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THIS is closer to the truth ... blame it on incompetence at FirstEnergy's "System Operator" control room of anything.

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Article Last Updated: Sunday, August 24, 2003 - 3:39:38 AM PST

Portrait emerging of causes of nation's worst blackout
By Michael Weissenstein, Associated Press

NEW YORK -- It all may have started with an untrimmed tree.

Then, like a wildly malfunctioning Rube Goldberg machine, the creaky Eastern power grid took less than an hour to turn a slumping transmission line outside Cleveland into a cascading multistate blackout that snuffed traffic lights, froze elevators and brought subway cars shuddering to a halt.

A preliminary portrait of the Aug. 14 power failure is emerging as industry officials, federal investigators and outside analysts piece together millions of pieces of data.

The picture is blurred by corporate finger-pointing, political jostling and the sheer complexity of tracing power's lightning-quick movement through thousands of interlinked miles of transmission lines that are managed by different operators.

Missed opportunities to address power grid disturbances in the hours preceding the blackout may have given the cascading events such momentum that, like an avalanche gathering speed as it rolls downhill, it eventually became impossible to stop.

One of the first signs of trouble came around 1:35 p.m., when a generator at FirstEnergy Corp.'s Eastlake Power Plant failed, coughing out a cloud of ash and steam.

The failure was preceded by unspecified irregularities in the surrounding electric grid, according to FirstEnergy and the Midwest group that oversees regional transmission.

It remains unclear whether the Eastlake failure caused the event some experts point to as the likely trigger for the chain reaction through the Midwest, Canada and Northeast.

That trigger pulled when, for some reason, a FirstEnergy power line outside Cleveland failed just after 3 p.m. That's hardly an unusual occurrence. But when the line's power flow shifted to its neighbor, that parallel FirstEnergy line sagged onto tree branches that should have been trimmed away, causing that second line to fail.

"The plan was that the second line would take more power," said Hoff Stauffer, a senior consultant at Massachusetts-based Cambridge Energy Research Associates, a private firm.

After that didn't happen, problems quickly began on the lines connecting FirstEnergy's system with American Electric Power Co. in northern Ohio.

One after another those six lines failed, each transferring more power onto the remaining lines, Stauffer said. Finally, the last line failed and a power surge rocketed through Indiana, into Michigan, careening up the west side of the state, across its center and back down into Ohio, leaving dead power plants and transmission lines in its wake.

AEP says that electricity meant to move through FirstEnergy's system reversed itself when the transmission systems in northern and southern Ohio separated, sending the power through AEP's system into Indiana, Michigan and Ohio.

The various failures swiftly spread to Ontario, Canada, which had been importing power from Michigan. With its source of power down, electricity began moving out of Ontario, crippling lines and power plants, Stauffer said.

By the time the problems reached New York, operators and equipment were able to detect the problem and cut themselves from their Canadian neighbor.

"New York's different," Stauffer said. "They saw the problem and they proactively cut themselves off from Ontario."

Suddenly, New York's power plants had nowhere to send their output and shut down to keep the excess energy from damaging their equipment, according to Stauffer. With those plants down, the remaining plants in New York began revving up to compensate and swiftly reached their own shutdown points, killing power across the state, he said.

The Cambridge hypothesis is based upon accounts gathered from the firm's utility company clients in the affected areas, including timelines publicly released.

The Department of Energy -- which is taking the lead in the joint investigation with Canada -- the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and an industry group, all have declined to discuss any early conclusions of their research into the blackout.

Pat Wood, chairman of FERC, listened Friday to the Cambridge theory -- which tracks many other experts' findings so far -- but said he wouldn't speculate on the cause.

In the end, Wood said the root problem may be something as mundane as an untrimmed tree. "That's not a really deep policy debate," Wood said, but would be a matter of saying, "Here's what your job is guy -- mow the grass, cut the trees."

In the wake of the blackout, Wood said he believes the intricate interconnectivity of the nation's power grid -- which makes one region vulnerable to another's problems -- makes it imperative to have a market designed in a way so that communication between utilities and system operators flows more smoothly than it did a week ago.

Communication across a low-tech system of telephone hotlines linking regional operators was inadequate or absent in the blackout, some utilities and politicians say.

The Ontario province's premier also has complained that U.S. power managers did not notify their Canadian counterparts as required under protocols put in place after a blackout darkened much of the same region in 1965.

