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Bush says not terrorism { August 15 2003 }

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   http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61919-2003Aug15.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61919-2003Aug15.html

Blackout Causes Mass Disruption
Power Gradually Returning Throughout New York City

By Barton Gellman and Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, August 15, 2003; 7:10 AM

NEW YORK, Aug. 14 -- An enormous power failure yesterday blacked out population centers from New York City to Cleveland, Detroit and Toronto, crippling transportation networks and trapping tens of thousands of people in subways, elevators and trains.

Authorities quickly dismissed the possibility that terrorists were to blame for the outage, but the impact of the mechanical failures that began along the Canadian border was dramatic all the same. The failure cut the electricity supply to millions of people in a 600-mile swath between New York and Detroit, shutting down entire cities across the Northeast without warning and stranding workers and travelers in the summer heat.

The blackout will be recorded as one of the most extensive in U.S. and Canadian history. It shut down at least 10 major airports and nine nuclear power plants in at least seven states and Canada's Ontario province, and it forced hospitals, prisons and emergency service providers to switch to generator power.

In a patient but chaotic evening commute, motorists found themselves snared in gridlock and pedestrians took to highways and bridges. ATMs stopped working, and cell phones became unreliable under the overload. Some jurisdictions declared curfews and sought help from the National Guard. Broadway went dark, and the San Francisco Giants-New York Mets baseball game was canceled.

There were conflicting explanations of the cause but no doubt about the short but sharp impact. Ford Motor Co. alone lost production at 21 factories. Amtrak service was canceled from Newark to Boston. Computers became useless to untold thousands who did not have battery power. "You realize just how dependent we are on electricity," New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg (R) said in his shirtsleeves at a news conference at which he urged people to drink water.

As midnight approached, power gradually returned throughout the region, and most airports and some rail lines had resumed service. New York Gov. George E. Pataki (R) said in an 11 p.m. news conference that "we have not as of yet seen serious injuries or deaths" related to the blackout. Still, authorities warned that they may not be able to restore full normalcy in time for Friday's rush hour as some areas braced for a longer recovery.

[By 6 a.m. Friday, large portions of New York City were still without power. Officials announced that there would be no subway service for the morning rush, and the Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North commuter lines warned suburban train riders they too may not have rides, according to the Associated Press. But the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey issued a statement around 5 a.m. Friday, according to the AP, saying PATH commuter trains would be operating on normal schedule, some bridges and tunnels would handle traffic as usual and all three major airports would be open.]

For New Yorkers, the power outage set off an eerie but ultimately benign echo of the chaos that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Before it became apparent that the cause was a malfunction rather than foul play, New York City deployed its "Atlas" anti-terrorism teams and its "alternative command sites," and other jurisdictions activated contingency plans to boost security. The Pentagon launched two F-16 fighter jets to patrol the skies between New York and Washington and put other military aircraft on alert at eastern U.S. bases, defense officials said.

But federal and local officials moved quickly to quell terrorism concerns. "The one thing I think I can say for certain is that this was not a terrorist act," President Bush said tonight from California, where he was on a fundraising trip.

Bush's remarks, and those offered earlier by various federal, state and local officials, calmed nerves but did little to ease the confusion on one of the hottest days of the summer, in which temperatures in the New York area were in the 90s. With traffic signals extinguished, cars and buses gridlocked almost immediately as the rush hour began.

Waves of pedestrians clogged the bridges out of Manhattan and took possession of the main roadbeds, as well as the elevated walkways. New Jersey Transit and the Long Island Rail Road canceled all service. Boos sang out from the sea of pedestrians when Bloomberg arrived at the Brooklyn Bridge with a security detail and media scrum that threw another obstacle across the path. At one point, the Port Authority police said all buses had stopped.

New York's subway system ground to a halt within moments, with some trains making it to the nearest station and others stalled within a warren of underground tunnels. "Wherever trains were when power went out, that's where they came to a stop," said Deirdre Parker, the transit authority spokeswoman.

The troubles in New York were mirrored across the Northeast and parts of the industrial Midwest. Outages were reported in Michigan, Ohio, New York state, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts.

The MGM Grand Casino in Detroit, which operates 24 hours a day in an atmosphere of perpetual illumination and climate control, shut down for the first time since its opening in July 1999. The blackout caused early closures of factories in the automaking area around Detroit and shut down the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel.

In Cleveland, the loss of traffic lights caused chaos downtown at the start of the rush hour. Toronto's streetcars were grounded, as power outages spread across the vast province of Ontario to Ottawa, the Canadian capital.

An official reported that about 400 people in Toronto were stuck in elevators and that rescue crews were trying to free them. Shopkeepers in some parts of the city operated by candlelight. There were reports that 170 miners in four mines in Sudbury were trapped, with no power to get them out, although they were reported to be in good condition.

Wayne Brocklehurst of the Ontario Office of Critical Infrastructure Protection and Emergency Preparedness said chemical plants in the Sarnia area released hydrocarbons in the atmosphere "because normal venting systems don't work." He said residents in that area were asked to stay inside.

