US Blackout Pinned on 3 Failed Lines in Ohio

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Sunday, August 17, 2003

US Blackout Pinned on 3 Failed Lines in Ohio

The head of the US North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC) said Saturday that the massive power outage that hit part of the United States and Canada on Thursday apparently started in Ohio.

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The head of the US North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC) said Saturday that the massive power outage that hit part of the United States and Canada on Thursday apparently started in Ohio.

It was "fairly certain at this time that the disturbance started in Ohio," Michehl Gent, the Council's president, said in a telephone news conference, the CNN reported on its web site.

The Council was founded after the outage in New York in 1965 and is a nonprofit organization sponsored by the electric industry.

Gent, attributing the blackout to the failure of three transmission lines in Ohio, also said it was not clear why the blackout was out of control and spread throughout Northeast and Midwest America and southern Canada.

"We are now trying to determine why the situation was not brought under control," he added. "It should have stopped."

On Thursday, power outage hit the New York City, Cleveland, Detroit, parts of New York State, northern New Jersey and Connecticut, and cities of Toronto and Ottawa in Canada.

The blackout affected some 60 million people in the two countries, shut down power plants, paralyzed the transportation and threw the cities into darkness, with only three deaths reported.

The outage also touched off finger pointing between the United States and Canada, with each blaming the other for the cause of the blackout. The two countries agreed to form a task force, headed by US Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham and Canadian Natural Resources Minister Herb Dhaliwal, to investigate the cause of the outage.

Meanwhile, Congressional hearings are reportedly to be slated next month.

Two days after the massive blackout, normalcy has returned to most of the affected regions. In New York state, Governor George Pataki said Saturday that "essentially 100 percent power has been restored all across New York State," the CNN reported.

In New York City, almost of all the main subway lines are operating again.

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