Well as everyone will see now the blame has shifted to Ohio with where the blackout started.......................This is now the third place i have seen the blame on the huge blackout.............................I caught this article on my RR homepage..........................Btw i surely hope they do something about this because imo it shows a huge weakness to any potential terrorist with our power supply.....................
Blackout Pinned on 3 Failed Lines in Ohio
By H. JOSEF HEBERT Associated Press Writer
published 01:05 PM - AUGUST 16, 2003 Eastern Time
The failure of three transmission lines in northern Ohio was the likely trigger of the nation's biggest power blackout, a leading investigator said Saturday.
Experts are working to understand why the disruption spread throughout the Northeast and Midwest and into Canada, and was not contained.
"We are fairly certain" that the problem started in Ohio, said Michehl Gent, head of the North American Electric Reliability Council. "We are now trying to determine why the situation was not brought under control."
Gent said the transmission system was designed to isolate problems such as those apparently involving the three lines in the Cleveland area.
"The system has been designed and rules have been created to prevent this escalation and cascading. It should have stopped, we think, after the first three" line failures, Gent said in a telephone news conference at which he did not take questions.
His organization is a nonprofit, industry-sponsored group that is supposed to oversee power line reliability. The council earlier had released documents showing four transmission line problems in the Cleveland area in the hour before the blackout spread Thursday afternoon across eight states from New England to Michigan.
The transmission system in northern Ohio is operated by FirstEnergy Corp. Company officials have declined to discuss details of their investigation into the blackout.
Council investigators were examining more than 10,000 pages of data, including automatically generated logs on power flows over transmission lines, Gent said.
The investigation has become more difficult because at the time of the power breakdown, "events were coming in so fast and furious that (some) ... weren't even being logged in a timely way," Gent said.
Nonetheless, Gent said he is convinced that no data was lost and whatever was not recorded will be recovered.
"We will get to the bottom of this," he said.
A federal task force of U.S. and Canadian officials was forming to investigate the outages that spread within seconds, affecting millions of people from New York City to Michigan.
The preliminary investigation focused on an electrical transmission loop that encircles Lake Erie.
Investigators since Friday had been intrigued by a series of interruptions on a number of power lines in the Cleveland area during the hour before the massive blackout began.
Two minutes after the last of the Cleveland-area line problems there were "power swings noted in Canada and the eastern U.S.," said a document made public late Friday by the council.
The United States and Canada have agreed on a task force to identify the cause of the blackout and correct whatever shortcomings caused it. The investigation will be headed by Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham and Canadian Natural Resources Minister Herb Dhaliwal.
Congressional hearings also are planned in September, and federal regulators were reviewing the power grid breakdown.
Abraham, who met Saturday with the governors of New York and New Jersey in Albany, N.Y., said the task force would not prejudge what might have happened.
More than 100 power plants, including 22 nuclear reactors in the United States and in Canada, shut down, most of them automatically to protect themselves against power surges, officials said.
Blackout blamed on 3 failed lines in Ohio!!!!!
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Miss Mary
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Yes i found out earlier today as well that parts of town here were without as well in other parts of the county......................Im guessing we were the southern most point in Ohio without power in some areas................I will say thats its a odd setup they have with the power companies.........
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grentz7721
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Miss Mary
Here's an interesting local article:
Region's power grid had time to avert blackout here
The Cincinnati Enquirer
By Mike Boyer
http://www.enquirer.com/editions/2003/0 ... dwest.html
The good news for electric customers across the region is that the country's electric grid worked the way it was supposed to in the midst of the worst power blackout in the nation's history.
While 50 million customers in northern Ohio, Michigan, Ontario, New York and New Jersey lost power, those in the southern half of Ohio, all of Indiana and Kentucky didn't.
"The grid system is set up so it isolates where there is a problem,'' said Steve Brash, spokesman for Cinergy Corp., which has 1.4 million electric customers in the Tristate.
"It isolated that area and prevented the rest of the state from getting into a cascading outage,'' he said.
Brash said Cinergy was asked to put some of its peaking plants on standby to generate additional power if needed.
Although officials said it's too early to say what triggered the massive blackout, they are focusing on a nine- or 10-second event near Lake Erie Thursday afternoon.