But many Canadians took the outage with good humor. "I heard someone say it was like 9/11 without the terror," said Lynn Bevan, a human rights lawyer in Toronto. There was no panic, she said. "Everyone thought it was too many air conditioners on."

Washington was not directly affected by the blackout, but political figures began to ponder the effect of the massive blackout on energy policy -- and the failure of all safeguards. One Democratic group said Republicans blocked a plan in 2001 to provide a $350 million loan guarantee program for improving the nation's power transmission reliability. Bush used the occasion to repeat his call to improve the nation's energy policy; his legislation has been stalled in Congress. The president said he has "said so all along" that the power grid must be improved, adding: "This is going to be an interesting lesson for our country, and we'll have to respond to it."

Both parties agreed the nation's power grid is badly antiquated. "We're a superpower with a Third World grid," said Democrat Bill Richardson, the New Mexico governor and an energy secretary under President Bill Clinton.

Authorities could not pinpoint a cause by day's end, and the confusing first hours of the blackout brought reports, later amended, blaming a fire at a 14th Street power plant in Manhattan, a computer worm and lightning. Whatever the cause, it was clear that a failure near Niagara Falls swiftly brought down neighboring power systems. The affected part, the Niagara Mohawk portion of the grid, serves much of the northeastern United States and parts of Canada. The system is part of a vast network -- from Florida to Washington state and into Canada -- that experts describe as the most complex machine ever built.

The outage, because it began along the Canadian border, produced early finger-pointing between the two countries. Canadian officials initially said the cause was a lightning strike on a power facility on the U.S. side of Niagara Falls; they later said the cause was a fire. But U.S. officials disputed the lightning explanation. "Our best understanding right now is that whatever did happen to start these cascading outages began in Canada," Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) said.

For an event so massive, there were few initial reports of casualties or looting. Normal activity halted in Cleveland, Detroit, Toronto, Ottawa and most of New York state, while smaller outages hit New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts. But Bloomberg, speaking almost an hour and a half after the power went out at 4:11 p.m., said the blackout was an "inconvenience" rather than a crisis. He said there had been no major fires, evacuation deaths or injuries, or significant criminal activity.

"Let us just pray nobody dies from the heat or an accident that was caused by this," Bloomberg said. "We'll look back on this as another test of New York."

Extra New York police and firefighters were ordered to work and they were restoring power to a hospital in Brooklyn that did not have generator power. Shelters were set up for stranded commuters. Traffic was blocked from entering Manhattan to allow people to evacuate, while many subway riders became covered in dark muck as they climbed out of the tunnels. Women removed high heels to speed their evacuation, and some vigilantes served as traffic cops to keep traffic moving.

But the New York mayor predicted a rapid return to order. "I would expect everything to be back to business tomorrow," he said, hopeful that New Yorkers would soon engage in a game of "where were you when the lights went out?"

Though utilities last night were still tallying the number of people affected, the area involved has a population of about 50 million people. The 1996 blackout on the West Coast affected 4 million and the 1977 New York City blackout affected 9 million. In 1965, about 30 million people in the Northeast and Canada were hit by a similar blackout.

The North American Electric Reliability Council, an industry consortium that monitors the grid, said the failures appeared to center around Lake Erie. "We do not know the cause at present," spokeswoman Ellen P. Vancko said. At the start of the blackout, thick black smoke poured from a Con Ed power station in lower Manhattan, and early reports said incorrectly that it was on fire. Bloomberg said the smoke resulted from a programmed emergency shutdown but did not indicate damage.

Nightfall brought an otherworldly darkness to New York's five boroughs and Long Island, with soft pinpoints of candlelight the only sign of habitation in apartment towers and a sea of red taillights defining roadways that were otherwise lost in the murk. Stargazers said the nearly full moon had never looked so bright.

Police in many jurisdictions called in all officers and did what they could to prepare for looting that they hoped would not come with nightfall.

In Orange County, New Jersey, authorities imposed an 8 p.m. curfew and banned sales of alcohol. Most stores halted sales and pulled down security shutters, but business boomed at places such as the Radio Shack and D'Agostino supermarket on 57th Street, as crowds of customers eight and nine deep surrounded sales counters with armloads of batteries, flashlights, radios, bottled water and ice.

New York opened emergency shelters for stranded commuters, and New Jersey Transit redirected about 500 buses to a staging area at the Meadowlands.

Pataki declared a state of emergency and placed the National Guard on standby. But the guard did not enter New York City, and authorities here said they saw much the same initial solidarity that appeared spontaneously in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 2001. Citizens shared rides, directed traffic and offered water and shade to those stuck in the heat.

"People are coming together," Bloomberg said. "They're helping each other. They're behaving maturely and calmly, and they are dealing with something that, let us all hope and pray, does not hurt anybody. Inconvenience is one thing, but loss of life is what we want to prevent at all costs."

Milbank reported from Washington.


© 2003 The Washington Post Company




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