The history, what happened in the Northeast Blackout of ... 1965?
Well here's the 'short' version, and, mark my words we're going to (we have already!) find *a lot* of parallels with what happened back then and what happened on August 14th ...
1965 NorthEast BlackoutThe Commission's initial report, published December 6, 1965, pinpointed the initiating cause of the interruption as the operation of a backup relay on one of the five main transmission lines taking power to Toronto from Ontario Hydro?s Sir Adam Beck No. 2 Hydroelectric Plant on the Niagara River.
This relay, which was set too low for the load which the line was carrying, disconnected the line. This caused the flow of power to be shifted to the remaining four lines, each of which then tripped out successively due to overloading.
With the opening of these lines, about 1500 megawatts of the power being generated at Ontario?s Beck Plant and the Niagara Plant of the Power Authority of the State of New York, which had been serving the Canadian loads in the Toronto area, reversed its flow and attempted to get to the Canadian loads through the only remaining U.S.- Canadian tie at Massena.
This overloaded the Massena intertie and it opened, thus completely isolating the Canadian system. As a result, a total flow of something over 1700 megawatts to Canadian loads was blocked, and the power surged into the United States.
These flows exceeded the capability of the transmission system in New York and the interconnections to the south, and triggered the breakup of the systems in Northeastern United States.
The power failure had three stages.
The first encompassed the initial shock to United States systems from the sudden thrust of the 1700 megawatts of power from Canada. A widespread separation of systems through New York and New England followed in a matter of seconds. If this had been the end of the disturbance, the power failure would have touched only one-third of the customers who were eventually affected, and none in southeastern New York and New England.
The second stage marked the attempted survival of the electric utilities in eastern New York and New England which had been separated from the rest of the interconnected systems of the United States. Isolated from other systems, these ?islands? (seefigure 2) generally were left with insufficient generation to meet their loads.
Power generation in virtually all of this area except Maine and eastern New Hampshire (area 5, figure 2) ceased within a matter of three to twelve minutes.
During this period, system operators attempted to interpret the information provided by their control center instruments, some of which were operating erratically, and to determine, with relatively little information, and in some cases with inadequate communications, the extent of the interruption and the appropriate course of action each should take to keep his particular system functioning.
The third stage of the failure-the restoration of power-was prolonged in some areas of the region, particularly in New York City and Boston, because power was not readily available to restart the steam-electric generating units. Moreover, substantial delays were encountered in energizing the high-voltage underground transmission networks.
The Northeast power failure affected the most densely populated area of the nation. It caused inconveniences to about 30 million people and estimates of economic losses run as high as $100 million. It left more than 800 hospitals without commercial power, and in some cases, particularly in New York City, no standby sources of power were availabie.
In some sections water and sewerage services were interrupted. Fortunately, there were few fires during the interruption. Many persons were confined for long periods in darkened elevators stuck between floors, and in subway trains stranded between f stations. Economic losses and impact on the public welfare were greatly lessened because the failure occurred on a mild moonlit evening. Public and ; individual anxieties were moderated because tele- phone service and many radio stations continued to operate
Key issues from the 1965 and 1967 reports to the president by the "FEDERAL POWER COMMISSION" on '65 Blackout: 1) Events commenced at approx. 5:16 p.m. Nov. 9 and by 5:30 p.m. (14 mins) most of the northeastern United States and much of the Province of Ontario, Canada was in darkness. 2) A number of major circuits 'tripped out' in the first four (4) seconds after the initial event occurred (based on looking at the log data) in the 1965 Blackout. It took an additional couple of minutes before system operators finally began to manually cut ties to adjoining regions and/or the various generating facilities shut down either automatically or manually 3) Power interrution lasted from a few minutes (in some locations) to as much as 13 hours in some parts of New York City (a function of bringing power back up). 4) They were *three* nuclear plants in the US licensed for operation at that time; one in Michigan (the since de-commisioned 'Big Rock' site that I had read about as a kid - I had this nifty fold-out brochure from Consumers *Power* at-the-time describing it) and *two* in New York state. None of them were operating at the time, however.