Some 300 megawatts of power moving on transmission lines from Detroit to New York, through Ontario, suddenly reversed to 500 megawatts going the other way, said Michehl R. Gent, president of the North American Electric Reliability Council, a voluntary industry organization overseeing reliability of the nation's wholesale power system.
The power loop around lakes Erie and Ontario has been "a problem for years,'' he said.
Officials don't know what led to that power shift, which may have been the event that caused a dozen or more transmission lines and 100 or so generating plants in the region to switch off.
Cinergy's Brash said the transmission lines and generating plants have automated protection systems so that when problems are sensed, they immediately shut down to prevent further damage.
Bob Burns, senior research specialist at the National Regulatory Research Institute at Ohio State University in Columbus, said transmission lines have both voltage and thermal limits.
The lines literally stretch and sag if there's too much heat buildup, say from too much electrical demand, or if the voltage gets out of predetermined limits.
When that happens, protective devices shut the lines down. Much the same thing happens at power plants when devices sense a problem, Cinergy's Brash said.
Cinergy is a member of the Midwest Independent Transmission System Operator Inc., a Carmel, Ind.-based organization that manages 111,000 miles of high voltage transmission lines in 15 states and one Canadian province.
Spokeswoman Mary Lynn Webster said when system engineers began seeing the problems in the Northeast late Thursday afternoon, they had time to redirect and redistribute power that otherwise could have triggered a wider failure.
Region's power grid had time to avert blackout here
The Cincinnati Enquirer
By Mike Boyer
http://www.enquirer.com/editions/2003/0 ... dwest.html
The good news for electric customers across the region is that the country's electric grid worked the way it was supposed to in the midst of the worst power blackout in the nation's history.
While 50 million customers in northern Ohio, Michigan, Ontario, New York and New Jersey lost power, those in the southern half of Ohio, all of Indiana and Kentucky didn't.
"The grid system is set up so it isolates where there is a problem,'' said Steve Brash, spokesman for Cinergy Corp., which has 1.4 million electric customers in the Tristate.
"It isolated that area and prevented the rest of the state from getting into a cascading outage,'' he said.
Brash said Cinergy was asked to put some of its peaking plants on standby to generate additional power if needed.
Although officials said it's too early to say what triggered the massive blackout, they are focusing on a nine- or 10-second event near Lake Erie Thursday afternoon.
Some 300 megawatts of power moving on transmission lines from Detroit to New York, through Ontario, suddenly reversed to 500 megawatts going the other way, said Michehl R. Gent, president of the North American Electric Reliability Council, a voluntary industry organization overseeing reliability of the nation's wholesale power system.
The power loop around lakes Erie and Ontario has been "a problem for years,'' he said.
Officials don't know what led to that power shift, which may have been the event that caused a dozen or more transmission lines and 100 or so generating plants in the region to switch off.
Cinergy's Brash said the transmission lines and generating plants have automated protection systems so that when problems are sensed, they immediately shut down to prevent further damage.
Bob Burns, senior research specialist at the National Regulatory Research Institute at Ohio State University in Columbus, said transmission lines have both voltage and thermal limits.
The lines literally stretch and sag if there's too much heat buildup, say from too much electrical demand, or if the voltage gets out of predetermined limits.
When that happens, protective devices shut the lines down. Much the same thing happens at power plants when devices sense a problem, Cinergy's Brash said.
Cinergy is a member of the Midwest Independent Transmission System Operator Inc., a Carmel, Ind.-based organization that manages 111,000 miles of high voltage transmission lines in 15 states and one Canadian province.
Spokeswoman Mary Lynn Webster said when system engineers began seeing the problems in the Northeast late Thursday afternoon, they had time to redirect and redistribute power that otherwise could have triggered a wider failure.
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weatherwunder
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therock1811
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Miss Mary
Another article, from an Engineer's viewpoint, minute by minute what happened last Thusday.
________________________
Cincinnati Enquirer
Monday, August 18, 2003
http://www.enquirer.com/editions/2003/0 ... ide18.html
Engineers were helpless as their grids gasped and died
By Robert Tanner and Jim Krane
The Associated Press
Waves of power strong enough to run a mid-sized city swung wildly between the Midwest, New York and Canada. In Cleveland, the voltage dropped to zero "like a heart attack." In Connecticut, a chunk of the control room's wall of maps suddenly flashed green - no juice.
At a monitoring nerve center in Valley Forge, Pa., that oversees the tangle of transmission lines and substations from New Jersey to West Virginia, a huge field of electricity dropped out and drained north.
