate utilities' investments in maintaining the grid.

Whatever safety margin was built into the system has been eaten away by lack of investment in modernization. "This is the fourth catastrophic failure of the central power grid within the last decade," says Kyle Datta, managing director of the Rocky Mountain Institute's consulting practice, "and yet decision makers are not learning the right lessons from these crises." One such lesson is that it does not matter how much power you can generate if you can't deliver it reliably to people who need it.

And here a combination of market forces, political foot dragging and the reluctance of people to welcome the arrival of high-voltage lines or towers in their backyards has made it almost impossible to create a transmission system that can keep up with demand. There is little incentive for utilities to erect new towers, especially after new federal rules in the late 1980s effectively capped the return on such investments at roughly 11%.

The latest crisis looked sure to change the landscape when lawmakers return next month and take up competing versions of an energy bill that gives the NERC enforcement power and encourages states to coordinate their electricity policies in wider regions–not to mention $13 billion in goodies for the oil, gas and nuclear industries. G.O.P. Congressman Billy Tauzin, who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, also announced that it will launch an investigation into what happened.

By nightfall in many places, time seemed to be moving backward, back to the days of candlelight and carriages and cigar boxes as cash registers, when ice cream sold for a nickel a scoop. As it grew darker, many of the bars in New York City even went back to the days when people were allowed to smoke indoors, in the belief that the police had better things to worry about than enforcing the new ban. Tourists curled up on the street in Times Square, on library steps and in hotel ballrooms; city residents slept on their roofs, where it was cooler. By morning you could buy T shirts reading where were you when the lights went out? with the date, confirming New York's position as the capital of capitalism. Meanwhile, half a world away, the few residents of Baghdad who had electricity sat stuck to their tv sets, watching the superpower grope in the dark. "We stayed up for an hour watching it," said a taxi driver, "until the electricity shut down."

—from TIME, August 25, 2003

Questions

1. What are the most likely causes of the blackout?

2. What is NERC and why was it formed?