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Concept
Northeast blackout of 2003
Summary
The Northeast blackout of 2003 was a widespread power outage throughout parts of the Northeastern and Midwestern United States, and most parts of the Canadian province of Ontario on Thursday, August 14, 2003, beginning just after 4:10 p.m. EDT.
Most places restored power by midnight (within 7 hours), some as early as 6 p.m. on August 14 (within 2 hours), while the New York City Subway resumed limited services around 8 p.m. Full power was restored to New York City and parts of Toronto on August 16. At the time, it was the world's second most widespread blackout in history, after the 1999 Southern Brazil blackout. The outage, which was much more widespread than the Northeast blackout of 1965, affected an estimated 55 million people, including 10 million people in southern and central Ontario and 45 million people in eight U.S. states.
The blackout's proximate cause was a software bug in the alarm system at the control room of FirstEnergy, an Akron, Ohio–based company, which rendered operators unaware of the need to redistribute load after overloaded transmission lines drooped into foliage. What should have been a manageable local blackout cascaded into the collapse of much of the Northeast regional electricity distribution system.
According to the New York Independent System Operator (NYISO) – the ISO responsible for managing the New York state power grid – a 3,500 megawatt power surge (towards Ontario) affected the transmission grid at 4:10:39 p.m. EDT.
For the next 30 minutes, until 4:40 p.m. EDT, outages were reported in parts of Michigan (Detroit), Ohio (Cleveland, Akron, Toledo), Ontario (Toronto, Hamilton, London, Windsor), New Jersey (Newark), and New York (New York City, Suffolk, Nassau, Westchester, Orange and Rockland counties, Rochester, Syracuse, Binghamton, Albany).
This was followed by outages in other areas initially unaffected, including all of New York City, portions of southern New York state, New Jersey, Vermont, Connecticut, as well as most of the province of Ontario.
Official source
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