"It was so massive," says Phillip G. Harris, president of PJM Interconnection, which controls electricity in much of the mid-Atlantic region, describing the flashflood of electrons bursting the nationwide system of controls Thursday.
Engineers watching the power storm on their screens were as helpless to stop it as the people whose elevators jerked to a stop mid-floor in Michigan or whose subway trains ground to a halt in New York City.
Once it got rolling, the great blackout of 2003 swept from Ohio to Canada to New York City in the time it takes to recover from a sneeze, leaving millions in eight states and Canada suddenly without electricity on a steamy summer afternoon.
So far, the search to fully understand the string of failures that led to the biggest blackout in U.S. history has turned up broken alarms and an initial trio of failed high-voltage lines in Ohio owned by Akron-based FirstEnergy Corp. Investigators also are looking at the overall aging infrastructure of transmission lines, serving a technology-driven society of cell phones that snap photos and of talking computers, the stuff of science fiction when many of the towers and transformers went up decades ago.
The men and women at the control panels and computer screens - technicians and engineers and security monitors - watched it all happen. Investigators are turning to them, and the equipment they run, for answers.
Some workers had an instant of warning time. Others were blindsided, dumbstruck, incredulous.
Going, going ...
It's 4:05 p.m. EDT Thursday, and the system is wobbling. Utilities in Canada and the eastern United States see increasingly wild power swings as voltage flows first in one direction, then another.
"What we saw was small swings of our flow, our power flows to Ontario," says William Museler, president of New York Independent System Operator, a utility provider in upstate New York. "We were supplying Ontario with about 1,000 megawatts at the time this started. Those power swings started at about 100 megawatts. They went to 800 megawatts - ultimately went into the range of about 3,000 megawatts. When it got to that range, that's when the system became unstable."
One hundred megawatts is enough to power several huge auto plants; 3,000 megawatts is enough to keep the entire city of Tampa running.
It's 4:09 p.m. By now, power has begun to drop slightly in Cleveland - then it plummets.
"It happened to us so quick. The voltage was lower than we wanted and then ... boom! It just dropped," says Jim Majer, commissioner at Cleveland Public Power, a city-owned utility. "It was like a heart attack. It went straight down from 300 megawatts to zero."
The nation's electrical grid is balanced between power plants that pump out huge amounts of electricity and its power-thirsty consumers - cities, industrial plants, baseball stadiums, air-conditioned skyscrapers. When the grid works, individual failures seal themselves off so power keeps flowing. When it fails, the often tenuous supply-demand balance can spur massive surges one way or the other, shutting down substations and generators as they try to protect themselves from damage.
And that's just what happened Thursday.
It's now 4:10 p.m. In Newington, Conn., the nerve center at Convex - the Connecticut Valley Electric Exchange - is quiet. Then the lights dim and the room goes dark. The air-conditioning drops and there is a momentary pause. The utility's backup generator kicks in.
Everything goes wild in the control room, where Peter Brandien and three operators monitor a wall of lights that trace the electrical grid of lines and substations of Connecticut and western Massachusetts in red and blue - a "status board" 15 feet high and 48 feet long.
"This thing was so wacky. Your initial thought was 'Is this real?' " Brandien recalls. "The western part of Connecticut all turned green, and the whole board started flashing."
The phones begin to ring: Technicians from farther north in New England are calling.
Unhesitating, relentless, the blackout sweeps across the East; generators, substations and nuclear plants automatically disconnect in a daisy chain of split seconds. Millions of people see lights and computer monitors flicker, dim and go dark.
It's 4:11 p.m. The monitors on duty at PJM Interconnection, which operates the energy market from New Jersey to West Virginia, watch, stunned and disbelieving, as electricity drains northward.
"They saw it happen, and there was very little they could do to influence it," says Robert Hinkel, PJM operations manager. "An operator can't react in less than a second."
Amid the gloom, there is a bright spot: Automatic protections succeed in confining the blackout in PJM's coverage area to northern New Jersey and northwest Pennsylvania.
And other electrical systems manage to isolate themselves, too: Buffalo, N.Y., survives as an island of twinkling lights in the enveloping darkness.
The Ohio dis-connection
Now, as utility crews check transformers for damage and homeowners seek repairs for damaged electronics, investigators conduct the post-mortem, examining records of glitches buried in computer logs in the arcane language of mechanical switch behavior.
