Excerpt

August 14, 2003, was a hot day in the northeastern United States, but not extremely so. Power lines carrying electricity to New York, Washington, DC, Toronto, and other major cities in North America were heavily taxed, but the loads were not unusual for an August afternoon.

On this particular Thursday, however, in rural Ohio, a power line happened to come into contact with a tree limb. This caused a power plant to go offline, then another. The shifting loads caused a Toronto-bound power surge, setting off a chain reaction that eventually brought some one hundred power plants down, affecting more than fifty-five million people in eight US states and Ontario and bringing the Northeast’s commuter trains to a standstill. 

In New York City, people walked down dozens of flights of stairs and then many miles more to their homes during the hottest part of a summer day. Air-conditioning systems failed, putting the elderly and the ill at risk. Phone service was interrupted as increased demand overloaded cell towers. Some municipal water systems lost pressure, prompting cities to advise their residents to boil their water before using it. Radio stations whose backup generators failed went off the air temporarily, frustrating the efforts of authorities to transmit emergency response instructions. Air transport and financial markets were disrupted. In some remote areas, power was out for a week. 

An investigation led authorities to a bug in the software of an Ohio power company’s control room that helped turn what should have been a manageable local blackout into a cascading regional failure. But the outage convinced even skeptics that the electrical grid was operating well beyond its design capabilities. Washington was swift to act, handing new responsibilities to the agencies that regulate operations and investment in the power grid.

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