Major power outages reported in New York City, other parts of Northeast!!

[Memnoch]

More info...


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Experts Asking Why Problems Spread So Far
By MATTHEW L. WALD, RICHARD PERÉZ-PEÑA and NEELA BANERJEE


The power collapse that stilled a large swath of North America Thursday apparently began with a failure in the Midwest that cascaded into Canada, and from there into New York, power industry officials said yesterday. They said they were trying to determine why it spread so far.

An enormous, instantaneous reversal of the power flow — huge amounts of electricity that had been moving east over the Great Lakes and was suddenly sucked back — overloaded one or more power lines, which quickly took themselves out of service.

In seconds, parallel lines were overloaded as well and shut themselves down, and then generating stations disconnected themselves. Ultimately, dozens of lines and about 100 power plants, with a staggering 61,800 megawatts of generation, had shut down — apparently before any human being could react. The series of major failures began about 4:08 p.m., and was over within roughly five minutes. The failures were triggered by a few seconds of tremendous instability in energy flows.

"This whole event was essentially a 9-second event, maybe 10," said Michehl R. Gent, president and chief executive of the North American Electric Reliability Council, describing how the problem started. His organization was founded after the 1965 blackout to establish rules and procedures to prevent repetitions.

Mr. Gent and other officials could offer no explanation for the failure of a series of systems that are supposed to isolate such problems, keeping a blackout in one region from dragging its neighbors into darkness, as happened Thursday. Some of those systems worked, notably in northern New Jersey and Pennsylvania, preventing the failure from spreading southward, and in Connecticut, protecting New England. But others clearly did not.

And so, as some government officials squabbled over what went wrong first, experts and energy officials were urgently trying to answer the more serious question of what, in effect, went wrong second — the inability of the system's computers and human operators over the next few minutes to isolate and limit the trouble.

"If we've designed the system for this not to happen, how did it happen?" Mr. Gent said. "I can't answer that question." He added, "I am embarrassed."
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[SecretMaster]

Whoa, sry for u Azrael. From what I've heard, Cleveland got the worst of the power outage. Yesterday they shut down all our power from 8.00 am to 7 p.m. to help other ppl.

I think the prob originally started in Ohio, from some plant.

[Lord Lothar]

Yahoo! News Update on the probable cause.