- Some power was restored by 11 p.m. Many others did not get their power back until two days later. In more remote areas it took nearly a week to restore power. 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 10 million people in Ontario and 45 million people in eight U.S. states.
The blackout's primary cause was a programming error or "bug" in the alarm system at a FirstEnergy Corporation control room in Ohio. The lack of an alarm left operators unaware of the need to re-distribute power after overloaded transmission lines hit unpruned foliage, triggering a "race condition" in the energy management system software, a bug affecting the order of operations in the system. What would have been a manageable local blackout cascaded into massive widespread distress on the electric grid.
"The best way to trim trees in a transmission line right of way is at the ground line with a chain saw." I think Wikipedia downplays the role First Energy played with the tree contacts. The computer and operator issues were a bunch of human performance issues, and human performance issues will always occur. But the tree trimming practice was a deliberate cost saving action. The other issues wouldn't have propagated if they'd just trimmed the damn trees. The industry had a lot of changes due to this, though it isn't fair to blame First Energy for that. If it wasn't them initiating it, it'd have been someone else (like APS, WECC and IID blacking out San Diego). The engineering and physics side of the blackout is pretty neat, and if anyone wants to talk about it, I'm more than happy to. I run power system studies all the time.
I had just flown to Michigan for a High School reunion. My dad stopped by the barber shop on the way back from the airport. Halfway through this haircut, the power went out. The barber finished without clippers, by the light coming in from the windows. As we made our way home a couple of miles, we kept thinking "oh wow, this is a little bigger than just that neighborhood". It wasn't for another hour or so that we realized how widespread the outage was. Fun nerd fact - At the time, I still had a back-end dial-up ISP number I could use. I dialed in to get online, and shared my connection over wifi so my brother could be online too. There we were, a couple of nerds, checking slashdot and sending IMs by candlelight on our laptops as long as the batteries lasted. Our power didn't come back on for three days... just in time for the reunion.
Aww man... I remember this being close enough to 9/11 where a lot of people were concerned about terrorism in a legitimate way and that's a fact forgotten at this point when a suspicious backpack can send every kid home early from elementary school in Sheboygan. If you were old enough at the time to remember and are not a goddamn moron, it's hard to grasp the fact that 9/11 really did change a lot and the response over the years from politicians has made that fact seem silly because they've taken advantage of the event in a lot of pretty ridiculous ways.
I remember this. I was on vacation driving to Newfoundland from Ontario. My sister called my mom and said they didn't have power, and it was all over the news. I had a friend in St. Catherines, ON, whose block, for some reason, was on a different grid, so he and his family still had power. He just switched to a Pacific Server and kept on playing Xbox.