US, Canada slowly recover from blackout

Millions of Americans and Canadians slowly recovered from the largest power outage in North American history yesterday, as President George W. Bush called the blackout a "wake up call" and urged the modernisation of antiquated electricity infrastructure.

Officials were trying to pinpoint the cause of the breakdown and discover how it cascaded so quickly through much of the northeastern United States and the Canadian province of Ontario, knocking New York City, Detroit, Cleveland, Ottawa, Toronto and a host of smaller cities back into the pre-electric age.

The good news was that it wasn't terrorism, that emergency procedures designed to evacuate people from subways and elevators appeared to have worked, that most people took the inconvenience with good humour, that law and order was preserved and that New York City reported only one death.

The bad news was that millions of people remained without power, many thousands were stranded and still unable to get home, airlines cancelled hundreds of flights, commuter services were chaotic and temperatures climbed above 32 degrees Celsius in most of the affected area.

Bush, visiting California, praised the country's emergency response system, saying work since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to upgrade procedures had paid off. Now, the nation needed to make the same investment in its electricity grid.

"We've got an antiquated system," Bush declared. "We'll figure out what went wrong and we'll address it."

As a symbol of recovery, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg rang the opening bell on the New York Stock Exchange. Outside, hundreds of confused, tired, sweaty, haggard new Yorkers wandered the streets, trying to figure out how to get home after spending the night in the city.

By midday, neon lights were shining on one side of Times Square while the other side remained dark. But one by one, the glaring electronic hoardings were springing back to life.

But New York power operators asked for permission to impose rolling blackouts to prevent customers from overloading the system and crashing it again. Canadian power generators also expected to impose controlled power cuts.

New York Gov. George Pataki said he wanted to know how and why the system crashed so catastrophically.

"How did this happen, why did it happen and why did we have a systemic failure across the power grid in the northeast when we were told after the blackout in the 1960s that this would not happen again," Pataki said on NBC's "Today Show."

Procedures put in place after a huge blackout in 1965 were supposed to isolate breakdowns to small areas and preventing them from spreading from one power plant to the next. Those procedures failed.

"This should not happen. We are in 2003. We are the most sophisticated society in the world and we have to have an energy system which is reliable," he said.

Former Energy Secretary Bill Richardson said much of the US electricity system was 50 or 60 years old and it was showing its age. "We're a superpower with a third-world grid. We need a new grid," said Richardson, who now serves as governor of New Mexico. Bloomberg, a businessman-turned-politician who is managing his worst crisis since becoming mayor in January 2002, said power would not be restored to all New Yorkers until later yesterday while the subway would still not be operating for the evening rush hour.

He said one person was reported dead of a heat-related heart attack, a miraculous outcome after such a massive failure. Bloomberg said 3,000 firefighters put out 60 fires, but almost all seemed accidental. One firefighter was injured.