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Cia possibility terrorist tempering Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
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What Went Wrong
It was a blip on the screen that turned into a monster, leaving 50 million Americans powerless. The inside story of a sleepless night
By Michael Hirsh and Daniel Klaidman
NEWSWEEK
Aug. 25 issue — Thursday, August 14, began as a typical late-summer day: hot, lazy and inconsequential. Up near Albany, Steve Swan was working as shift supervisor at the New York Independent System Operator, the nerve center of the state’s power grid. Because of all the air conditioners in use around the region, the grid was carrying a heavy load that day. But it was nothing special for August.
IN FACT, MOST OF THE East and Midwest was operating only at about 75 percent of capacity; in past summers, power systems in the region have used more capacity on hotter days without incident. Hunkered down at their terminals, the electrical engineers and other “utility geeks” know that their job of monitoring power flows isn’t very glamorous. “A lot of days we sit there for hours and it doesn’t look like we’re doing anything,” says one dispatcher. Rarely does the guy standing guard at a utility feel a part of history.
But at 4:06 p.m., ET, something caught Swan’s eye on the big screen at the front of the room. He noticed a large amount of power flowing from New York toward Ontario through the transmission lines—underground and overhead cables. That wasn’t so unusual. A power plant must have gone down. But seconds later, something happened that he’d never seen be-fore. The 800-megawatt surge reversed course and began hurtling back toward New York, like some giant ectoplasmic monster on a rampage. Emergency sirens began to wail through the facility—klaxons not unlike the sirens from “Star Trek.” Just outside the control room, the operator’s chief executive, William Museler, was finishing up a budget report when his room went dark. He rushed through the secure doors into the control room, where what he saw reminded him of a “science-fiction movie,” he recalled to NEWSWEEK. People were standing up in stunned silence as they gazed at the power board. Normally, there would be a couple of illuminated red lines representing downed transmission lines. But now most of the board was flashing. “This is the big one,” said one dispatcher.
‘THIS IS MY WORST NIGHTMARE’
Generators all over had shut down to ward off the surging megawatt monster, which could overload and burn them out. “No one had ever seen this before, and it happened instantaneously,” said Museler, who had lived through Hurricane Gloria in 1985, which took down 750,000 customers. His heart sinking, he asked one of his employees, “Find out if New York City has gone dark.” It had. Museler says he thought to himself: “This is my worst nightmare.”
He wasn’t alone. Faster than most humans could respond, power grids across the region began “islanding” themselves, disconnecting automatically from the overloaded system. Generators clicked off in a cascade of shutdowns that darkened New York, Pennsylvania, the Midwest rust belt and much of Ontario. In seconds, North America had suffered the worst blackout in its history. In about nine seconds, 61,800 megawatts were lost, and as many as 50 million people were abruptly left without power. Fortunately, it was still daylight. In Michigan and Ohio, the governors called out the National Guard to distribute water; the troops rolled out trucks known as water buffaloes to provide fluids at airports and public parks (two gallons per person and you had to bring your own container). Agriculture specialists worked the phones, trying to get generators to farmers to enable them to milk their cows. Other officials called hospitals to see if they needed more diesel fuel to run their emergency power engines. Gas lines spilled out onto highways, snarling traffic. “It’s like Mad Max out here,” said one Detroit resident.
New York City simply shut down all at once. At 4:09 p.m., three minutes after Swan first noticed something was wrong, a rush-hour-packed subway car carrying Richard Warren, an investment banker hoping for an early weekend, lurched to a stop. The lights soon went out, and the August heat grew overwhelming. Cut off, people talked in frightened tones of terrorism. “This woman kept yelling ‘Help! Help! People are dying down here!’ It was a little intense,” Warren recalls. The police arrived two hours later and escorted the passengers, who wielded their cell phones as flashlights, through the dark, rat-infested tunnel and up to daylight at Union Square. The stranded subway riders joined tens of thousands of other New Yorkers who suddenly turned into refugees, tracking their way home across the Brooklyn Bridge or bivouacking for the night by tunnels and bridges in scenes reminiscent of 9/11.
THOUGHTS OF TERRORISM
For many, the first minutes of the Great Blackout of 2003 were haunted by those memories of nearly two years ago. Across the country in San Diego, President George W. Bush was on brief respite from his monthlong Crawford, Texas, vacation, lunching with troops at the Marine Air Corps Station in Miramar before heading to a fund-raising dinner. Just as White House chief of staff Andrew Card had leaned over to Bush in the middle of a public event to tell him of the terror attacks on 9/11, Card’s deputy, Joe Hagin, now bent over to tell the president about the massive blackout. The traveling White House learned about the blackout “simultaneously” as the news was breaking on TV because their cell phones began ringing incessantly. Hagin checked in with the White House Situation Room and the Homeland Security operations center, asking if the blackout was the result of terrorism. “I think everyone’s first conclusion was this was terrorism,” said Homeland Security spokesman Gordon Johndroe.
