Date:17/08/2003 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2003/08/17/stories/2003081701441200.htm

International

Blackout affects 50 million in Canada, U.S.

By Sridhar Krishnaswami

Washington Aug. 16. The United States and Canada have agreed to form a Joint Task Force to find out what went wrong in the historic North America blackout of Thursday and determine the steps to prevent its recurrence.

The White House has said that the force will be headed by the Energy Secretary, Spencer Abraham, and Canada's Minister for Natural Resources, Herb Dhaliwal. All agents at the centre, state and local levels as also private sector electricity suppliers have been invited to contribute to its work.

The blackout affected nearly 50 million people spread across eight States in the United States and Southern Canada to include Ottawa and Toronto. The system is said to be slowly coming back with the subway system in New York City back to nearly 100 per cent functioning. All major airports that saw severe curtailment of departures and arrivals in the city are now slowly getting back to the normal mode.

Two days into the historic power outage, there are very few clues as to what went wrong; but there is a strong suspicion that the `culprit' may have been the so-called Lake Erie Loop, a massive system that encircles Lake Erie from New York to Detroit, into Canada and then back again to New York. According to an agency report, technicians had noticed something quite stunning on the northern leg of the Loop — some 300 megawatts of electricity that was moving east suddenly reversed course and within seconds some 500 megawatts of power was moving west.

Not impressed

But the Governor of New York is not impressed with all this. George Pataki has taken the position if the problem was in Ohio or Michigan, that should not have reached Manhattan in New York for the grid is supposed to isolate such problems. "That just did not happen," he said.

While firm clues have not been identified, several of the theories that were floated around, especially in Canada, have been thrown out — there was no lightning hits on a facility on the American side at the Niagara Falls and that there was no fire at power facilities in New York City or Pennsylvania that triggered the grid collapse.

Officials say more than 100 power plans including 22 nuclear reactors in the U.S. and Canada were shut down, most of them automatically, as protection against power surges.

If there is one thing that has been ruled out emphatically by ione and all including the U.S. President, George W Bush, it is terrorism.