Anatomy of a Blackout A 124-page report, jointly issued by the U.S. Department of Energy and the Canadian government, attributes the August 14, 2003, power failure to a sequence of events at an Ohio utility, FirstEnergy Corporation, and the Midwest Independent Transmission Operator (MISO) charged with overseeing its operations. Describing the events leading to the blackout, a New York Times article spoke of “layers of dysfunction” and a “comedy of errors.”

At 12:15 p.m., a technician at MISO inadvertently turned off a computer program that was supposed to monitor conditions on the Midwest grid every five minutes. He went to lunch, and his mistake was not noticed until almost two hours later. Around 3:05 p.m., three major transmission lines short-circuited owing to FirstEnergy’s failure to trim trees that were resting on the wires, a standard maintenance requirement. A FirstEnergy computer crashed, preventing people from realizing that several of the company’s power plants and transmission lines had shut down. With those lines out of commission, other electricity generators in the state needed to quickly reduce their power output to keep from overloading the grid, but they did not respond quickly enough. As a result, the problem “cascaded” throughout the region,
as other generating units and transmission lines were sequentially taken off-line to prevent damage. Workers
in FirstEnergy’s control room did not appreciate the extent of the problem until the lights went off in New York City later that day. Ironically, they learned of the blackout the way many Americans did — from a CNN news broadcast.

The biggest power failure ever to strike North America, the U.S.-Canadian report found, was caused by “deficiencies in specific practices, equipment, and human decisions that coincided” on that fateful August afternoon. William Hogan, research director of the Harvard Electricity Policy Group, considers the document a “careful analysis of the factors immediately responsible for the blackout.” But it doesn’t delve into broader, more generic issues — like coordination shortcomings, communication breakdowns, and regulatory failures — that were also responsible. In short, Hogan adds, “They did a good job of explaining that, at 3:05 p.m., the patient was standing on the ledge of the building and hadn’t fallen off yet. The question is, how did he get on that ledge in the first place? What underlying conditions made the situation so precarious, allowing events to unfold as they did? The task force didn’t go into that.” — SN