In fact, federal investigators ruled terrorism out within the first 45 minutes—perhaps prematurely. True, there was no detectable physical intrusion; nor had terrorist hackers left the usual cyber footprints. But despite the initial reassuring signals to the public, during an emergency conference call with senior officials at 5:30 p.m., the CIA “put on the radar” the possibility that there might have been some terrorist tampering. Informants and interrogations of terror suspects have led the CIA to believe that Al Qaeda is seeking to target power grids to produce just the widespread chaos witnessed Thursday afternoon, a senior administration official told NEWSWEEK. Last year the FBI concluded that terrorists are eagerly surveying weaknesses in power grids through Internet connections in Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and Pakistan. Even if they had no role in this episode, many worry that the Blackout of 2003 provided them with a perfect case study.
Back in Washington, the new multibillion-dollar counterterror machine put in place so painstakingly since 9/11 began dutifully lumbering into action. At the new Department of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge—a cabinet secretary only since March 1—rushed into his office just after 5 p.m. to face his first major test. He called Card and “assured the president we were coordinating communications at all levels,” said a Homeland Security official. (The president had been extremely frustrated on 9/11 when he became disconnected, especially from calls with Vice President Dick Cheney at the White House, and ordered a top-to-bottom revamping of secure communications.) Homeland Security mobilized several emergency response teams to assist with telecommunications and other demands. NORAD, the continental air-defense system inside Colorado’s Cheyenne Mountain, ordered two more F-16s out of Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida to patrol the East. “Our level of tolerance is so low we’re always at the edge of being prepared to launch,” NORAD spokesman Doug Barton told NEWSWEEK.
‘WE NEED SOME ANSWERS’
Meanwhile, at the epicenter of the collapse in Albany, New York Gov. George Pataki descended into his hardened command center, an old civil-defense bunker four floors beneath the ground. Behind a blast partition, the governor paced in his wood-paneled office, occasionally stepping out to pepper his aides with questions: “Is Long Island online yet?” “Is Westchester County online yet?” Pataki grew irritated as the minutes and hours passed and power—which energy executives assured him would be back shortly—was still not restored, said an aide who talked to him. In one dicey moment, Pataki recalled to NEWSWEEK, officials had to rush a second backup generator to the neonatal unit at Stony Brook University Hospital after the first backup went down. “We were told after ’65 and ’77 that this wasn’t going to happen again,” Pataki said Saturday. “And it did. And that is very upsetting. We still want to know why it happened, why it cascaded. The systems that were supposed to act as firewalls did not, and we need some answers.”
Pataki isn’t the only one asking these questions. To most Americans, the vast blackout seemed nearly inexplicable: what in the world did power stations in Ottawa have to do with New York or Cleveland? Many Easterners and Midwesterners seem not to have realized that over years of restructuring their regional power, companies had merged generation capacity to become part of the largest infrastructural system on the continent. A power-sharing network stretching from Miami to Manitoba had become, in effect, a single electrical circuit.
For decades this system had worked well. Electricity grids in Canada and the United States, for example, link up at 37 major points so the two countries can trade significant quantities of power. When one utility has a shortage, it simply buys power from a neighboring utility. But this network had also grown a very soft underbelly: an old transmission grid of underground and overhead power lines stuck back in the 1950s and ’60s. Experts knew these ancient cables couldn’t handle the rapid surges of the new power-trading economy. A federal security official told NEWSWEEK that by 9 p.m. Thursday, 80 percent of the generators that had been knocked out during the blackout were running again at capacity—but transmission lines could handle only 20 percent of the output.
IS DEREGULATION TO BLAME?
For years experts have warned of too little investment in a transmission grid that had become more complex than anyone knew. One complicating factor was deregulation. In the 1990s, many utilities were broken up, separating transmission businesses from the generators that produce electricity. Today the system is dominated by independent operators in a market-driven system—and “a broken link between generation planning and transmission planning,” says Steven Taub of Cambridge Energy Research Associates.
No one stepped in to fix the problem, in part because no one operator was directly responsible and could see benefits to building power lines for other regions. Even the public bears some of the blame: no one wants to pay the higher rates demanded by the old utility monopolies. And citizens’ groups have made local approval of new transmission lines very difficult.
It’s unclear whether Washington can find the way—or has the will—to overhaul the system; as the lights came up, the Bush administration and leading Democrats were too busy with the city’s favorite pastime, the blame game. But they at least achieved consensus in praising the government’s response.
Homeland Security’s Johndroe called the blackout a “test case” of the system, and the results were in: state and local officials had taken the necessary steps to be prepared for massive emergencies. Department officials gingerly reminded reporters of their widely ridiculed calls for homeowners to stock up on water, duct tape and other provisions. “One of those items was batteries,” a DHS official noted Friday. “Yesterday cell phones didn’t work. So you could listen to the radio.”
SHADOWS OF ’77
Especially in New York, the night of 8/14 marked a striking contrast to previous outages. There were no riots of the kind that crippled the city in the big blackout of 1977. Overall, officials logged 800 elevator rescues, 80,000 calls to 911 and a record 5,000 emergency medical service calls, but almost zero hysteria. A senior New York Police Department official said that between the time the power went out on Thursday afternoon until 6 o’clock Friday morning, New York police recorded only 305 arrests—somewhat lower than the department records on a normal evening.
