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Blackout has 'em stumped
15/08/2003 11:45 - (SA)
Boston - The cause of the largest power blackout in US history has thus far proved as hard to find as a working refrigerator. Was it lightning or fire? Antiquated lines or bad luck? Born in America or Canada?
It depends on who's talking.
The early confusion underscored the bedevilling 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.
Like a river's tributaries, their contributions spill into immense regional power grids, where they become anonymous and untraceable. Managers at dozens of control sites monitor intricate crosscurrents of supply and demand, watching over their delicate balance.
A single failure can reverberate through the system and set off a catastrophic chain reaction like Thursday's, even with the relatively moderate summer heat and humidity of that day.
Investigators eager to find the cause were focusing on transmission lines and transformers in upstate New York and neighbouring Canada, scouting for traces of the surge that tripped circuit-breaking protective devices to shut down the system.
President George W Bush promised a review of "why the cascade was so significant, why it was able to ripple so significantly throughout our system."
'Third World electricity grid'
"We're the world's greatest superpower, but we have a Third World electricity grid," said former Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, now governor of New Mexico.
Most accounts of what went wrong late on Thursday afternoon agreed on only a few points. Federal and local officials, including Bush, saw no apparent sign of terrorism. There was a bubble of speculation about whether computer hackers might be responsible, but no real evidence so far.
Beyond that, some power network partners - generators, distributors, monitors, governments - dropped early theories blaming one thing or another, but nearly always somewhere else. In truth, no one was initially sure what set off the outages and why they spread so fast and far - across much of the American Northeast, Midwest and southern Canada.
In Canada, the office of Prime Minister Jean Chretien pointed across the border in some early stabs at a cause. It blamed a purported lightning strike, and later a fire, at a power plant in upstate New York. Canada's defence minister, John McCallum, gave another version, blaming a fire at a nuclear plant in Pennsylvania.
Officials on the American side threw back blunt denials and suggested the trouble started to the north. An Associated Press reporter in Niagara, New York, reported that the plant there was up and running.
"There's not even a trash can fire. We would know," added Maria Smith, a spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency.
Problem in transmission lines
Some American officials, including a spokesperson for New York Governor George Pataki, shifted scrutiny to a possible problem in transmission lines between New York and Canada - probably on the northern side, they said.
Canada's defence minister later inched away from some of the first Canadian explanations - but still blamed the Americans for the problem.
Such confusion between energy partners has sometimes been blamed for the outages themselves in the past, including a nine-state Western blackout in 1996 laid partly to weak co-ordination.
While answers are scant for the moment, investigators of the latest blackout will probably abound. Federal and state agencies, and congress, are expected to jump in. They will ultimately want to figure out why safety measures failed to shield more grids from the collapse and, of course, who to blame.
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