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In-Depth Information
2003 Northeast Blackout
What Happened?
On August 14, 2003, the largest electri-
cal blackout in American history hit the
northeastern United States and parts of
Canada. Several metropolitan areas were
affected, including New York, Cleveland,
Detroit, Toronto, and Ottawa. Within a
span of three minutes, 21 power plants
had shut down, affecting approximately
50 million people.
The typical problems resulted in the blackout areas. Lack of traffic lights caused
traffic problems. Trains and elevators were stuck. Airports delayed flights. Water
pressure that relied on electric pumps failed. Cell phone usage was disrupted.
(Wired telephone usage was still available, but it was overtaxed during the emer-
gency.) Internet traffic slowed due to downed servers and the attempt to reroute
messages. Some incidents of looting were reported.
Estimates place the total financial cost of the blackout anywhere between $4 and
$8 billion. Nine people died from various causes related to the blackout.
■
The northeastern
United States
before and after the
blackout.
What Caused It?
Many sources of the problem were blamed during the early hours and days after
the blackout. Because of the heightened consciousness after the September 11,
2001 attacks, authorities were quick to rule out terrorism. Downed trees and
lightning strikes throughout the affected region were blamed. Officials even con-
sidered---but quickly ruled out---the “Blaster” computer worm that was spreading
at the time.
Over the course of the next few months, a task force sorted out the issues. The ini-
tial cause was determined to be in Akron, Ohio, where the FirstEnergy Corp. had
failed to keep trees near the power lines trimmed appropriately. On August 14,
2003, tree limbs caused three power lines to fail simultaneously. When such fail-
ures occur, the operators at the power control center are responsible for keeping
the load balanced. In this case, they failed to do so, because the computer-based
alarm system that would have informed them of the problem failed to operate cor-
rectly. The load imbalance quickly spread to neighboring power plants, resulting
in the cascading blackout.
So although there were various contributing factors, a big part of the problem
was the failure of the alarm system. This issue eventually was traced to a race
condition bug in the computer General Electric Energys used to monitor alarms.
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