Lights Out

By NANCY GIBBS

We learn most about power when we lose it and are left eating cereal by candlelight on the front stoop. Or helping the waiter and the hairdresser and the deaf man direct traffic at the intersection. Or meeting an elderly neighbor for the first time when we stop to deliver some water. One woman who had lived in Manhattan for 40 years saw the Big Dipper for the first time. You could see Mars hanging over midtown. Outside a Tribeca bar, a patrol car cruising by turned on the bullhorn: "Attention! Make sure you drink your beer before it gets warm." There turn out to be some things you can see only when the lights go out.

Some cities still carry scars from past blackouts that turned into festivals of looting and despair. But it was clear that we are living in new times, when at 4:09 Thursday afternoon the power flickered and died in the largest black-out in North American history, and instead of exploding, the cities fell quiet. Horns didn't honk. Though there were nasty exceptions here and there, shopkeepers didn't gouge, and windows didn't shatter, and most of the fires were coming off grills. Ottawa saw more looting than Detroit or Toledo. The latest test of people's nerve and grace found them equipped with both.

In Toronto delis and store owners sold bottles of water for less than the usual price; people shared cabs in the city and cell phones at the airport, and one theater company moved its performance out onto the street by the light of a pair of parked cars with their high beams on. In Ohio the Akron Beacon Journal printed a special edition of its rival, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, whose editors typed up reporters' notes by flashlight. Modell's sporting-goods company parked two trucks stocked with 2,000 pairs of shoes in Times Square and handed them out to stranded people walking home. In Harlem a group of church ladies in large hats outside a small Pentecostal church set up a card table with cups and plastic pitchers of iced tea and lemonade; they were giving drinks away.

Maybe people didn't panic because word went out so quickly from every public official from President Bush on down that there was no evidence of any kind of attack. There was no sign of a bomb or a break-in, and for anyone concerned that it might have been a more subtle, cyberterrorist assault, Michehl Gent, president and CEO of the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC), offered soothing words. "It's virtually impossible to get into a system without leaving some tracks," he said.

Though officials were quick to say what hadn't happened, they were at a loss to explain what had. How can the power demands of a not unusually hot day somehow bring a huge chunk of the northeastern electrical grid crashing down? The blame cascaded as fast as the blackout. On the ground some Americans blamed Canada for its origin; Canadians returned the favor. Ottawa officials first suggested that it was a lightning strike at a plant in upstate New York, except that it was a lovely sunny day in Niagara Falls, and there were no reports of lightning anywhere. In the end, the two governments announced a joint task force to investigate, and President Bush said he would look into "why the cascade was so significant, why it was able to ripple so significantly throughout our system." But finding answers may mean reviewing yet again the lessons learned from four historic power failures going back to the 1960s, looking at the weird rules that govern how power companies invest their money, and confronting the evidence that an antique grid of twigs and twine cannot meet the demands of 21st century consumers, much less protect itself from anyone who might actually set out to bring it down.

Experts will have to wade through 10,000 pages of of log data before they can say exactly how the disaster started, but they had a pretty good idea why: the electrical system in the Northeast and Midwest consists of a lot of capacity to generate power and too few means of moving it around smoothly. Over the past 10 years, electricity demand has jumped 30%, but transmission capacity has increased only half that much. Because everything is tied together, too much strain in one place can cause the whole system to snap. Officials learned that lesson in the blackouts of 1965, and 38 years later, they learned that all the safeguards put in place ever since may no longer be adequate for the job.

In the olden days--say, the 1930s--electricity was generated by coal-burning or hydroelectric plants located a short distance from the people who would use it. That meant when problems hit, the lights went out locally, even if locally meant a large city. But in the 1970s new federal utility laws threw transmission lines open to all comers. Now utilities could get their power wherever it was cheapest, even if that meant it had to travel farther: power generated in Alabama is sold to Vermont. The nation's power grid--the vast system of lines, transformers and switching stations--was never designed to move electricity long distances, let alone "from Maine to Miami," points out Terry Boston of the Tennessee Valley Authority.

That said, even the experts were surprised by the speed and breadth of last week's failure. It began, according to Gent, with an immense buckle in the system, when a still mysterious event--three transmission lines near Cleveland failing--began pulling down parts of the grid. A broken alarm at First Energy, a northern Ohio utility, may have allowed too much to go wrong before technicians noticed. The loss in power soon forced as much as 5,000 megawatts--almost enough to power Nevada for a day--that had been moving west to east to suddenly change direction. The reversal happened so fast that operators did not have time to react, and within about 10 seconds, vast sections of the grid were overwhelmed. The failed lines in Ohio started a cascade that was able to crash more than 100 power plants, including 22 nuclear plants in the U.S. and Canada, despite a structure designed specifically with such a danger in mind. "There are so many systems in place to prevent this kind of thing from happening," says Maria Zazzera, a former utility manager who worked for the New York Power Authority for 21 years. "I know people whose whole lives are dedicated to the reliability of this system. They do drills. They have procedures in place."

