Initial evidence points to the private ownership of utility companies and their drive to increase profits, as the reason for the massive failure. This is behind the lack of investment by utilities in transmission-line maintenance and upgrading and a more broadly deteriorating infrastructure.

The impact of the outage was heaviest on workers in city factories, shops, and buildings, farmers, and small businesses people such as restaurant operators (see accompanying reports).

“This particular incident has made it abundantly clear to the American people that we have an antiquated system,” U.S. president George Bush said August 15. “The grid needs to be modernized.” Technicians described an overloaded transmission system, which is badly in need of maintenance and new construction.

“I am most pleased by the fact that our emergency response was good, it reacted well,” Bush said. He didn’t comment on the thousands of people who were forced to spend the night of August 14 in city parks and streets.

“I’m from New Orleans. We have hurricanes. We don’t put people out on the street. We put them in the Super Dome,” Mike Smith, an industrial designer who was stranded in New York during the outage, told the August 16 New Jersey Star Ledger.

In Manhattan, the warm weather made the night in the open or the long walk home more bearable than it might have been. The New York subway system was out of action for almost 36 hours. According to the New York Post, up to 500 people had to walk out of subway cars stranded in tunnels, while almost twice that number were rescued from jammed elevators.

Millions across the region went without an income for one or two days as workplaces closed. In Detroit, General Motors, Ford, and Daimler Chrysler shut down a total of more than 50 plants. With auto parts companies also closing their doors, 300,000 workers or more were affected.

One hundred miners at the Falconbridge nickel mine, 200 miles north of Toronto, were forced to spend more than 12 hours underground until the morning of August 13, when power was restored to the elevators that bring them up to the surface.  
 
Behind the blackout
“The system has been designed and rules have been created to prevent this escalation and cascading. It should have stopped,” Michael Gent, president of the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC), told the Associated Press. NERC is charged with establishing rules to govern the flow of power generation, transmission, and use.

Gent and other NERC officials said August 17 that the first power line failures occurred near Cleveland. The breakdowns cascaded around the Lake Erie Loop, which moves power “from New York to the Detroit area, Canada and back to New York State,” in the words of the Wall Street Journal.

The New York Times reported Gent as saying, “300 to 500 megawatts, enough to electrify a small city, were moving east to west, from Michigan to New York through Ontario” when the flow reversed direction. It destabilized the flow of power, producing a cascading series of power station failures.

New Mexico governor William Richardson, a Democratic Party politician who served as energy secretary in the administration of William Clinton, described the United States as “a major superpower with a third-world electrical grid.” His condescending remark alluded to the reality that blackouts are a regular fact of life in many cities in the semicolonial world.  
 
Inadequate infrastructure
Two years ago, according to the UK Guardian newspaper, NERC’s David Cook told the U.S. Congress that “$56 billion was needed to update the aging power infrastructure.”

Denise VanBuyren, vice president of Central Hudson Gas and Electric, complained of the “bottlenecks” in the system. “We’ve got excess power in upstate New York, but there’s no way to get it to New York City,” she said.

Many utility companies have sold off their generating plants under the banner of deregulation. At the same time, Con Edison and the other traditional utilities maintain a monopoly on the transmission lines. Denied the rate increases they seek, they have held back on maintenance or construction of new facilities.

According to an article in the August 17 New York Times, the first known failure on August 14 hit a transmission line near Cleveland. As the power from that line was transferred to another one nearby, this second transmission line heated up, expanded, and sagged into a tree, causing it to shut down. Trees near transmission lines, however, are supposed to be cut back to prevent such accidents. Of the first five lines that failed, four belong to FirstEnergy, one of the country’s biggest utilities. A statement by the company said that an alarm system that was supposed to alert controllers of the failure did not function.

In 2001 the power industry spent $3.7 billion of the $5.3 billion needed to upgrade the power lines, reported the August 17 Star Ledger. The paper cited a study by the New Jersey-based R.J. Rudden energy consulting firm. The survey concluded that the cumulative shortfall at the end of five years could top $20 billion. The Electric Power Research Institute in California has estimated that electricity demand will grow by a total of 17 percent between 1998 and 2007. Transmission capacity, by contrast, is forecast to increase only 4 percent.

Ilona Gersh in Detroit contributed to this article.
 

Within minutes of the outage the system that supplies water to the city, county, and 69 surrounding communities shut down. Millions of gallons of raw sewage were released into Lake Erie and the Cuyahoga River.

It turns out that the city’s four major water stations have no backup generators. Officials did a study in 1999 and concluded that the risk did not merit the cost.
 

As it turned out, inner city power is essential to providing water pressure to outlying areas, so city mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and water director Victor Mercado convinced the company “to bring some areas up earlier so the city could once again supply water to 125 communities along with Detroit,” reported the August 17 Detroit News and Free Press.

The African World Festival, which draws hundreds of thousands annually downtown to explore African music, art, and handicrafts, was cancelled, as was a rock concert scheduled for Comerica Park. Shamil Baker, another garment worker, told this reporter she thinks that city officials canned the events because “they don’t want too many African-Americans or young people getting together because they’re afraid we’ll be violent.”
 

The driver on one bus described the blackout as “another Walkerton”—a reference to events in Walkerton, Ontario, where several people died and hundreds were made ill after drinking poisoned water. The incident is attributed in part to the fact that the government had cut funding for water quality monitoring.

Two days later, at the time of writing this report, transportation service had still not been restored. However, only six hours after the blackout, service in upscale Rosedale was restored, quickly followed by the downtown business core.
 
 
Related articles:
Nationalize the energy companies  
 
 
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