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Human Error Eyed In Blackout

Aside from the garbage cans overflowing with spoiled food, the water-boil warnings and the flood of questions about how transmission problems ended up leaving 50 million people in the dark, life in the Northeast was close to normal two days after a historically bad blackout.

In major developments:

  • The probe into how the eight-state, two-nation blackout began centered on an area just south of Cleveland, where three transmission lines apparently failed just before the massive outage.
  • A lead investigator suggested human error might have caused the outage. Alarm systems that might have alerted engineers to the failed lines were broken.
  • The nation's top energy official would not predict an end to power interruptions, but did forecast higher rates.
  • The Bush administration supports a three-year delay in a controversial proposal that its supporters claim would make it easier to run the nation's electrical system.

    Michehl Gent, head of the North American Electric Reliability Council, a nonprofit, industry-sponsored group that is supposed to oversee power line reliability, suggested human error might have been the reason the problems were not isolated before they knocked out power from Michigan to New Jersey to the Canadian province of Ontario.

    "The system has been designed and rules have been created to prevent this escalation and cascading. It should have stopped," Gent said in a telephone conference call.

    Gent said investigators were examining more than 10,000 pages of data, including automatically generated logs on power flows over transmission lines, to determine what caused the blackout.

    FirstEnergy Corp., the Akron, Ohio-based utility that officials said owned at least two of the three lines that failed, said alarm systems that might have alerted engineers to the failed lines were broken, but that functioning backup systems had been in place.

    Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said in a Sunday broadcast interview that higher rates must be "part of the solution" to problems highlighted by Thursday's massive blackout.

    He says higher rates would offer an incentive to build new transmission capacity.

    He says another area that needs fixing is state-to-state cooperation on electricity transmission across borders.

    Abraham says "people in the front lines" are confident there won't be a repeat of the blackout of 2003.

    But, he says it would be "premature" to predict there will be no more power interruptions.

    Abraham said the Bush administration supports a three-year delay in a controversial proposal that its supporters claim would make it easier to run the nation's electrical system.

    Abraham says a controversial proposal by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission would "force down the throats" a federal policy of deregulation that states with cheap power oppose.

    The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission proposal would establish national standards for managing the flow of electricity through regional transmission organizations. It also would establish some new rules on access to transmission lines.

    Nearly all of the millions affected by the blackout had power restored by Saturday, but people were still being urged to conserve electricity and many remained harried by aftereffects.

    Toronto's subways remained out of action on Sunday, as Ontario officials pleaded with the public to reduce electricity use by 50 percent, or face the risk of rolling blackouts.

    The province is trying to import power, as it did Saturday when it received help from New York, Manitoba, Quebec and Minnesota.

    Thunderstorms Saturday knocked out power to a few thousand customers in the Detroit and Lansing areas. Crews worked into Sunday to restore service, and utility officials asked residents without power to call and alert them to isolated outages.

    Gent told CBS News Correspondent Sharyl Attkisson he considers the chance of any kind of terrorism remote and has narrowed the list of possible causes to two: either a system design flaw, or "some electric utility or operator was not playing by the rules."

    The rules, Attkisson explained, were adopted by the industry to try to keep the delicate balance of power; there's more electricity generated than lines to deliver it, so there's a constant fight to keep lines from overloading. As long as companies follow the rules there shouldn't be a blackout. But it turns out the rules are voluntary, with no real punishment for violators.

    Gent promises there will be no whitewash, no matter which way the finger of blame points.

    Water customers in parts of Michigan, Ohio and Ontario remained under warnings to boil water before drinking or cooking with it because water systems shut down by the outage were still being checked out.

    Macomb County, Mich., ordered restaurants to shut down — although that was news to Ali Harajli and the crowds gobbling up shish kabob and shawarma at his St. Clair Shores eatery.

    "They have a point, and they have a right to do that," said Harajli, who had pots of boiling water ready for kitchen use. "Other restaurants in town probably don't take the same steps that we do."

    In Manhattan's Midtown, hundreds wandered about Saturday on a sticky summer day at a street fair — a typical, and welcome, scene after two days without power. All of New York City had power back by 9:03 p.m. Friday, and its subways were running a few hours later.

    Turgay Agrali, a tourist from Turkey, stood in the crowd with a smile, comforted by the promise of air conditioning when he returned to his hotel.

    "The first day I came was nice," he said. "The second day — blackout."

    There were still overflowing garbage cans scattered around Manhattan, but sanitation crews were working overtime through the weekend. Tons of trash had been piled on sidewalks as New Yorkers emptied their refrigerators of spoiled food.

    The blackout occurred at 4:11 p.m. EDT Thursday, creating instant chaos in the eastern United States and Canada.

    In Michigan, DTE expected its plants to be at full capacity by Monday, even though the state's power system was especially damaged by the blackout. Because of its Great Lakes geography, the state has relatively few connections on the Lake Erie transmission loop with other states and Canada, so just before the blackout it received a huge surge of electricity that had nowhere to go.

    "Power goes into Michigan or comes out, but it does not go through, for all practical purposes," said Gary Kitts, Michigan Public Service Commission chief administrative officer.

    The energy situation remained tenuous in Michigan, where officials said it was critical for people to conserve electricity to avoid rolling blackouts.

    Bettie Lloyd was undoubtedly among those most intent on avoiding a repeat. The auditor for the Detroit Board of Education was stuck alone in a hot, dark elevator for nearly 19 hours; firefighters finally freed her Friday after someone heeded her pleas for help.

    "I prayed a lot," said Lloyd, 52. "I said, `Oh my God, you're here! Thank you!'"

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