Those procedures were meant to isolate problems and keep them from spreading. Because supply and demand need to match up for the system to work, relay mechanisms throughout the grid continuously monitor the flow of power. If there is a sudden failure for some reason, like a lightning strike on a transmission tower, circuit breakers open, and the sector unhinges itself from the grid. This process is called islanding; the goal is to contain the glitch by sealing it off from the rest of the network.

When that happens, it creates a hole; the network is programmed to quickly either pick up power from other sources or shed load, meaning purposely shut off power in one part of the grid to protect the rest of it. That's one reason suburbs are more likely than urban centers to suffer brownouts: to protect commerce and hospitals in the most densely populated areas. But to work, any shift has to happen very fast, in real time, says Zazzera, "and nobody likes to drop load. You never want it to go black because you have to report it to your regulatory commission. You get in trouble; it's difficult to start up again." In this case, there may never have been time to make a decision. In past blackouts, there was a window of as much as 45 minutes to try to adjust to a deviation. This one moved across hundreds of miles in seconds.

The fallout could have been worse. If you lived in Vermont, you could even say that the system worked. By quickly unplugging itself from power feeds from New York, the state was spared the same fate. Down in Chattanooga, Tenn., when engineers at the Tennessee Valley Authority operations center saw transmission flows spike, they managed to program their generators to slow down and stabilize the flow of electricity; that and a system of circuit breakers in Ohio stopped the crash from spreading south.

Vast amounts of money and time have gone into solving the problem of such chain reactions ever since the legendary blackout of November 1965, when an overloaded relay switch near Toronto left 30 million people without power all through New England and down to New York City. In those days, people wondered whether the Russians had attacked. That experience frightened the industry into the creation of the NERC., an industry group that sets standards for the whole transmission system. The NERC set up the system for quarantining sick plants so that if one failed, it would not infect the others. The council also hoped to coordinate utilities' investments in maintaining the grid. "We had a cascading failure of great interest in 1965, and then we spent a whole bunch of money to make sure it didn't happen again," observes Norm Rubin, senior policy analyst for Energy Probe in Toronto. "They obviously didn't get 100% at it."

Even with safeguards in place, there were other problems to contend with. That was made clear in July 1977, when a lightning bolt in northern Westchester County, N.Y., knocked out two transmission lines. Within an hour New York City sealed itself off electrically from the larger grid, but since the city does not generate enough power internally to sustain itself, 9 million people lost power, some for more than a day. Nor were the failures limited to the Northeast. In July 1996, some 2 million customers from Nebraska to Washington State to Baja California Norte in Mexico lost power when a 345 kilovolt line was shorted out by a tree in Idaho. A mechanical glitch shut down a parallel line, setting off the wider collapse. The industry learned to trim trees near power lines.

So what happened last week was a nasty reminder, not a complete surprise to electricity-industry types. Whatever safety margin was built into the system has been eaten away by lack of investment in modernization. "This is the fourth catastrophic failure of the central power grid within the last decade," says Kyle Datta, managing director of the Rocky Mountain Institute's consulting practice, "and yet decision makers are not learning the right lessons from these crises." One such lesson is that it doesn't matter how much power you can generate if you can't deliver it reliably to the people who need it.

And here a combination of market forces, political foot dragging and the reluctance of people to welcome the arrival of high-voltage lines or towers in their backyards has made it almost impossible to create a transmission system that can keep up with demand. There is little incentive for utilities to erect new towers, especially after new federal rules in the late 1980s effectively capped the return on such investments at roughly 11%. One fight between West Virginians, who don't want ugly transmission lines, and Virginians, who need power, has been going on for 12 years. By 1999 transmission investment was less than half the $5 billion it had been 20 years earlier. And Enron's collapse didn't exactly help make utility investment attractive. As energy policy was assembled piece by piece, there was both too little regulation and too much: no one was requiring the utilities to upgrade the grid, and utilities were worried that if they did it voluntarily, they might not be allowed to charge enough to make their money back.