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg—playing a lower-key version of the role his predecessor, Rudy Giuliani, perfected after 9/11—held more news briefings in a day than he has in months. Open-shirted and perspiring, he urged New Yorkers to remember their elderly neighbors and pets. They seemed to. In an interview with NEWSWEEK, Bloomberg contrasted New Yorkers’ composure this time with that of 1977. The difference? “Communications worked, coordination worked,” he said. “The other thing that is different from the ’70s is that people wanted to make the city work. There is a feeling among the people, a temper of the times, if you will, of cooperation and getting along.” As of Friday morning, despite constant complaints from localities and states that they get too little aid from the Feds, there was only one request for assistance from Washington, Bush told reporters. Bloomberg had asked for a generator from the Defense Department. Pataki later said he would request disaster aid.
Despite the back-patting, troubling questions hung heavy in the damp August air: how is it that Homeland Security experts, until now, had paid so little attention to the grid’s vulnerabilities—despite warnings that went all the way to the president’s desk? “This was not supposed to happen,” a senior U.S. Security official said to NEWSWEEK. Department officials believed that, since the big blackout of ’65, the electricity-transmission system was supposed to have been redesigned with safeguards that would make such disruptive incidents impossible.
‘YOU CAN’T CHANGE THE LAWS OF PHYSICS’
Another vexing problem: will there ever be a good way to evacuate New York City? August 14 was also an uncomfortable reminder that whatever threat we’re getting ready for, it may have little to do with what actually happens. Consider: most post-9/11 urban-evacuation plans depend on public transportation, but that went out in a blink last week. Though the mass departure from New York City came off smoothly, if sweatily, “this tells you clearly that it’s very, very difficult to evacuate millions of people in a short period of time,” said James Kallstrom, a former FBI agent in charge of New York who now advises Pataki. “You can’t change the laws of physics.”
Most important, what really went wrong? On that one, there were plenty of theories to go around. On Friday morning, Mayor Bloomberg asserted, apparently based on information supplied by the power company, that the event had started in Canada. The office of Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien, in turn, apparently leaked word to media in hard-hit Ottawa that the blackout might have been triggered by a lightning strike on a major transmission line in upstate New York. By Saturday, industry officials were increasingly convinced that the problem that led to the blackout originated somewhere in northeastern Ohio. “We are now trying to determine why this situation was not brought under control after the first three transmission lines relayed out of service,” said Michehl Gent, CEO of the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC), the agency formed after the last great Northeastern blackout, in 1965, to prevent another such breakdown. Industry sources say they believe the lines Gent was referring to are operated by First Energy, a transmission company based in Akron, Ohio, that has recently faced legal and financial problems. A spokesman for First Energy confirmed that company facilities in northern Ohio had suffered several mishaps during the afternoon of the 14th. These included a tree falling on one of the company’s heavy-duty 345-kilovolt high-tension lines and “tripping off” a generator at a company plant in Eastlake, Ohio. Industry sources said another 345kv line may have been so overloaded with electricity that it sagged into a lower-voltage cable below it on the pylon, shorting out the circuit. (A company spokesman acknowledged that one of its lines could have sagged.) But First Energy spokesman Ralph DiNicola told NEWSWEEK that the company believed its equipment had coped with all these failures, which were “not unusual on a warm summer day.” He said that First Energy “had no indication there was a major problem” until lights began blinking off elsewhere.
Gent and others hope reforms to the grid system may come soon—and that new teeth to enforce the performance demands of operators will be pushed through as part of a giant energy bill now stuck in conference on Capitol Hill. But there are other problems. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission wants to give all electricity suppliers equal access to power lines—a plan that’s supposed to give consumers the cheapest electricity available, even if it comes from generators in other regions. But power companies and politicians in the South and West have vigorously opposed the plan, contending that it would force prices higher in their usually low-cost regions.
To force the power industry to take responsibility for its own system, even some of those allied with the Bush administration who once championed deregulation now say some rethinking is in order. “In the past, those companies had to invest in transmission because it was part of their business model,” says Andrew Lundquist, who served as executive director of Vice President Cheney’s energy task force. “Now they’re uncertain if they are going to own it at all. I’m not saying the deregulated model is bad, but they need certainty. They need to get through this.”
For power-industry workers like Steve Swan, a 17-year veteran, there wasn’t much time to consider those larger issues last week. On Friday, Swan and his fellow workers, downing pizza slices and Dunkin’ Donuts on the fly, spent all day getting New York’s power grid back online. For Swan, it must have been one of the most fulfilling experiences of his life. But now that he’s been part of history, he may be happy to be just a utility geek again.
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With Mark Hosenball, Daniel Mcginn, Tamara Lipper, T. Trent Gegax, Keith Naughton, Suzanne Smalley, Patrick Crowley, Martha Brant, Eleanor Clift, Debra Rosenberg and Richard Wolffe
© 2003 Newsweek, Inc.
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