They are looking back to the hours - and days, weeks and months - before the catastrophe.
One warning sign already uncovered: The Ohio transmission lines suspected as the blackout's origin were buzzing with excess electricity earlier Thursday, causing trouble for their neighbors, says Pat Hemlepp of American Electric Power Co. in Columbus.
And on the shores of Lake Erie, hours before the blackout, a cloud of ash and a big whooshing sound spewed out of the three chimney stacks at FirstEnergy's Eastlake, Ohio, coal-fired power plant as it shut down. Why the 680-megawatt plant went offline is still not clear, but FirstEnergy spokesman Ralph DiNicola says the company is examining if it had any connection to the first of the transmission lines to go down.
The ash blanketed cars, homes and picnic tables in the village of Timberlake.
The town's mayor, Sam Santangelo, says the ash showers happen every now and then. And he should know: He lives no more than 1,000 feet from one of the stacks.
But with the power going out soon after along the lake, and then the massive blackout, he adds, "It makes you wonder."
________________________
Cincinnati Enquirer
Monday, August 18, 2003
http://www.enquirer.com/editions/2003/0 ... ide18.html
Engineers were helpless as their grids gasped and died
By Robert Tanner and Jim Krane
The Associated Press
Waves of power strong enough to run a mid-sized city swung wildly between the Midwest, New York and Canada. In Cleveland, the voltage dropped to zero "like a heart attack." In Connecticut, a chunk of the control room's wall of maps suddenly flashed green - no juice.
At a monitoring nerve center in Valley Forge, Pa., that oversees the tangle of transmission lines and substations from New Jersey to West Virginia, a huge field of electricity dropped out and drained north.
"It was so massive," says Phillip G. Harris, president of PJM Interconnection, which controls electricity in much of the mid-Atlantic region, describing the flashflood of electrons bursting the nationwide system of controls Thursday.
Engineers watching the power storm on their screens were as helpless to stop it as the people whose elevators jerked to a stop mid-floor in Michigan or whose subway trains ground to a halt in New York City.
Once it got rolling, the great blackout of 2003 swept from Ohio to Canada to New York City in the time it takes to recover from a sneeze, leaving millions in eight states and Canada suddenly without electricity on a steamy summer afternoon.
So far, the search to fully understand the string of failures that led to the biggest blackout in U.S. history has turned up broken alarms and an initial trio of failed high-voltage lines in Ohio owned by Akron-based FirstEnergy Corp. Investigators also are looking at the overall aging infrastructure of transmission lines, serving a technology-driven society of cell phones that snap photos and of talking computers, the stuff of science fiction when many of the towers and transformers went up decades ago.
The men and women at the control panels and computer screens - technicians and engineers and security monitors - watched it all happen. Investigators are turning to them, and the equipment they run, for answers.
Some workers had an instant of warning time. Others were blindsided, dumbstruck, incredulous.
Going, going ...
It's 4:05 p.m. EDT Thursday, and the system is wobbling. Utilities in Canada and the eastern United States see increasingly wild power swings as voltage flows first in one direction, then another.
"What we saw was small swings of our flow, our power flows to Ontario," says William Museler, president of New York Independent System Operator, a utility provider in upstate New York. "We were supplying Ontario with about 1,000 megawatts at the time this started. Those power swings started at about 100 megawatts. They went to 800 megawatts - ultimately went into the range of about 3,000 megawatts. When it got to that range, that's when the system became unstable."
One hundred megawatts is enough to power several huge auto plants; 3,000 megawatts is enough to keep the entire city of Tampa running.
It's 4:09 p.m. By now, power has begun to drop slightly in Cleveland - then it plummets.
"It happened to us so quick. The voltage was lower than we wanted and then ... boom! It just dropped," says Jim Majer, commissioner at Cleveland Public Power, a city-owned utility. "It was like a heart attack. It went straight down from 300 megawatts to zero."
The nation's electrical grid is balanced between power plants that pump out huge amounts of electricity and its power-thirsty consumers - cities, industrial plants, baseball stadiums, air-conditioned skyscrapers. When the grid works, individual failures seal themselves off so power keeps flowing. When it fails, the often tenuous supply-demand balance can spur massive surges one way or the other, shutting down substations and generators as they try to protect themselves from damage.