"We have known for a long time now, a decade, that the utility industry is underinvesting in the reliability of the grid," says Charles Curtis, a Deputy Energy Secretary under President Clinton. "We can't tolerate a system that's this brittle. The social and economic costs are terrific." Congress has tried writing energy legislation that would give the NERC federal authority to enforce grid standards, and the Administration wants to provide financial incentives for putting up more wires. But so far, such language has not made it into law because it has always come bundled with other energy initiatives that are deal breakers, like opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil development. When New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, who made the rounds of talk shows last week declaring the U.S. was "a superpower with a Third World grid," was Energy Secretary during the Clinton Administration, a blue-ribbon commission identified several areas of the country that had transmission problems. Congress effectively ignored the report. "Congress has pretty much neglected the day-to-day operation of the system because we're so focused on this religious battle over whether to deregulate or not deregulate," says a House energy expert. And it has been hard to get lawmakers to override vocal constituents. "If the accepted policy continues to be 'Not in my backyard,'" says Ken Johnson, a spokesman for the House Energy and Commerce Committee, "there are going to be a whole lot of people walking home from closed businesses to dark houses in the future."

Last week's crisis looked sure to change the landscape when lawmakers return next month and take up competing versions of an energy bill that gives the NERC enforcement power and encourages states to coordinate their electricity policies in wider regions--not to mention $13 billion in goodies for the oil, gas and nuclear industries. G.O.P. Congressman Billy Tauzin, who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, also announced that it will launch an investigation into what happened.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who walks the streets in Rudy Giuliani's large shoes, began his mayoral training years ago on the trading floors of Wall Street, where an ability to stay calm amid chaos can make you very, very rich. That skill set served him well in those first blackout hours, as he briefed White House chief of staff Andrew Card; assembled his police and fire chiefs; phoned the head of Consolidated Edison, New York's power company; and declared that terrorism was not involved, soothing the city's nerves. Bloomberg advised people to treat Friday as a snow day--a charming image on a day when temperatures were heading into the 90s. He asked essential workers to go in but everyone else to stay home: "There are worse things than taking a summer Friday off from work."

That's because by then he and the other big-city mayors knew that there were no quick, easy fixes. Getting a power system up and running after a blackout--called a black start--involves much more than just flipping a switch. Power-generating units have to be brought online one at a time. If one power plant were brought up with all of Toledo waiting with its air conditioners in the on position, it would just shut down again. So technicians have to carve up cities into electrically isolated pieces and bring each neighborhood back up one by one in bite-size chunks that the system can handle. As they build more and more islands, they can start to string them together, but try to move too fast, and the whole thing goes dark again. Nuclear-power plants usually take at least 24 hours to restart.

In the meantime, the cities had no choice but to cope as best they could--get the sanitation workers out to harvest the remains of every dead refrigerator, get the buses and trains moving. Ohio Governor Bob Taft declared a state of emergency in Cleveland after all four pumping stations that lift water out of Lake Erie went out and residents were ordered to boil their water at least through Sunday. Even the beaches were off limits for swimming after a sewage discharge sent bacteria levels soaring. At least one house fire in the city was blamed on burning candles.

By nightfall in many places, time seemed to be moving backward, back to the days of candlelight and carriages and cigar boxes as cash registers, when ice cream sold for a nickel a scoop. As it grew darker, many of the bars in New York City even went back to the days when people were allowed to smoke indoors, in the belief that the police had better things to worry about than enforcing the new ban. Tourists curled up on the street in Times Square, on library steps and in hotel ballrooms; city residents slept on their roofs, where it was cooler. By morning you could buy T shirts reading WHERE WERE YOU WHEN THE LIGHTS WENT OUT? with the date, confirming New York's position as the capital of capitalism. Meanwhile, half a world away, the few residents of Baghdad who had electricity sat stuck to their TV sets, watching the superpower grope in the dark. "We stayed up for an hour watching it," said a taxi driver, "until the electricity shut down." --Reported by Amanda Bower, Sean Gregory and Jyoti Thottam/New York; Laura Eggertson/Ottawa; Steven Frank/Toronto; Elisabeth Kauffman/Nashville; Eric Roston, Douglas Waller and Mark Thompson/Washington; Fran Stewart/Cleveland; and Cathy Booth Thomas/Dallas

With reporting by Amanda Bower, Sean Gregory and Jyoti Thottam/ New York; Laura Eggertson/Ottawa; Steven Frank/Toronto; Elisabeth Kauffman/Nashville; Eric Roston, Douglas Waller and Mark Thompson/Washington; Fran Stewart/Cleveland; and Cathy Booth Thomas/Dallas