Also in the spotlight are government regulators and the group overseeing the Midwest's transmission grid, the Midwest Independent Transmission System Operator. In New England and the mid-Atlantic states, grid operators with more direct control were able to cut off themselves off from the worst of the blackout.

Giving regulators and the operator in the Midwest more control might have helped them contain their problems, some experts say.

FirstEnergy subsidiaries have had localized blackout problems in Ohio. Meantime, AEP has been criticized by Ohio electric regulators for poor maintenance on its lines.

The allegations have not been tied to the Aug. 14 blackout, but unions and some politicians in states affected by the outage have blamed industry deregulation and cutbacks in staff numbers and maintenance schedules.

Utilities and their supporters in turn have blamed environmentalists' and local communities' objections to new lines and power plants.

Or this:

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http://www.ohiocitizen.org/campaigns/electric/2003/error.htm

Human Error Likely Cause of Blackout, Timeline Says

August 27, 2003

Investigators of North America's biggest blackout say all signs from a nearly completed timeline point to human errors in the early stages in Ohio on Aug. 14 as the cause of the cascade into darkness.

They have nearly finished assembling a second-by-second chronology composed of millions of bits of data collected from computers, voice recorders and hundreds of sensors scattered from Detroit through Canada into New York, officials said.

The retracing of the 600-mile electrical storm track starts at 1 p.m. on Aug. 14. Three hours passed before local problems in the Midwest grew into a crisis that cost billions of dollars and darkened the homes of millions of people.

Industry officials involved in the inquiry said they were not prepared to point to a particular cause, human or technological, but they generally voiced enthusiasm for the pace and progress of the analysis.

"We think we have the timeline nailed pretty well," said Donald M. Benjamin, vice president of the North American Electric Reliability Council, the industry group created after the 1965 blackout to maintain electricity flows.

"It's down to the second in terms of what happens, which transmission paths opened, when areas became isolated," Mr. Benjamin said. "It provides a good understanding of how the power flows."

But an expert from the federal government taking part in the investigation was much more definitive about a probable cause, saying all the data pointed to mistakes by people in the event's earliest stages.

The crucial missteps, a federal investigator working on the analysis said last night, appear to have occurred in the handling of an hourlong sequence of line failures and plant shutdowns preceding the full-blown blackout, which swept parts of eight states and eastern Canada starting around 4:10 p.m. on Aug. 14.

"Had all of the existing policies been followed, this would not have developed into a cascading event," the investigator said. "What we see are institutional breakdowns, not a breakdown of the system itself."

He and other investigators declined to discuss details, but others involved in the investigation said the timeline essentially matched independent analyses done recently by several grid experts and utilities.

The chronology also shows that by the time the problems left the Midwest, the disruption could not be stopped from exploding through the large portals linking that region with Canada and then with New York.

The reliability council, also called NERC, assembled the record for its own investigation and for a task force created by the Department of Energy and the Canadian Ministry of Natural Resources.

The findings so far will be discussed today with Spencer Abraham, the secretary of energy.

Mr. Benjamin said utilities were still assembling records from earlier in the morning of Aug. 14, with the goal of comprehending what conditions existed around the electrical grid of wires and plants before there were any signs of trouble.

Officials at the FirstEnergy Corporation, the Ohio utility whose territory and lines have been identified by many experts as the most likely trigger for the event, yesterday stood by the company's contention that there were power plant and line failures outside of its territory in the hours before its own troubles began.

"As far back as noon, there were other generation-unit trips and other transmission-line trips outside of our area," said Ralph DiNicola, a spokesman for FirstEnergy. "We're certainly hopeful that the Department of Energy and NERC are looking at all of those conditions."

Yesterday, officials from the Midwest Independent Transmission System Operator, the group responsible for overseeing the safe flow of electricity around the Midwest, said they remained convinced that the group had not contributed to the cascade.

In the Northeast, officials said they were still unable to answer some basic questions about how and why the blackout spread from the Midwest and Ontario into New York, both across the major web of transmission lines that cross the international border at the Niagara River, and at a bottleneck in upstate New York that separates the eastern part of the state from the western part.

In both places there are relays - essentially large versions of the circuit-breakers in a household fuse box - along the lines. When something goes wrong, the relays are supposed to trip, interrupting the flow of current, protecting other equipment from damage and keeping the problem from spreading.

Yet officials say many relays - which are owned by the New York State Power Authority and Niagara Mohawk, a major upstate utility - continued to conduct power even as the system gyrated out of control.