And that's just what happened Thursday.
It's now 4:10 p.m. In Newington, Conn., the nerve center at Convex - the Connecticut Valley Electric Exchange - is quiet. Then the lights dim and the room goes dark. The air-conditioning drops and there is a momentary pause. The utility's backup generator kicks in.
Everything goes wild in the control room, where Peter Brandien and three operators monitor a wall of lights that trace the electrical grid of lines and substations of Connecticut and western Massachusetts in red and blue - a "status board" 15 feet high and 48 feet long.
"This thing was so wacky. Your initial thought was 'Is this real?' " Brandien recalls. "The western part of Connecticut all turned green, and the whole board started flashing."
The phones begin to ring: Technicians from farther north in New England are calling.
Unhesitating, relentless, the blackout sweeps across the East; generators, substations and nuclear plants automatically disconnect in a daisy chain of split seconds. Millions of people see lights and computer monitors flicker, dim and go dark.
It's 4:11 p.m. The monitors on duty at PJM Interconnection, which operates the energy market from New Jersey to West Virginia, watch, stunned and disbelieving, as electricity drains northward.
"They saw it happen, and there was very little they could do to influence it," says Robert Hinkel, PJM operations manager. "An operator can't react in less than a second."
Amid the gloom, there is a bright spot: Automatic protections succeed in confining the blackout in PJM's coverage area to northern New Jersey and northwest Pennsylvania.
And other electrical systems manage to isolate themselves, too: Buffalo, N.Y., survives as an island of twinkling lights in the enveloping darkness.
The Ohio dis-connection
Now, as utility crews check transformers for damage and homeowners seek repairs for damaged electronics, investigators conduct the post-mortem, examining records of glitches buried in computer logs in the arcane language of mechanical switch behavior.
They are looking back to the hours - and days, weeks and months - before the catastrophe.
One warning sign already uncovered: The Ohio transmission lines suspected as the blackout's origin were buzzing with excess electricity earlier Thursday, causing trouble for their neighbors, says Pat Hemlepp of American Electric Power Co. in Columbus.
And on the shores of Lake Erie, hours before the blackout, a cloud of ash and a big whooshing sound spewed out of the three chimney stacks at FirstEnergy's Eastlake, Ohio, coal-fired power plant as it shut down. Why the 680-megawatt plant went offline is still not clear, but FirstEnergy spokesman Ralph DiNicola says the company is examining if it had any connection to the first of the transmission lines to go down.
The ash blanketed cars, homes and picnic tables in the village of Timberlake.
The town's mayor, Sam Santangelo, says the ash showers happen every now and then. And he should know: He lives no more than 1,000 feet from one of the stacks.
But with the power going out soon after along the lake, and then the massive blackout, he adds, "It makes you wonder."
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Stephanie
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Miss Mary - were you affected at all by this blackout? In know that Cinncinati is in the southern part of the state and south of Cleveland, but was all of Ohio affected?
I spoke with my mother this evening and apparently a crisis was averted in New Jersey because the power stations in Central New Jersey had caught the problem just before it caused a blackout here! :o
I spoke with my mother this evening and apparently a crisis was averted in New Jersey because the power stations in Central New Jersey had caught the problem just before it caused a blackout here! :o
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Miss Mary
Stephanie - no we were fine in Cincinnati. Local officials saw the impending problem and took measures to protect us here. We draw our power from other grids anyway. One local suburb lost power on that Thursday afternoon, residents were worried it was connected to the Blackout but their power came back on in few hours. Must have just been a fluke. It was odd though. I think I got out a few flashlights that night, just in case. What I do anyway in severe storms!!!!
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pvroses
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I don't have a news link to prove this,but I heard on CNN the other nite that the "suspect" power plant in Ohio had an alarm system (all plants do) that will alert them if there is a big fulx either way in energy flow. Unfortunatly the "alarm system" was down,and who knows for how long.... So basicly they had no alert that the power was going down until the final few seconds before it did,then it back fed and surged in all kinds of directions causing the rolling blackout.
BTW did anyone see the news clip of Torantos mayor saying that ".....have you ever seen the US take the blame for anything ??...." Kinda made me wonder if this was true....
~K
BTW did anyone see the news clip of Torantos mayor saying that ".....have you ever seen the US take the blame for anything ??...." Kinda made me wonder if this was true....
~K
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